To be released on December 25, 2013

[nas78]

www.thewrap.com/leonardo-dicaprios-wolf-wall-street-set-open-christmas-day/

Paramount will release Martin Scorsese’s awards hopeful this year as a holiday treat

Paramount Pictures will release Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” nationwide on Christmas Day, an individual familiar with the project has told TheWrap.

Paramount had no comment.

And life goes on...

[nas78]

www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/official-jack-ryan-moving-january-650181

It's Official: 'Jack Ryan' Moving to January 2014
Paramount's decision means that Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street" will be done in time for a Christmas release.

There's still no official word on whether Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street will open on Jack Ryan's old date, but the decision to officially move Jack Ryan indicates he will be.
Insiders say Scorsese's first cut Wolf of Wall Street was 180 minutes long. The goal was to trim 15 minutes to 20 minutes.

[sikri06]

Wonder when they'll announce WOWW moving. We have already seen some interesting shuffling with SONY moving American Hustle away from Christmas and The Monuments Men to February.

I also find it comforting that the goal wasn't to trim WOWW all the way down to two hours, but that a 160-165 minute cut was the goal. That makes a lot more confident of the quality of the film. Cutting an hour might have made it incoherent. This goal seems much more doable and actually might make it a better film.

[nas78]

Crazy-Crowded Christmas at Box Office: Will Hollywood Ever Learn?
www.thewrap.com/christmas-box-office-crowded-jack-ryan-wolf-wall-street

On Christmas Day, Paramount is rolling out the Martin Scorsese-directed Leonardo DiCaprio drama “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Fox has set “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” with Ben Stiller, Universal’s debuts its Keanu Reeves’ thriller “47 Ronin” and Warner Bros. will open the Sly Stallone-Robert De Niro boxing comedy “Grudge Match.”

As if that’s not enough, the Justin Bieber concert documentary “Believe” opens nationwide on Dec. 25, the Meryl Streep-Julia Roberts dramedy “August: Osage County” gets a limited release and “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” expands nationwide.

[sikri06]

I expect both 47 Ronin and The secret Life of Walter Mitty to tank. The latter have already been screened to critics who thought it was a disappointment and for 47 Ronin Universal doesn't seem to have high hopes for it. It has been delayed a full year and the marketing has been lackluster. Keanu Reeves was cast in the lead five years ago and is mostly a joke these days.

Grudge Match could be a minor hit with the older audience. Of the platform released movies I expect several of them to get a slower roll out than currently planned.

The main problem could be screens, but as I said I think we will see a slower roll out of several platform releases. The main competition that I see here, as it becomes apparent that WOWWS is a comedy, is Paramount's own Anchorman 2 that opens the week before. There could be some overlap in audience there. I expect the WOWWS audience to be a little older though.

Internationally WOWWS should have a clear victory. The first Anchorman never caught on outside the US and the rest (besides 47 Ronin in Japan) doesn't have strong international appeal either.

[will]

Friedman has only just started with his shit. I can only imagine what he'll write as the release approaches:

Martin Scorsese and co. are working like crazy to finish “The Wolf of Wall Street.” I can tell you that the movie will get a star studded New York premiere, but really, really late. “Wolf” is set to walk down the red carpet on December 17th at the Ziegfeld Theatre. That's two days after everyone's left town. It's also two weeks or more after the New York Film Critics and other groups have to announce their awards.

Hmm... How is this going to work? Because even if film groups see “Wolf” in some form around December 1st, when Scorsese is back from the Marrakesh Film Festival, that leaves two more weeks to fiddle with the film. And you know they will…”Wolf” opens nationwide on Christmas Day…

www.showbiz411.com/2013/11/13/scorsese-film-gets-latest-premiere-possible-50-shades-moved-to-2015

[sikri06]

Nov 14, 2013 7:38:25 GMT -5 will said:

Friedman has only just started with his shit. I can only imagine what he'll write as the release approaches:

Hmm... How is this going to work? Because even if film groups see “Wolf” in some form around December 1st, when Scorsese is back from the Marrakesh Film Festival, that leaves two more weeks to fiddle with the film. And you know they will…”Wolf” opens nationwide on Christmas Day…

Why would they "fiddle" with it if they have it finished and shown to critics by 11/25 or as this suggest by 12/1? Makes no sense.

