I was sitting in a screening of The Fault in Our Stars when I learned Warner Bros. has abruptly pulled the plug on the July 18 release of Andy and Lana Wachowski‘s sci-fi actioner Jupiter Ascending starring Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis. The film will now hit theaters February 6, 2015 and according to Deadline it’s to finish visual effects.
You can choose to believe that if you like, but I saw a massive, effects-heavy trailer for the film just last night in front of Edge of Tomorrow and this simply smells like a studio seeing an opportunity to make some money in a weaker slot as opposed to losing a lot marketing yet another effects extravaganza in a summer filled with them. Marketing a film of this sort in February won’t be nearly as costly, especially considering the competition is Lionsgate’s Mortdecai starring Johnny Depp and Universal’s disaster waiting to be buried Seventh Son, which was originally supposed to hit theaters on October 18, 2013 until the Legendary and Warner Bros. relationship went kaput.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the Wachowski’s simply make movies a major studio can’t figure out how to market and you can only sell them as the directors of The Matrix trilogy for so long. Nevertheless, it’s a sad state of affairs right now, I’d rather see a failure from the Wachowskis than more cookie-cutter superhero movies, but one sells big, the other not at all. Oh well.
[sb id=”934467″ height=”281″ width=”500″]
