Walt Disney Pictures has today updated its release schedule, setting David Lowery’s remake of Pete’s Dragon for release on August 12, 2016 and Rupert Sanders’ live-action take on Ghost in the Shell for release on April 14, 2017. They’ve also swapped the dates previously set for Craig Gillespie’s The Finest Hours and Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book. Those films will now arrive October 9, 2015 and April 15, 2016, respectively.
Pete’s Dragon is about to enter production with a cast that includes Academy Award winner Robert Redford, Bryce Dallas Howard, Oakes Fegley and Oona Laurence. The film will now open opposite Universal Pictures’ comedy Dirty Grandpa and Universal and Legendary’s action-thriller Spectral.
Ghost in the Shell, which recently set Marvel’s The Avengers and Lucy star Scarlett Johansson to headline, is the first film to claim that April 14, 2017 date. It hits one week after Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim 2 and one week before a still-unrevealed Universal Monsters film.
The Finest Hours, starring Ben Foster, Casey Affleck, Chris Pine, Eric Bana, Holliday Grainger, is set in February of 1952, and follows one of the worst storms to ever hit the East Coast and struck New England, damaging an oil tanker off the coast of Cape Cod and literally ripping it in half. On a small lifeboat faced with frigid temperatures and 70-foot high waves, four members of the Coast Guard set out to rescue the more than 30 stranded sailors trapped aboard the rapidly-sinking vessel.
The new date has The Finest Hours opening opposite New Line Cinema’s Vacation sequel/reboot and Relativity Media’s thriller Kidnap.
The Jungle Book, finally, adapts Rudyard Kipling’s classic tome with a cast that includes Christopher Walken, Ben Kingsley, Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giancarlo Esposito, Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong’o and Neel Sethi. It arrive opposite Columbia Pictures’ Goosebumps and Universal’s still-untitled third entry in Malcolm D. Lee’s The Best Man franchise.
