According to The Playlist (and, for what it’s worth, Box Office Mojo is backing this up), New Line has pushed the release date of Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind back a month, from January 25 to February 22. It would be impossible not to question What It All Means. After all, this is not the first time this film has been shuttled down the calendar, but the January date sure looked sticky for awhile. The studio had planned a compressed indie film media blitz to unfold over the next three weeks, to include sending Gondry on a multi-city Apple Store tour in advance of Rewind’s Sundance premiere. New Line probably just feel like they need an extra four weeks after all that to run TV ads, and that’s fair. But let’s wildly speculate as to what else could be going on, after the jump.

1) Maybe the original release date was too crowded.

The release calendar, like love, is a battlefield, and New Line is no stranger to chronological subterfuge. January 25 is packed with sure-fire winners. Why go up against The Romanian Abortion Film and Rambo: Not Dead Yet, when you can jump a month, and face competition no more formidable than Larry the Cable Guy?

2) Maybe they’re just trying to pull a Juno.

Admittedly, the circumstances are different–Juno had virtually no buzz going into Telluride, whilst 16 days before its scheduled Sudance premiere, Be Kind Rewind is already battling the aura of tainted goods. But if the film is even remotely crowd-pleasing, New Line may be hoping they can similarly craft a mainstream hit by capitalizing on Festival goodwill. And even if the film itself goes over terribly with critics, they’ve got to be banking on a very specific kind of press coverage at Sundance. When it comes to someone as perrenially cool as Michel Gondry, hipster lifestyle magazines would always rather drool than negatively (if accurately) call them on a misstep.

3) New Line is so busy promoting their Oscar hopefuls that they want to wait until the end of the campaign season to release Rewind, so that it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of their effort surrounding films like The Golden Compass.

Okay, I’m sorry–that was just a tasteless joke.