[will]

He's trying to insinuate that after the critics groups screenings, issues with the film will have arised, and they will need to fix them before release.
As for the premiere, two weeks eight days before it opens is actually early for the official premiere of any film, not "really, really late" as he writes.


On the box office front, here's what Paramount vice chairman, Rob Moore, is saying regarding the many movies opening around Christmas:

Indeed, the cinema landscape is so crowded that two high-profile releases -- Sony's George Clooney World War II caper The Monuments Men and Paramount's Jack Ryan reboot -- decided to abandon Christmas Day altogether. Sony said Monuments Men was bumped to Feb. 7 because it isn't finished. Jack Ryan was moved to Jan. 17 to make room for Wolf of Wall Street, which "felt like a movie that will be part of awards season," says Moore, adding that he believes the tale of 1990s financial whiz Jordan Belfort will attract a healthy number of movie­goers in their 20s and 30s. He pegs American Hustle -- Russell's period political-corruption dramedy starring Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams and Bradley Cooper -- as Wolf's closest competitor.

www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/walter-mitty-wolf-wall-street-655361

[sikri06]

Still doesn't make sense. You don't invite critics to test-screenings. You do those with a focus group of regular moviegoers.

[arnzilla]

The Aviator premiered at NY's Ziegfeld Theater on 12/14/2004 and GONY
premiered there on 12/09/2002.

[nas78]

TWOWS will be released on Dec 25 in our land too...
What a wonderful wonderful Christmas present...
Thank u Santa...

[will]

thanks, nas


BoxOffice.com has lowered their prediction for the opening weekend to $21M, with the film making a total of $100M by the end.

I guess they think that Wed. and Thur. will be rather loaded, and they'll take away from the weekend box office.

[arnzilla]

NY Times - December 1, 2013

Scorsese’s ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Gets In Under the Oscar Wire
By MICHAEL CIEPLY and BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES — Last week, Martin Scorsese winged off to Marrakesh, Morocco, where he will spend nine days adjudicating Prince Moulay Rachid’s film festival.

But he left a not-so-little something behind: “The Wolf of Wall Street,” a two-hour, 59-minute cinematic romp through the securities business — his longest film ever.

Completed just last Wednesday and shown at two sneak-peek guild screenings on Saturday, “The Wolf of Wall Street” is the last, and possibly weirdest, of the Oscar season movies to surface, creating a type of parlor game for the gossipy movie industry. Daring to be both late and long is rare brinkmanship in a Hollywood that has become more accustomed to corporate discipline.

Will the picture, now scheduled for release on Christmas Day, do for crooked stock traders what Mr. Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” did for the mob? Or might it find Paramount executives on the next plane to Morocco, looking for a filmmaker who dropped a problem in their laps?

For Paramount, the stakes are not inconsiderable. Though the Viacom-owned studio had spring-summer hits in “Star Trek Into Darkness” and “World War Z,” it is running last among the major studios, with only about $823 million in domestic ticket sales, roughly half those of first-place Warner Brothers.

But the success or failure of Mr. Scorsese’s film may also tell how the awards game is played in future years. While this has been a good year for viewers, the soft performance of “Rush,” released by Universal, and the collapse of “The Fifth Estate,” from DreamWorks and Disney, have reminded of the awards season risks. Will the big studios, having jumped back into the Oscar race with contenders like “Argo” and “Zero Dark Thirty” last year, pull back again, ceding the prize chase to the indies?

“The Wolf of Wall Street” is being released into what is shaping up to be a cluttered holiday season. There are five movies opening in wide release on Christmas Day — two more than last year — and a group of films, including “Saving Mr. Banks” and “The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug,” are expected to be strong holdover competitors.

