An odd way to announce that Hamaguchi’s critically-acclaimed Cannes drama got picked up Netflix, but fictional character Katie Mitchell (of the “Mitchells Vs the Machines”) revealed just that in a promo letter.
That means that, despite most of the 24 Cannes competition titles having been already bought by U.S. distributors, there are seven films still left orphaned: Casablanca Beats, The Divide, Nitram, Petrov's Flu, The Restless, The Story of My Wife, and Three Floors.
All of these are to be expected, terrible films, but with the sole exception of Justin Kurzel’s excellent “Nitram”. Supposedly, “Nitram” has a distributor, but they're just not making it public yet (potentially due to blowback given how controversial subject matter is in Australia). NEON? Amazon?
Drive My Car was co-written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, based on the short story of the same name by Haruki Murakami from his 2014 short story collection Men Without Women. It was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and won went on to win the Best Screenplay prize.
Paul Greengrass’ "The Uprising," starring Andrew Garfield, opened to $3.2M from 2,068 theaters this weekend. Yikes. The budget hasn’t been disclosed, but is said to be in the $20-$30M range.