You probably already forgot about “Before I Wake,” and no one would blame you for that. The film got its first trailer in 2015, had its release date bumped back, and then another promo in 2016. However, the horror flick from “Oculus” director Mike Flanagan, starring Kate Bosworth, Thomas Jane, and Jacob Tremblay never wound up hitting multiplexes in the U.S. What happened? Well, it wasn’t the movie, but the studio behind it that gummed up the works.
Chatting on the Post Mortem podcast, Flanagan says that his supernatural thriller, which was set to be released by Relativity Media, essentially met its fate when the studio went bankrupt. It’s a situation that’s even more unfortunate given that test screenings were very positive for the picture.
“It was a great deal [with Relativity], and it was a big fat wide release, and coming off of what they did with ‘Oculus,’ it was like, This is going to be great,” Flanagan revealed. “And so we sold the movie to Relativity, and we had a release date, and we were all set, and I moved on to the next project… And then things just got weird. Everything kind of stalled. We weren’t getting trailers and posters and materials. It was kind of cagey. We didn’t know it at first, but it was because of the collapse… And so they moved it off the date, and they didn’t really have a good reason, and they didn’t ask us to change anything, which was odd… And it was testing better than ‘Oculus’ ever tested. We were in a really good place… We just couldn’t get these materials.”
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“It was like, ‘Well where’s the marketing materials?’” the director continued. “And we eventually found out that a lot of the vendors had cut them out because they had too much debt and so the vendors weren’t turning the materials over… And then we started to really learn about how much trouble the company was in, and they finally came to us, and it was like, ‘Yes, we’re going to file Chapter 11, but we’re confident we’re going to pull out of it.’ But they’d pushed the date back twice at that point, and we had had international buyers that had picked it up based on the wide release commitment in the States, and so we kicked and screamed and shook our fists, but there was no choice but to kind of wait it out and hope they emerged from bankruptcy and would pick up where they left off and do right by the movie.”
So, what’s the status of the movie? Despite starring Tremblay — who shot “Before I Wake” before “Room,” but has since seen his star rise — it’s unlikely to be released. International distributors waited as long as they could, but eventually the film was released in some overseas territories, including the U.K. where it’s on Netflix, and subsequently pirated, making the possibility of another company rolling the dice on a theatrical release unlikely.
So, you might have to find this one on your own if you’re curious about it, and as for Flanagan, he’s moving onto “Gerald’s Game” at Netflix. [via EW]