Mr. Scorsese’s film is rated R for “strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language throughout, and for some violence” — and, along with another film about a seedy subject, Sony’s “American Hustle,” represent a turn from the year’s more earnest awards fare, like “12 Years a Slave.” Paramount in particular seems to be betting that moviegoers want some dirty fun for Christmas.

Unlike “Margin Call,” a drama based on the crisis of 2007 and 2008, or “Wall Street,” which tackled the junk bond era, the film that finally surfaced last week will offer no lessons about mainstream finance. Rather, it is a New York-based story about scammers scamming scammers. The star, Leonardo DiCaprio, surrounded by a cast of hundreds, plays Jordan Belfort, a real-life market manipulator born out of the boiler-room culture that flourished in the 1990s. He ultimately spent nearly two years in prison after being convicted in connection with securities fraud and money-laundering.

Eyebrows first arched in June, when Paramount released a provocative trailer — in one snippet dwarfs are thrown at a dart board, backed by Kanye West’s throbbing “Black Skinhead.” “The big question,” wrote TimeOut.com, is why ticket buyers should care “about these self-absorbed, money-grubbing, Armani-clad cretins.”

In fact, Mr. Scorsese’s movie walks much the same turf as “American Hustle,” from the director David O. Russell. In that one a fictional fraud artist, played by Christian Bale, becomes embroiled with federal investigators during the Abscam operation in the late 1970s.

Paramount, which is releasing “The Wolf of Wall Street” in the United States (and Japan), in October bumped the film from a planned release on Nov. 15 to a new slot on Christmas Day. The sudden date change meant shifting Paramount’s action-thriller, “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” from Christmas into January, while landing Mr. Scorsese’s movie on top of another of the studio’s Christmas bets, “Labor Day,” directed by Jason Reitman.

The shift happened amid reports that Mr. Scorsese was showing friends and family a cut that exceeded three hours. (There were no formal research screenings, according to the person briefed on the film.)

Mr. Scorsese, 71, may have been able to push time limits — in more ways than one — because Paramount did not control the purse strings; “The Wolf of Wall Street” was financed by Red Granite Pictures, for a reported $100 million.

The problem is that there are only so many screens to go around, and exhibitors are reluctant to tie up real estate with long films; shorter movies like “Gravity,” which ran 91 minutes, allow them to pack in more screenings and sell more candy.

Some of the most successful films of all time, of course, have been quite long. “Titanic,” which ran three hours and 14 minutes, took in more than $3 billion worldwide in 1997, after adjusting for inflation. And Mr. Scorsese’s own “Casino,” which was just sixty seconds shorter than “The Wolf of Wall Street,” became a modest hit in 1995.

“A film never fails simply because it’s too long,” said Phil Contrino, chief analyst for BoxOffice.com. If Mr. Scorsese has “made something that draws favorable comparisons to his other true-crime epics, then length won’t matter.”

Mr. Scorsese, once considered the director whose work was most likely to be passed over by awards committees, has been on a hot streak this decade, with a best picture winner and three additional nominees in “The Departed,” “Hugo,” “The Aviator” and “Gangs of New York.”

A spokeswoman for Paramount declined to comment, and representatives for Mr. Scorsese did not respond to a query.

Mr. Scorsese finally screened an almost-finished cut of the film for an inner circle, including Mr. DiCaprio, and Paramount’s chief executive, Brad Grey, in New York a week ago. But the film was not actually finished until two days later, on Wednesday, according to a person who was briefed on the proceedings and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality strictures.

Tastemakers began getting answers on Saturday, as Paramount staged the first of some hastily convened awards screenings in Los Angeles.

“The danger with a movie that’s late-breaking like this is usually, are people going to see it?” said Kristopher Tapley, editor at large of Hitfix.com, and one of perhaps a dozen professional Oscar handicappers who spent last week waiting for an invitation to see what is the final film on their checklist. “But everybody is going to see a Martin Scorsese movie,” Mr. Tapley added.

Perhaps. But not until Mr. Scorsese is good and ready.

[nas78]

In 2 Days...
www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=801750243184558&set=a.219175171442071.73977.207982675894654&type=1&relevant_count=1