The Venice and Toronto festival lineups provided a few surprises headed our way.
Over here at Awards Insider, we pride ourselves on being able to see the future. Sure, we don’t always get it right. But often, we’ve got a pretty good grasp on the film landscape heading into awards season—even if we haven’t seen all the films yet.
I’m Rebecca Ford, and I have to admit that I was taken by surprise a couple of times this week as the Venice and Toronto film festival lineups were announced. In the past couple weeks, we’ve been doing calls with most of the studios and have kept hearing that slates looked thinner this year—that unlike the past couple of years, each studio had only one or two titles it was pushing for awards season.
But these lineups brought to light a few films that weren’t on my radar at all. For example, Paramount has a film called Better Man: a Robbie Williams biopic in which the singer plays himself. It’s from the director of The Greatest Showman,Michael Gracey, and was picked up by Paramount in a splashy deal earlier this year. It’s also a musical, and there are rumors about it making bold choices in its storytelling. Given the language used in its announcement as part of the Toronto Film Festival lineup, it’s also likely landing at Telluride. For a film that’s getting such a prominent double fall festival debut ahead of a December release, it’s wild to me that it hasn’t been on anyone’s radar before this week.
Better Man is not the only film to have a surprise landing on the festival lists. I’ve also got my eye on postapocalyptic musical The End, starring Tilda Swinton, which will premiere at TIFF, and Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, which is headed to Venice.
As it turns out, Better Man is not the only musical biopic to take us by surprise this week. James Mangold’s Bob Dylanmovie, A Complete Unknown, released its first trailer on Thursday, showcasing Timothée Chalamet as the music icon. The biopic is planned for a December release, and with Mangold at the helm (he directed Walk the Line, which earned Reese Witherspoon an Oscar), we are guessing this could be a strong awards play for Chalamet.
There’s so much to dig into in these festival lineups. David Canfield and I do our best to break it all down here, from the big-ticket titles like Joker: Folie à Deux to the smaller indies looking for buyers. But there’s no way for us to even name-check every film that might soar in the fall. At least now we have a lot to be excited about.
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