It was announced today at ComicCon that Michael Mann‘s Blackhat (formerly Cyber), a thriller about cyber-terrorism with Chris Hemsworth, will open platform-style later this year in order to qualify for award-season honors. Mann and Hemsworth unveiled the first footage of Blackhat in Hall H. Deadline‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that Blackhat “may qualify for the Oscars this year in a strategy much like Lone Survivor this past awards season.” If they follow the LS playbook it’ll open just after Christmas. The wide opening will be 1.16.05. The trailer “looks big-scale and sensational…Mann at his best,” Fleming enthused.

Hemsworth offered this quote roughly a year ago: “I just finished [Blackhat]. It’s based in the world of cyber-terrorism….a sort of cat-and-mouse international heist-thriller. Basically, something similar to the Chicago Board of Trade is hacked into and it sets off a chain of events around the world, affecting the stock market. The code that was used to hack into it…my character had written it years before and he happens to be in prison for cyber crime. He is pulled out and offered a deal if he works with a joint task force of the FBI and the Chinese government in trying to track this guy down. It starts off in Chicago and ends up in Kuala Lumpur, in Hong Kong and in Jakarta.”

“It was was fascinating. I knew nothing about that world. It’s very prominent now as we see what hacking and cyber-terrorism make possible, like shutting down power grids in other countries. In our film he shuts down the water pumps to overheat the cooling system in a nuclear power plant and causes a whole lot of chaos. When you do that research you realize, how vulnerable you are.”