It’s way things work at the this time of year, you often can’t see further ahead the next day or two as Venice, Telluride and TIFF elbow and jostle for attention. But at the end of the month, the red carpet will roll out at the New York Film Festival, and among their handful of World Premieres will be James Gray‘s “The Lost City Of Z.” And spending some time without a U.S. distributor to call home, it now has one.
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THR reports that Amazon has stepped up and acquired the North American rights to the film, adding yet another recent film by a major auteur to their already impressive roster which includes Woody Allen, Park Chan-Wook, Nicolas Winding Refn, Jim Jarmusch, and more. As per usual, the streaming service will team up with a distributor to get the film in theaters, with Paramount Pictures as possibility to fill that role, which means you can probably expect a wide release for the movie. However, the question remains: when?
If indeed Paramount gets the film, as we’ve already discussed, the studio’s lineup for the rest of the year is stacked with Denis Villeneuve‘s “Arrival” (opening on November 11th); Robert Zemeckis‘ “Allied” (opening on November 23rd); and Denzel Washington‘s latest directorial effort, “Fences” (opening on Christmas Day). And that’s not to mention the question mark that continues to be Martin Scorsese‘s “Silence,” which will reportedly be completed in October, but remains undated. My guess? “The Lost City Of Z” will be a 2017 release.
Based on the book by David Grann, and starring Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, and Tom Holland, the film will tell the true story of Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), the British military-man-turned-explorer, whose search for a lost city deep in the Amazon grows into an increasingly feverish, decades-long magnificent obsession that takes a toll on his reputation, his home life with his wife and children, and his very existence.
We can’t wait for this one, and it’s good to know that at the very least, “The Lost City Of Z” now has a distributor who will bring it to screens both big and small beyond NYFF.