It looks like the wait for Steven Soderbergh’s spy thriller “Haywire” might be a bit longer than expected. According to our sources, the tentatively scheduled January 2011 date will not go ahead as planned, as the film is now reportedly changing distributors.
From what we hear, Lionsgate will no longer be handling “Haywire,” with Overture taking over the film’s North American release. Ryan Kavanaugh (who produced the film via his Relativity Media shingle) acquired the financially ailing Overture earlier this summer, so the reason for the distribution switch seems obvious. The move is interesting since Kavanaugh had a “put deal” in place with Lionsgate and Soderbergh was eager and confident in the abilities of execs Tim Palen and Joe Drake to make sure the genre film was given the right marketing push. No word yet on details around the switch but what we’ve been told is that the distribution change now means the film is currently eyeing a late March or early April 2011 release.
As for Overture, which ran into financial trouble earlier this year, the acquisition is certainly a very high profile pick-up for the distributor that is making a strong rebound in the latter half of 2010 with a solid arthouse candidate in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s “Jack Goes Boating” and the highly anticipated horror film “Let Me In” waiting in the wings.
Even though the film is switching hands, we should be ready for some marketing material to arrive soon. We’re told that the excellent designer Neil Kellerhouse, who created posters for “The Girlfriend Experience,” “The Social Network” and a number of DVD covers for The Criterion Collection, has created a poster for “Haywire” which should be coming soon. Also, Soderbergh is planning to put six minutes of the film on YouTube in which the film’s star and mixed martial-artist Gina Carano will apparently “destroy” one of her male co-stars. We can’t wait.
With an all-star cast featuring Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Bill Paxton, Michael Angarano, Matthieu Kassovitz, Channing Tatum and Antonio Banderas we probably don’t have to tell you this one can’t hit theaters soon enough.