Taika Waititi‘s Next Goal Wins, a fact-based sports saga, and Terrence Malick‘s The Way of the Wind, a Jesus flick, share two similarities. They’re both between three and four years old, principal-photography-wise, and both are unreleased.
It was recently announced that Searchlight will release the Waititi film, which began shooting in November 2019 and wrapped in January 2020, on 11.17.23.
The Malick film, which wrapped in the fall of ’19, has no distributor and may not even peek through at a film festival this year, although that situation could change. This is par for the course for Malick. Typical post-production periods for his films occupy an average of a couple of years.
On 3.30.22 I wrote facetiously that “if Malick sticks to his usual post-production timetable, The Way of the Wind…will most likely open sometime in ’23.” It’s now almost certain that won’t happen and that a ’24 release date is the earliest possibility.
Delays of this length are fairly unprecedented. Both films are basically regarded as jokes at this stage, but Malick is the king of this realm.
