Here’s another movie to shake up the predictions of Oscar prognosticators. Keeping largely on the down low for most of the year, “Moneyball” director Bennett Miller‘s wrestling/murder drama “Foxcatcher” is coming out to play with a new studio and release date, marking another movie to keep a firm eye on over the next four months.
Previously housed at Columbia Pictures, the film will now go over to Sony’s arthouse shingle Sony Pictures Classics, and land in theaters on December 20th, presumably kicking off a platform release as is customary for the studio (they’ve also got Asghar Farhadi‘s “The Past” arriving the same day, though we presume there might be some shuffling). Starring Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Steve Carell, Sienna Miller, Vanessa Redgrave and Anthony Michael Hall, the film will chronicle the wild, true story of John du Pont (Carell), a multimillionaire and paranoid schizophrenic who built a wrestling training facility, Team Foxcatcher, on his 800-acre Pennsylvania estate. In 1996, he shockingly murdered Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler David Schultz (Ruffalo), a longtime friend, who du Pont believed (as was discovered during the trial) was part of an international conspiracy to kill him.
As to why Columbia Pictures let it go? Probably because they’ve already got their hands full with three potential Oscar contenders this year in the form of David O. Russell‘s “American Hustle,” Paul Greengrass‘ “Captain Phillips” and George Clooney‘s “Monuments Men.”
No word yet on if/when “Foxcatcher” will hit the festival circuit, but we’d wager Telluride and/or AFI are good bets at this point.
