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Nikki Finke claims Paramount has bumped Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island from an October 2009 release date to February 2010, for the sole reason that they don’t have enough money to give the picture an awards campaign this year. If this is true it would would sort of make sense, since a) the film hasn’t been slotted into any of the fall film festivals, and b) Paramount is probably all-in, Oscar-wise, on The Lovely Bones. But also: do they really think this is awards bait? Because the trailer makes it look like weirdly generic high-concept horror. Plus, Nikki claims it’s scoring well with audiences — which is more evidence that the Academy wouldn’t give it the time of day.
Via Living in Cinema.
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We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Wait, I don’t get this: “Nikki claims it’s scoring well with audiences — which is more evidence that the Academy wouldn’t give it the time of day.”
Wasn’t SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE massively (and sadly) popular with audiences?
agreed that this doesn’t look like Oscar bait, but then I didn’t think Departed did either.
Well, the fact that it wasn’t slotted into any fall film festivals isn’t super-noteworthy; that’s been the case with all of Scorsese’s recent big-ticket pictures from “Gangs of New York” on. It was that film, and then “The Aviator,” that got the standard-issue award-bait December openings. I recall there was some surprise along the lines of “Hey, Warners thinks it can actually make some money off this!” when it brought out “Departed” in early October rather than December. (And they did make some money, too.) “Island” had been in a similar slot, which makes the change all the more confounding. I can’t imagine that Scorsese and Schoonmaker, who busted their asses to bring this in for a fall release, are anything but violently disappointed.