Back in September, NEON acquired Mike Flanagan’s “The Life of Chuck.” A 2025 release date was being set up for the film, which meant that it wouldn’t take part in this year’s Oscar race, and that’s despite winning the coveted TIFF People’s Choice Award.
Flanagan has now confirmed that ‘Chuck’ will be released in theaters on May 30, 2025. NEON is all but dumping this one. Why? Because the film just isn’t good enough for awards. Trust me, I’ve seen it. The TIFF audience award was a real puzzler to me, and releasing ‘Chuck’ in mid-2025 halts any of the momentum the film might have built up out of TIFF.
NEON has a lot of eggs in its basket this year, which includes an Oscar frontrunner for Best Picture (“Anora”), and International Film (“The Seed of the Sacred Fig”), so it’s not surprising to see them toss ‘Chuck’ aside and bet all of their chips on these other films.
The reviews for ‘Chuck’ were fine (64 on Metacritic), and Flanagan diehards at TIFF fully embraced the film, but it’s just not that good.
Based on short stories in Stephen King’s 2020 book “If It Bleeds,” the cast includes Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, and Jacob Tremblay. ‘Chuck’ is told in reverse order, from the end of a man’s life to the beginning. The film starts with the death of Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), then proceeds to showcase moments in his life, culminating with his childhood as an orphan in a supposedly haunted house.
In my review, I called ‘Chuck’ a narratively “creative” film, but also a very “schmaltzy” and “messy” one. Flanagan just can’t help himself in hammering down his message. Part of me really wanted to embrace ‘Chuck’ a little more, especially in how beautifully constructed the whole thing was, but Flanagan is just not that subtle a filmmaker.
12 of the last 14 TIFF winners have gone on to earn Oscar nominations for Best Picture, and four of them won the big prize. Previous winners include “American Fiction,” “The Fabelmans,” “Belfast,” “Nomadland,” “Jojo Rabbit,” “La La Land,” and “12 Years a Slave.”