Here’s some good news for you movie fans out there. Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver, once scheduled to his theaters at the tail-end of this summer, has been bumped up a few months. So yeah, you’ll be able to see the next movie from the director of Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World earlier than expected. And let me tell you this much: this is great news.
Sony’s panel kicked off CinemaCon this evening with a bang. The studio screened the first six minutes of Baby Driver before revealing the change. The film will no longer open on August 11, 2017. Instead, it will speed into theaters on June 28, 2017.
Citing the enthusiastic reaction to the film at the SXSW Film Festival (where it took home an audience award), the studio decided that they’d like the film to play through the summer. This is a wise choice. Baby Driver is a crowdpleaser for sure, a movie that demands the biggest screens and the loudest speakers, but it’s not a sequel or part of an established franchise. Giving it some extra time to stretch its legs and find an audience could be the best possible move, especially since that’s the point of the season when audiences start thirsting for something a little more fresh.
And Baby Driver is certainly fresh. It’s a crime movie set to an eclectic soundtrack, a jukebox musical where action becomes choreography. Here’s what I said in my rave review from SXSW:
Baby Driver is a different beast than Wright’s previous movies, not quite the cultural fantasia of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and not quite the kinetic comedy of his “Cornetto trilogy.” Although infused with his familiar energy, it’s in love with films like Sharky’s Machine, Bullit, Heat, and Point Break and perfectly happy to be a member of that club rather than a parody or a deconstruction. The cinematic grammar on display is knowing, aware of the genre, but the story and the characters feel as if they strolled straight out of an undiscovered Walter Hill classic. So much of Baby Driver is, by design, wholly familiar, a knowing pastiche of the classic car chase movie…albeit one given the pulse of a Busby Berkeley musical.
This move certainly suggests that Sony knows what SXSW audiences know: they have a real winner on their hands, the first Edgar Wright movie that has the serious potential to break out big and win him admirers beyond his dedicated cult following. Hopefully, the studio continues to treat this one right…and the crowds come out.
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