I used to buy a British monthly movie magazine called Films and Filming, a cut above Photoplay and ABC Film Review but not as hoity-toity as Sight & Sound, and the first pages I always turned to were two particular sections. One was called “New Productions” and the other was “Premieres.”
Unlike now when movies open globally day-and-date, there was no way of knowing when movies would open in the UK – and they had to open in London first (hence the importance of the premiere) before they would turn up in my home city of Glasgow. Even if you were able to tap into Variety or Screen International at a library reference room and note which films had opened in the USA, that still provided no clue as to when they would open in Britain.
The Exorcist, for example, opened in the US at the tail end of 1973 but didn’t receive a London premiere until March 14, 1974. Papillon also opened in December 1973 in New York, but its London premiere was also March 14 the following year.* But there was barely a fortnight between The Great Gatsby hitting New York and premiering at the Leicester Sq Theatre in London on April 10.
I knew all this well ahead of time because I had bought the March 1974 edition of Films and Filming which came out in February. Had I sought such details in the standard media I would have looked in vain until photos of the premiere appeared.
The “New Productions” section of the March issue of the magazine told me I could expect in due course, out of 50 movies listed, the likes of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro both playing the Mafia kingpin, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, Robert Redford as The Great Waldo Pepper, Robert Aldrich prison drama The Longest Yard with Burt Reynolds, Arthur Penn’s The Dark Tower (later renamed Night Moves), Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and Jon Voigt in The Odessa File. I had no idea when any of these would appear or even what they were about but at least I could put them on my radar.
So I am one of those guys that’s always checking online to see what’s coming up in the next few months at the cinema. These days, unless it was Dune, or a Christopher Nolan picture or a conic book franchise, I’d generally have no idea what was coming my way because the media is not interested in the run-of-the-mill product.
The Coming Soon Business is generally limited to trailers. Seeing a trailer for Digger, with Tom Cruise in Oscar-bait form, which isn’t due till October, whetted my appetite and I thought I dig into the Release Schedule section of the Imdb to see just what was coming my way.
There’s a remake of mountaineering adventure Cliffhanger starring Lily James in the Sylvester Stallone part, the French biopic of General De Gaulle, and D-Day drama Pressure (“from the makers of The Darkest Hour”). Zach Creggar (fresh from Weapons) has a new take on Resident Evil, and Georgia Oakley (Blue Jean, 2022) does the same for Sense and Sensibility starring Daisy Edgar-Jones.
Anne Hathaway is hoping to capitalize on the hot streak of The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Odyssey with thriller Verity co-starring Dakota Fanning. Former Spiderman Andrew Garfield is the British rebel leading The Uprising directed by Paul Greengrass (The Lost Bus, 2025).
Sandra Huller (Project Hail Mary) chases another Oscar nom for Fatherland. There’s a Batman spin-off Clayface. Godzilla Minus Zero is a sequel to the surprising hit of a few years back. John Lithgow stars as Roald Dahl in an adaptation of the play Giant.
Johnny Depp aims at the Thanksgiving crowd with Ebenezer and goes rogue in Avengers: Doomsday at Xmas. I Play Rocky looks like being a breakout hit. There are reprises for The Fockers in Focker-in-Law, with Ariana Grande drafted in to help out series regular Robert De Niro, and Santa Claus in Violent Night 2. Dune: Part Three has already staked out Xmas as have the third edition of Jumanji and in a clever piece of counter-programming Robert Eggers’ Werewulf.
Coming into the New Year there’s a very welcome return for The Beekeeper, another offering from M. Night Shyamalan, a reimagining of the Narnia legends, Julia Roberts in mainstream thriller Panic Carefully, and the second remake of The Thomas Crown Affair this time around with Thomas B. Jordan.
In between we can look forward to being sold various festival fare as the next-best-thing.
*In fact, I didn’t have to wait that long for The Exorcist, it opened in Glasgow in the first week of April 1974. Papillon took much longer – mid-July. The Great Gatsby opened in Glasgow on April 22nd.
The Magnificent 60s 