Baz Luhrmann on the “Great Gatsby” release delay

Vulture.com: When we caught up with director Baz Luhrmann last night at Samsung’s “Meet the New Way” launch party, we tried our damnedest to find out why exactly he’d delayed his 3-D adaptation of The Great Gatsby from its winter berth to next summer. Did he simply need more time to tinker? It’s okay to be a perfectionist, after all. But a smiling Luhrmann would simply not budge. “I will tell you this, I’m just very nourished by just working on it,” he told us. “I’m just thrilled.” And a little busy? Maybe too busy to make a December release date? “Right now I’m working on music. You can imagine how involved I am in the music alone.” Noted!

“Bachelorette” Breaks Records Before It Hits Theaters

It used to be you knew what you were in for when a movie was not, as the trailers say, “only in theaters”: something way too highbrow or way too, well, too bad for a studio to put money behind a cinematic release.

This week, the movie Bachelorette—a raunchy dark comedy starring Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fisher and Lizzy Caplan as bridesmaids who are not as interested in the wedding as they are in the party that proceeds it—seems to have heralded the end of that era. The film premiered at Sundance this year but doesn’t come out in the U.S. until Sept. 7 for a limited release. Still, it’s already made more than a half a million dollars in video-on-demand and online rental formats. (Which is about as much as a decent indie opening weekend in theaters, notes Variety.) Since its release last Friday in the iTunes rental store, where it is available for $9.99, it reached No. 1 on the download charts—the first movie to ever do so prior to its theatrical release, according to Reuters.

Bachelorette’s distribution scheme comes courtesy of RADiUS, a Weinstein company created specifically to deal with new methods of releasing movies; even though this is the first RADiUS film, clearly the idea has legs. And although other movies have gone the iTunes/VOD route first—Dunst’s Melancholia did it last year—the success of Bachelorette is good news for mainstream-ish movies that people want to see but about which studios may be wary. According to Deadline, even though a ‘Ladies With A Hangover’ movie sounds appealing (especially post-Bridesmaids) and Sundance audiences loved Bachelorette, the characters were just too unsympathetic for the R-rated film to score a big traditional distribution deal.

Promotional help from the cast (for example, Rebel Wilson, who plays the unlucky bride, appeared on Jimmy Kimmel last night) helped the movie overcome any straight-to-not-quite-video stigma. It’s a good time in general to separate VOD releases from old-timey straight-to-video. Straight-to-video may soon be a thing of the past anyway: The Wrap reported this weekend that, because of low sales, Warner Bros. is dismantling its straight-to-video division. With other non-theatrical options on the rise, that’s bad news for anyone hoping for a sequel to the sequel to the sequel to Free Willy and pretty much no big deal for the rest of us.

Time.com

Continue reading “Bachelorette” Breaks Records Before It Hits Theaters

Isla & “Bachelorette” girls featured in Elle magazine

Isla and her Bachelorette co-stars Kirsten Dunst and Lizzy Caplan are featured in a new photo spread in the September issue of Elle (US)! The ladies talk about female friendship and this generation of women, and pose in the latest ‘cool-girl’ fashions for the magazine. The photoshoot has been added to our Gallery, and the interview to our press page, all courtesy of Elle.com.

Katy Perry is on the cover of this issue, so keep an eye out for it and pick up a copy to see Isla inside!

All the Single Ladies

Whether your idea of cool-girl dressing is cutout mod sheaths or sexy-strong tailoring, the firebrand trio of this month’s darkly funny bachelorette will show you how to have a good time.

When wickedly funny Los Angeles playwright Leslye Headland first began taking meetings with Hollywood executives, she heard the same question on repeat: “They’d ask,‘What’s the female version of an Apatow movie?’ I would always say, ‘Depressing.’” Audiences love a man-child, but would they find “a woman struggling with her femininity” just as funny? Turns out they do. Bachelorette, Headland’s raucous Sundance hit, in theaters this month, is hilarious, twisted, and startlingly incisive. On the eve of a wedding, three early-thirties bridesmaids lean hard into old archetypes—the ditz (Isla Fisher), the nympho (Lizzy Caplan), and the alpha female (Kirsten Dunst)—and wrestle with their own inadequacies as the rotund runt of their high school pack (the always-game Rebel Wilson) beats them all to the altar, with a Disney- perfect prince to boot. Make no mistake: This isn’t Bridesmaids. Headland spins her premise into something grittier, a fiercely sharp send-up of the idea, she says, “that there’s a checklist by which women should live their lives, so that they’re always defining themselves by what they don’t have.”

Read the full interview



“Bachelorette” now available on Video On Demand; new stills released

Bachelorette was released on Video On Demand in the US yesterday – admittedly I’m not quite sure how this works or where you can watch it etc., but if you do know and have the ability to watch it, then be sure to give it a go! Drop back in and let us know what you thought of it after you’ve watched it. It will be released in limited US cinemas on September 7th, and you can find additional international release dates here.

Several new stills for the movie have been released recently, and I’ve added them to our Gallery. There is also a new Russian poster for the film – same photo/artwork, Russian text.

Bachelorette (2012) > Posters & Artwork x1 more
Bachelorette (2012) > Stills x8 more