Seems folks in Hollywood woke up this morning, rubbed the sleep out of their eyes, and decided to make some release date changes and additions. Warner Bros. has already moved "The Great Gatsby" to next summer, while over at Sony, they are making some changes of their own.
With lensing kicking off shortly in Montreal, Roland Emmerich has just had his schedule cut by a whopping five months, as Sony has dated "White House Down" for a June 28, 2013 release instead of the previously planned November 1, 2013. The studio paid James Vanderbilt a massive $3 million for the script earlier this year and are no doubt cheesed that Millenium Entertainment are brewing their own similar action movie "Olympus Has Fallen" with the same setting, but with Gerard Butler intead of Channing Tatum in the lead. That Antoine Fuqua-directed movie is also in front of cameras at the moment, and it should be interesting to see how this pissing match for release date continues — we're certainly getting deja vu over the "Mirror Mirror"/"Snow White And The Huntsman" duel between Universal and Relativity. But at the moment, "White House Down" will square off against "R.I.P.D." and "The Internship" on the same weekend. Will anyone blink? We'll soon see.
Meanwhile, "The Equalizer" continues to move forward with Denzel Washington signed on, an April 8th start announced and now a release date of April 11, 2014 set for the TV show adaptation. Based on the hit 1980s series, Washington will be filling the lead role of an aging man (originally played by Edward Woodward) who offers up his services as a fixer for free in order to atone for a muddled past working for an agency referred to only as The Company. Thee is no director yet, but the studio has a few intriguing hopefuls on their wish list including Pierre Morel, Nicolas Winding Refn, Gavin O’Connor and Gareth Evans. So we'll see if any of those guys take it on or…someone else. Right now, the film's only competition that weekend is "Stretch Armstrong" which isn't really competition at all. [THR/ComingSoon]
