I know most film blogs make a post for every teaser, release date, and every last press release. I frankly don't have the time but even if I did... why encourage Hollywood's itchy trigger fingers when they're constantly fussily rescrambling their pieces on the puzz--I'm mixing too many metaphors-- Moving on to the Release Date Switches/Announcements. We're less than 200 days away from Oscar nominations! So yes, we gotta update those charts again soon, I know.
Oscarable Switcheroos
August: Osage County has, as you now, moved to Christmas day, despite its summer friendly title. And Saving Mr Banks, the Mary Poppins related Disney flick is opting to get out in front of the Christmas crowd a bit with a December 13th bow. Meanwhile Twelve Years a Slave, from director Steve McQueen and Grace of Monaco, the new Kidman flick, both move from the Dread Oscar Eligibility Dump Week (that awful New Years week) into airier mid October. And October is getting busier and busier, really because Ridley Scott's The Counselor (just discussed) has also moved from its intended mid November start to late October.
Contrary to popular belief this does not automatically mean that the studios are less gung ho about their Oscar chances. Oscar watchers (and, yes, distributors sometimse) often forget that you don't have to open in late December to be a player. It helps to open in the last third of the year though, sure! But MANY MANY films have had good luck in September (your Argos and your American Beautys), October (your Departeds) and November (your Slumdogs and your No Countrys) among other months.
Your Oscar calendar is currently looking like this... [Oscar Types, Superheroes and Meryl vs. Annie after the jump]
woo woo ♪ here comes the life of the Oscar partay
September:
Prisoners, Rush (20); Therese (27),
October:
Gravity (4); Captain Phillips, The Fifth Estate, Romeo & Juliet (11); 12 Years a Slave (18); The Counselor (25)
November:
The Wolf of Wall Street (8); Her (20); Nebraska (22); Black Nativity, Frozen, Grace of Monaco, Out of the Furnace (Thanksgiving); Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom (29)
December:
Dallas Buyer's Club, Inside Llewyn Davis (6); American Hustle, The Hobbit 2, Saving Mr Banks (13); Monuments Men (18); August: Osage County, Labor Day (Christmas Day)
First promotional image from "Grudge Match"
Christmas 2013
New Entry: Have you heard about Grudge Match? It's a boxing comedy starring Sylvester Stallone and... Robert De Niro? Oh god no. Really Bobby? If you wanna talk about grudges, I got one: why u wanna piss on your Raging Bull legacy now? It's one thing to have a sense of humor about yourself. It's another to make a lot of junk late in your career that exploits your early career in such shameless make-a-buck ways. This is why I can't take him seriously and hated that brief moment last Oscar season when people were trying to sell us on a third Oscar win for Silver Linings Playbook merely because it looked like he wasn't only there for the paycheck for once.
Goodbye 2013!
The Seventh Son, which was to be one of three Julianne Moore movies opening the same weekend in October, has left for the wasteland of January. This is not a good sign for the fantasy franchise hopeful (which also stars Jeff Bridges and Ben Barnes) and gives me nightmares that it's another Beautiful Creatures. Also departing the year is Sin City: A Dame To Kill For which I never really believed was going to open this year (or ever frankly). It's now looking at August 2014.
I just had such a brilliant idea. Can Meryl please drop out of Into the Woods and give that gem of a role to someone else? She'd be an AWESOME "Miss Hannigan" in Annie.Musical vs. Musical in 2014
Meryl vs. Annie. For the first time in my entire lifetime Hollywood is threatening to open two big movie musicals on the same weekend. It used to be I couldn't get a big movie musical even once every three or four years so I'm happy about this development. See, both the remake of Annie (starring Quvenzhane Wallis and Cameron Diaz as Miss Hannigan) and the adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods (with Meryl Streep as The Witch and Anna Kendrick as Cinderella) are sharing that holiday berth. You know they're never going to go head-to-head in the end. But who wins this game of chicken?
Expect one of them to move to Thanksgiving or Meryl Streep and Cameron Diaz will both be warbling tunes about children not listening and children annoying them at each other in the multiplex.
Forevermore...
Meanwhile cinema continues its march towards becoming the world's noisiest TV station, with endless episodes of the same fucking series hogging all the theaters. It's worth noting that as of today we are only...
133 days away from... Thor The Dark World (11/8/13)
147 days away from... Hunger Games: Catching Fire (11/22/13)
280 days away from... Captain America: The Winter Soldier (4/4/14)
208 days away from... The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (5/2/14)
329 days away from... X-Men Days of Future Past (5/23/14)
343 days away from... Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (6/6/14) Reboot
364 days away from... Transformers 4 (6/27/14)
369 days away from... Maleficent (7/2/14)
377 days away from... Fast & Furious 7 (7/11/14)
386 days away from... Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (7/18/14)
399 days away from... Guardians of the Galaxy (8/1/14)
441 days away from... Resident Evil 6 (9/12/14)
511 days away from... Hunger Games: The Mockingjay Pt 1 (11/21/14)
537 days away from... The Hobbit: There and Back Again (12/17/14)
616 days away from... Fantastic Four (3/6/15) Reboot
616 days away from... Cinderella (3/6/15)
672 days away from... The Avengers 2 (5/1/15)
729 days away from... The Terminator (6/26/15) Rebootof the franchise. This is so hilariously dumb I can't help but lmfao. Time travel, by its very nature, allows you to keep on tinkering with the timeline -- you don't have to start over dumbasses! Hollywood, ur dumb
735 days away from... Independence Day 2 (7/3/15)
741 days away from... Pirates of the Caribbean 5 (7/10/15)
757 days away from... The Smurfs 3 (7/25/15)
861 days away from... Ant-Man (11/6/15)
896 days away from... Alvin and the Chipmunks 4 (12/11/15)
908 days away from... Kung Fu Panda 3 (12/23/15)
1078 days away from... The Amazing Spider-Man 3 (6/10/16)
1771 days away from ... The Amazing Spider-Man 4 (5/4/18) ... Or, "The Emancipation of Andrew Garfield" and he's free to make movies suited to his talents again! He'll be nearly 35 years old when he yanks himself out from that web.
I'm sorry if that exhaustive list screams "kill me now". It gets better. Beautiful original movies will manage to sneak themselves into a few theaters inbetween the oppressively marketed superheros, anachronistic fairy tales, and giant fucking robots. I promise! They must!