Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel reported today that Sony has bought all int’l media rights (excluding U.K. TV) plus domestic home entertainment rights to Edward Norton, Amy Rice and Alicia Sams‘ Obama doc, called By the People: The Election of Barack Obama. The heretofore untitled film will open in U.S. theatres via HBO Documentary Films, Siegel wrote. But when?

The fact that no projected release period was included in the story probably means By The People will come out in ’10. Which I feel will feel be too late in the game. The ’08 election was a long miniseries that everyone absorbed from hundreds if not thousands of different media and camera angles as it happened. I could maybe watch a first-rate review of it one more time later this year, but not next year. The world will have moved on. Enough already. The big Achilles Heel of this project has always been the fact that Norton, Rice and Sims have been moving at a glacial pace.