Warner Bros. has officially commented and pushed back on recent rumblings from Puck News that Jonah Hill‘s next directorial effort, “Cut Off,” starring Kristen Wiig and himself, was supposedly “unreleasable,” stemming from a wave of negative critical reception for his last pic “Outcome” and the studio ultimately pulling “Cut Off” from their summer slate of releases after it was poised to hit theaters on July 17 (studios change dates all the time, mind you, and sometimes feel like a game of musical chairs).
Folks over at The Wrap were not only able to get an on-the-record comment from the studio (stating “that speculation is inaccurate”) but also Hill’s reps, who were quick to point out that the movie is “not finished” and is currently in post-production stages (alluding to the movie likely not even being ready to be screened and possibly why that July date wasn’t feasible and less about the film’s rumored “quality issues”).
The new movie focuses on a pair of wealthy siblings (Hill and Wiig) whose parents (played by Bette Midler and Nathan Lane) turn off the money faucet and force their adult kids to support themselves, which sounds like a great premise for a comedy in the modern age. During a chat with THR back in April, Hill had compared his new movie to a mix of “Step Brothers,” “Clueless,” and “Trading Places.”
READ MORE: 53 Must-See Films To Watch Summer 2026
I don’t think we really have to point out that movies take time to complete (big or small due to the editing process and other elements in post). And if the Hill-directed project isn’t 100% ready for public consumption (only wrapped back in January), then studios simply wait to get a better sense of when it can be released, and while bigger event films need to plant release date flags, smaller comedies have way more flexibility on when they hit theaters. It’s also not lost on us that the optics of removing a release date from the summer lineup are always great, but not always an indicator of anything nefarious going on or the studio’s confidence being zapped.
Another glaring factor here is that it would have gone head-to-head on July 17 with Christopher Nolan‘s R-rated Greek myth blockbuster adaptation “The Odyssey,” which is expected to dominate that weekend and potentially gobble up most of the screens in the process (even “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” tried to create space from it). If they were both aimed at the same older demographic, that would have also caused WB a headache.
Does this automatically mean that “Cut Off” won’t get extended editing tinkering or a possible round of reshoots from Hill/WB during its post-production stage? Hard to say and anything is possible, but even then, that wouldn’t be any sort of concrete signal that the movie is “unreleasable,” and could come down to run-of-the-mill internet gossip (that’s at least the vibe we’re getting from these recent reactions from the Puck reporting). Of course, we’ll have to wait this one out to see how real that rumbling actually is, given Puck reporter Matt Belloni, for the most part, has been a straight-arrow on rumors/reports in the past.
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
