If you read the script for “Shutter Island,” by Laeta Kalogridis which starts out awesome and then…. well follows the book and then ends up being a little silly… you could easily tell that it was going to be a Marty Scorsese B-movie, or lesser work like, “Bringing Out The Dead.”
Still, some insisted on keeping the picture and it’s actors in their Oscar bubble predictions, to which we thought, “no friggin’ way.”
And it seems our posit was right. “Shutter Island” has now been bumped off its October 2nd release date and shuffled into the not-so-Oscar-worthy month of February. Ooof, no really, February 19, which means it’ll go head-to-head with ” From Paris with Love” which makes it feel like the special Olympics of box-office weekends. Guess Paramount isn’t having a great year and they can probably thank Michael Bay’s back end deal that probably sucked up all the profits made from “Transformers 2,” which has grossed an astonishing, $825 million worldwide so far this year.
Or it’s more likely that “Shutter Island” was simply just never an Oscar-quality film as many assumed and Paramount wants to focus on other Oscar contenders this fall (uhh, what films these are, we’re not sure…) and let the Leonardo Dicaprio-starring film kill at the box-office in February. After all, it’s all about filling holes in certain quarters these days and perhaps Q1 is empty over at Paramount.
But Nikki Finke says a source told her, ” ‘It tested in the high 80s/low 90s and Scorsese even brought it down to 2 hours.’ So what’s the problem? I hear that Paramount told the filmmakers it doesn’t have the financing in 2009 to spend the $50M to $60M necessary to market a big awards pic like this.”
Money is killing everyone these days, but we’re still willing to bet “Shutter Island” isn’t the Oscar pic everyone thought it was, regardless of $$$. After all, we did write a piece back in February, titled: Martin Scorsese’s ‘Shutter Island’ Not Quality Quite Oscar-Bait For 2009? [Deadline Hollywood]