Scorsese, 74, has no new movie this year–“Silence,” his historical epic released last winter for awards considerations, was a huge commercial flop. His contemporary, Oliver Stone, 70, made a movie, “Snowden,” that few people have seen or liked.
Nonetheless, other vet filmmakers, such as Clint Eastwood, 87, and Spielberg, 70, will vie for Gold this award season.
Spielberg’s “The Papers,” about the Washington Post and the Pentagon Papers, is being rushed to meet its theatrival exhibition–limited release in late December.
The Fox production, which shot during the summer and wrapped in July, boast an all-star cast, including Meryl Streep (as Post publisher Katharine Graham), Tom Hanks (as editor Ben Bradlee, and Carrie Coon (as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Meg Greenfield).
The Papers will be on view exactly 40 years after the release of Alan Pakula’s 1977 masterpiece, “All the President’s Men,” which was cited as Best Picture by the N. Y. Film Critics and won Jason Robards first Best Supporting Oscar, as editor Bradley (now played by Hanks).
Ridley Scott’s “All the Money in the World” — about the 1973 kidnapping of 16-year-old John Paul Getty III, wasn’t on the 2017 awards radar until last month, when Sony announced a release date on December 8.
The project just wrapped production and is now in the editing room now. It features Michelle Williams, as Getty’s fretful mother Gail Harris, and Kevin Spacey, as Getty’s patriarchal grandfather (who infamously charged his son, Getty Jr., interest on a portion of the ransom money). Mark Wahlberg also stars as an ex-CIA agent dispatched to Italy.
Eastwood’s Real-Life Drama, ‘The 15:17 to Paris.”
“Million Dollar Baby” wrapped in the summer of 2004 before going on to spoil the season for Alexander highly acclaimed, “Sideways,” and Scorsese’s biopic “The Aviator.”
Two years later, Eastwood surprised with his foreign lingo film, with “Letters from Iwo Jima,” which came together quickly in the wake of production on “Flags of Our Fathers” (a companion piece released two months prior).
In April, the four-time Oscar winner announced “The 15:17 to Paris” — about the 2015 Thalys train attack in France and the childhood friends who thwarted it, as his next project at Warner’s. He set off to make the film only weeks ago, but he’s already closing in on a wrap and will likely have it in and out of the editing suite in no time.
Warner already has the Oscar contender with Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk.
Eastwood had taken the extraordinary step of casting in his picture the real-life heroes Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, and Spencer Stone as themselves.
August 21 will mark two years since Sadler, Skarlatos, and Stone charged gunman Ayoub El-Khazzani on a Paris-bound Amsterdam train, preventing him from carrying out massacre. It’s a political story that benefits from its timeliness and relevancy.
No specific release plans for “The 15:17 to Paris” have been announced by Warner
