14 DAY TRIAL // In a very surprising move, Warner Bros. has pulled the Wachowski siblings’ film “Jupiter Ascending” from the summer blockbuster season, pushing back the release date to next year. The announcement comes just weeks before the original release date.
Variety confirms that fans who had been expecting to see the film, starring Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis, Sean Bean, and Eddie Redmayne, on July 18, will have to wait some more, until February 6, 2015 until it comes out in theaters.
While Warners didn’t offer a reason for the delay, speculation online has it that it could be down to one of 2 reasons: either the studio realized post-production work would take longer than initially anticipated, or higher-ups don’t have confidence in the film.
The summer blockbuster season is called just that for a very good reason: this is the time of the year when the biggest (i.e. most star-studded, most profitable) movies come out. It could be that Warners did not think “Jupiter Ascending” had what it took to go up against all these, so they pushed it to the box-office “wasteland” that is the month of February.
However, it might not be all that grim. Deadline is positive that the film got pushed back for the former reason, reporting that “the Wachowskis needed more time to complete visual effects work on their CG-heavy space epic, which spans intergalactic worlds and follows the story of a woman (Kunis) who links up with a space warrior (Tatum) and learns she’s the heir to Earth.”