Fall Re-release Already Planned for The Grey?

Even though The Grey is still a day away from its official release, distro company Open Road is already, to hear director Joe Carnahan tell it (to The Playlist, here), planning to re-release the film next October. Hype has been building for months about the film and Carnahan's return from big-budget explosion-making to gritty man-who-is-tough genre territory he explored in the fantastic Narc. The reasoning for this planned re-release, apparently, is to qualify the film for Oscar consideration, and more specifically, to try and get Academy voter eyes on Liam Neeson's performance in the lead.

 

This news will probably be interpreted by some as a case of counting your chickens before they hatch - it’s definitely not a common thing, that a studio would plan to re-release a film for Oscar consideration before the opening box office numbers, or even the bulk of professional reviews, come in.

On the flip side, the early buzz for the film has been somewhere between excellent and really excellent, and it’s understandable that Open Road would want to try and capitalize on that. It’s a pretty well-known fact that the bulk of the films that receive Oscar nominations are released in the latter half of the year.  January is stereotypically viewed as a dumping ground for films, so it can be very easy for a film such as The Grey to get lost in the shuffle. 

If anything, this news has probably made me even more interested to see the film, since I would like to see if Liam Neeson’s performance is truly good enough to warrant Oscar consideration in the fall. It'll have to be great to overcome the Academy's propensity to dismiss performances in genre pieces - Albert Brooks and Ryan Gosling can speak to that It could, on the other hand, be a sly little bit of marketing - this is certainly the first time I've heard Oscar buzz about a wolf movie in January - but we'll see soon enough. 

Find more of Sean Kelly's work on his excellent blog right here, and follow him on twitter by typing in @SKonMovies ! He also covered weird sequel news and brought us a Spider-Man synopsis this week.