File under: expected move. “No, it’s not just a rumor. Julian Schnabel’s ‘Miral’ has been pushed into 2011,” wrote David Poland on Twitter early this morning.
While we probably shouldn’t take this as official announcement word yet, it’s not much of a surprise. Originally positioned as an awards contender with a December 3, 2010 release, the film pretty much tanked upon arrival with critics at the 2010 Venice Film Festival earlier this year. This meant many critics — including our reporters in the field — skipped the film and any heat the picture might have briefly gone has evaporated.
The Weinstein Company, while seemingly bouncing back from their financial woes, still don’t have a huge Oscar budget. They basically pick one show pony and ignore the rest because they essentially don’t have the dough to back more than one contender. And since “The King’s Speech” won the Toronto International Film Festival’s audience prize (and the Hamptons film festival prize this weekend) and is already considered a major Oscar Best Picture shoo-in, it’s no shocker that “Miral” is being tossed off into 2011. No doubt the studio will have to rethink the date and then reconfigure what to do with the picture.
Bit of a shame, we’re huge fans of Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell & The Butterfly” and “Before Night Falls,” (“Basquiat” to a lesser extent), but we assume the guy had to shoot a dud one of these days. That said, we’ll still give it a shot, whenever we get the chance to see it.
Adapted by Rula Jebreal‘s novel of the same name, the drama revolves around a real orphanage in Jerusalem set up by a Palestinian woman (Hiam Abbass). From the looks of the trailer, Freida Pinto seems to take center stage here as a former inhabitant of the orphanage. The film also stars Willem Dafoe, Yasmine Elmasri, Alexander Siddig and Vanessa Redgrave. We’re sure we’ll hear official word sometimes soon, but until then it’s probably TBD 2011.
Update: Kris Tapley at In Contention has confirmed the report, and says that the film will be released in March 2011. According to an Variety piece from September, Schnabel has edited the picture “much differently” since debuting in Venice.
