I always struggle during the dumping ground months of the year. There's movies that I want to see, but I never actually want to go to the theater to see them. Thankfully, summer and fall come around, and I get back in the movie-going mood. But man, in April and September, it's rough.
Anyways, two of my most anticipated films of the fall season, The Wolf of Wall Street and Jack Ryan: Shadow One, hit a speed-bump today. The Wolf of Wall Street, according to THR and Hitfix, is going to be moved to either a Christmas release or 2014. If it's the former, that would require Jack Ryan: Shadow One to move to January 17 for the "lucrative", to quote The Hollywood Reporter, Martin Luther King Weekend. All this adds up to bad news in my mind. Let's break it down.
Currently, Paramount has a pretty stacked fall slate. They have Jackass Present Bad Grandpa on October 25, The Wolf of Wall Street on November 15, Nebraska on November 15, Anchorman 2 on December 20, Jack Ryan: Shadow One on Christmas Day and Labor Day in limited release on Christmas Day. That's a pretty stacked lineup. Add to that, the Christmas season also currently features 47 Ronin, Saving Mr. Banks, The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, August: Osage County, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and The Monuments Men. That's a massive amount of films for one holiday to handle. And Jack Ryan is neither an established franchise, by the new generation's standards, or an Oscar contender. That's the first problem.
Second problem is that The Wolf of Wall Street was just screened for Paramount execs this weekend. There's nothing inherently bad about that, besides the fact that a little advanced word came out about the movie. The source for THR and Hitfix said that not only was the film a whopping 180 minutes long (3 hours), but that it also had some content that was sure to receive an NC-17 rating from the MPAA. That's a big no-no for Paramount. Reports are now saying that Scorsese is busy cutting the film down from its current length while also cutting down on some content. In other words, he's hard at work, but there's no way that it makes the November 15 date. So, depending on how fast Scorsese works, The Wolf of Wall Street could be released on Christmas day, or sometime in first quarter 2014. The former option leaves room for an Oscar run.
Now, let's say that Scorsese manages to cut twenty minutes from the film and gets a hard R. Paramount dates the film for Christmas Day. That's just too many movies for Paramount in a short span. So, what they plan to do in that case is to move Jack Ryan. Not to March. Not to May. Not to April. But to January. I know that was a series of awful sentences, but I had to get a point across. Paramount is planning to move Jack Ryan to January in the case that The Wolf of Wall Street is released in the Christmas time period. The weekend of January 17 to be exact. That's a killer for one of my most anticipated for the year. But hey, life is full of disappointments. This is a very interesting situation and I'm really curious to see how it turns out.
It looks like a strange Scorsese movie, but i know that its gonna be great.
ReplyDelete