Weinsteins Position The King’s Speech for Oscar Season, Tillman Story before Football Season

After playing extremely well in France in late November, Radu Mihaileanu’s The Concert becomes the first release of the year for the Weinsteins. The pause, wait, filling of the coffers means that their first release doesn’t come until the 16th of July. The target market for this film is much like the demo that gravitated towards Mihaileanu’s Live & Become (Va, vis et deviens) – easy to please seniors.

A couple of weeks before football season starts, they’ll release their second film which they also picked up at Sundance. Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story receives an August 20th release. As mentioned before, The Company Men would either be launched beforehand, or after this.

Sam Taylor Wood’s Nowhere Boy which was also featured at Sundance, will receive an October 8th release, which is almost one year to the date when it was launched in the U.K. Seeing that the subject of the Beatles and Kristin Scott Thomas is an audience favorite, I could see this play well in theaters. I measure all audience reaction at festivals with a grain of salt, but there was a genuine affection from the Sundance crowd.

While the company could make a purchase or two at Cannes this year and quickly place it within the Oscar race, so far, The King’s Speech which with this November 26th date becomes The Weinsteins’ Award seasons bait, with Blue Valentine needing plenty of TLC beforehand, I addressed my concerns with December 31st release.

The unmentioned titles in the piece, are Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil and Mikael Hafstrom’s Shanghai. I’m fully expecting for the Hoodwinked sequel to receive the same sort of release as the original film – which made 50 million working from a mid December to an expanded mid January release.

For a quick overview of the Weinstein Co. releases, simply click here.