Better get out that red marker and maybe an eraser, as the movie calendar has an addition and an amendment to be made.
First up, Warner Bros. has announced that Guillermo Del Toro‘s “Pacific Rim” will unleash its fury on July 12, 2013 right in the middle of summer. Starring Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba and Charlie Day, the film will tell the story of Raleigh Antrobus, who along with his brother, piloted Jaegers, enormous building-sized robots constructed to fight off the malevolent creatures, driven telepathically by a pair of specially-trained pilots, working in tandem against giant sea monsters emerging from the Pacific Ocean, wreaking havoc on a number of cities. Yes, this thing will be a monster both literally and figuratively. “This is my most un-modest film, this has everything. The scale is enormous and I’m just a big kid having fun,” del Toro recently told Shock Til You Drop. Filming starts in November.
Meanwhile, though “Haywire” has been bumped to next year, Steven Soderbergh fans will get “Contagion” more than a month earlier than expected as it has moved up to September 9th from its previously slated October 21st bow. Starring a huge ensemble cast including Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, John Hawkes, Chin Han, Josie Ho, Demetri Martin, Jennifer Ehle, Bryan Cranston, Elliott Gould and Sanaa Lathan, the film is a taut, thrilling and all-too-plausible and frightening screenplay that is a “Traffic“-like sprawling film about the ramifications of the spread of a global virus. Earlier in the year, Soderbergh called it a “horror” film and he wasn’t messing around.
A reader recently caught a test screening for the film and sent us their reactions saying it was “incredibly intense, disturbing and way too feasible to not feel slightly sick to your stomach the whole time.” They said that “the uneasiness that the film creates is similar to that while reading ‘The Road,’ in that the horror comes from the situation, but also the truths in what this type of situation can bring out in human nature.” With multiple storylines, our source told us, “this is just great storytelling. There are several complicated pieces to the puzzle and everyone is making ethically questionable decisions, yet the virus itself makes for a sinister enough antagonist that there’s still a clear foe to be fought.” Sounds intense. They also mentioned that audience members gasped at certain points during the film and that it left you wanting to reach for some hand-sanitizer so yeah, we can’t wait to see this for ourselves.
The move puts the movie up against the Tom Hardy drama “Warrior” but more importantly, it lands one day after TIFF starts on September 8th, and we won’t be surprised if it makes a trip up to Toronto. That said, the date could also mean a Venice premiere is in the offing but we’ll leave that to the festival prognosticators and simply be content with the fact that we won’t be waiting as long for “Contagion” anymore. Update: We’re told the sales poster is a fake. You don’t see Damon in any kind of mask in the film. The trailer will likely be hitting this week.