The ever popular Hollywood dance move, the release-date shuffle, is once more sweeping the nation, with a number of high-profile films all finding, or changing, release dates in the last few days.
First up, Focus Features has moved the Joe Wright-helmed and Keira Knightley-led “Anna Karenina” back a week from November 9th to November 16th, presumably to give it some breathing room from Steven Spielberg’s long-gestating passion project “Lincoln,” which opens on the original date. The film will premiere at TIFF next month, having opened in the UK on September 7th, so we should be hearing on how it turns out very soon.
Baseball drama “Trouble With The Curve,” starring Clint Eastwood and Amy Adams, is also changing its release date, moving a week ahead from September 28th to September 21st. We’re not really sure what the reasoning is, but we’d wager that it either comes down to wanting to give the film an earlier head start on the awards season or to give it more time to court baseball fans, as the MLB postseason starts in October. Still, with the film barely six weeks away, we should be seeing a trailer for this one very soon, right?
As for new additions, the long-delayed "This Must Be The Place," starring Sean Penn as a vengeful Robert Smith-esque rock star out to kill a Nazi from his father's concentration camp, and directed by "Il Divo" helmer Paolo Sorrentino, has finally found its slot. The film was acquired by The Weinstein Company last September, and has already opened in much of the world, but U.S. audiences will finally get a chance, according to EW, to check out the oddball, poorly reviewed film for themselves on November 2nd, 2012. There's some stiff limited-release competition that weekend, with "Jack & Diane" and "Seven Psychopaths" both claiming the same date.
Finally, and much further off, online gambling thriller “Runner, Runner” now has a release date set for September 27, 2013. This gives the Ben Affleck-led and Brad Furman-directed film a date vaguely comparable to other adult-minded fare like the 2010 Affleck vehicle "The Town," and this does look like it could be a heavy hitter with a script by “Rounders” duo Brian Koppelman and David Levien, and a cast that not only includes Affleck but also Justin Timberlake, Gemma Arterton, Anthony Mackie, Oliver Cooper, Sam Palladio and Ben Schwartz. “Runner, Runner” is set in the world of offshore gambling and follows Timberlake’s lead, who flies to Costa Rica to chase the tuition money he was cheated out of while playing online poker but ends up becoming the right hand man of the poker company’s corrupt CEO, played by Affleck. “Rounders” remains a slick and fun look into the gambling world of the '90s, and we hope that Koppelman and Levien can work their magic again here. [Box Office Mojo]