A 1.20 Wrap story by Matt Pressberg about Megan Ellison‘s Annapurna Pictures launching a distribution arm contains a bit of a shocker, at least from my perspective. Kathryn Bigelow’s untitled drama about the 1967 Detroit riots, Pressberg reports, will be released by Annapurna on August 4th — the 50th anniversary of the riots. Which is well and good as far as acknowledging history goes, but an August release usually means no Oscar action, or none anticipated by the filmmakers and/or the distributor. I was naturally expecting Bigelow’s film, which was written and co-produced by Hurt Locker/Zero Dark Thirty collaborators Mark Boal, to be in the Oscar conversation. Maybe it still will be, but an 8.4 release doesn’t encourage belief in that possibility.
