When will ‘Apollo 18’ land?
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It’s become a piece of information as elusive as a NASA launch code: When in the name of Robert Goddard is ‘Apollo 18’ hitting theaters?
The found-footage movie imagines that the famed scrapped lunar mission really happened, with the astronauts facing some horrific consequences when they arrived on the moon (trailer below if you’d like a refresher). When the film was signed up by the Weinstein Co.’s genre division, Dimension Films, last fall, the company announced an ambitious March 4 date. That soon became an April 22 release date, and then an Aug. 12 date, as filmmakers needed more time to get the movie shot and edited.
The horror/science-fiction hybrid, from Spanish genre filmmaker Gonzalo Lopez Gallego, this week was shuffled to January 2012. But a few days later, it moved back to August, this time to Aug. 26, after ‘Final Destination 5,’ a formidable competitor among the genre crowd, moved off Aug. 26 to Aug. 12.
If that isn’t more complicated than a NASA rocket diagram, the story gets more knotty still. The ‘Final Destination’ move to Aug. 12 prompted the genre movie that was already on that date -- the Guillermo del Toro-produced ‘Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’ -- to get the heck out of the way and move to...Aug. 26.
That means that both ‘Apollo 18’ and ‘Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’ sit on the same end-of-summer weekend, a situation that at least one distribution expert feels is untenable given that both appeal to the same horror crowd. So it’s likely one of them -- possibly ‘Apollo 18’ -- will move again.
At this point it may be simpler just to go to the moon.
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‘Apollo 18’ looks to explain the reason we never went back
--Steven Zeitchik
