Matt Damon gets adjusted
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Poor Matt Damon. Maybe it’s just that he works too hard. Last year, the Oscar winner was scheduled to bring out three movies in the fall and saw Universal move one (‘Green Zone’) into March of the following year. This coming fall, it will happen again.
Universal announced Wednesday morning that it was pushing the ‘The Adjustment Bureau,’ the Philip K. Dick-derived sci-fi romance in which Damon plays a politician opposite Emily Blunt’s mysterious ballerina, from its initial Sept. 17 date to March 4.
Damon will instead concentrate on his two other fall films: the Coen brothers’ ‘True Grit’ remake (which Scott Rudin is producing and which will no doubt demand some serious awards-season promotion time, as Scott Rudin films are wont to demand) and the Clint Eastwood thriller ‘Hereafter.’ The latter comes out in December; the former in October.
In fact, the pattern is remarkably similar to last year, when Damon had an awards-season auteur movie (Steven Soderbergh’s ‘The Informant’) and a Clint Eastwood film (‘Invictus’) take pride of place over a Universal play. Damon and his wife are also expecting a child in the early fall, so he’s cutting back to just two movies for the season.
Universal’s ‘Adjustment’ adjustment set off/was part of a flurry of other scheduling moves by the studio. Few others were of great consequence, though the James Cameron-produced underwater adventure ‘Sanctum’ will now come out a month earlier, on Feb. 4, (it had been set for the March 4 slot). And the studio has moved from February to September ‘Devil,’ a claustrophobic horror film that’s produced by the company of the airbender, M. Night Shyamalan (and had been commonly referred to as ‘The Night chronicles,’ the name of a series).
Incidentally, the Damon switch means that it’s the second movie of the fall-spring season about mystical events surrounding a ballerina. Darren Aronofsky follows up his tour de force ‘The Wrestler’ with ‘Black Swan,’ about mysterious goings-on at the New York ballet, in a likely fall release. And they say Hollywood has abandoned the highbrow.
-- Steven Zeitchik
twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT
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