While the last few months of the year are what Hollywood designates as "Oscar Season," there is one weekend that is always a total bummer: the first weekend of December. For whatever reason the movie industry treats this one particular three day stretch like the plague. Last year the biggest movie to open on that weekend was Steve McQueen's Shame, and that only opened in 10 theaters. The year before that the biggest new movie was The Warrior's Way, which placed ninth and made only $3 million. Needless to say, it's not great news if your film is opening on that weekend, which means I have some bad news for those looking forward to Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly.
Deadline reports that the gangster drama is being pushed from its October 19th release date to November 30th. In a comment to the source, Harvey Weinstein said, "In this industry it is a very rare event to look at a weekend where your movie could open as the only wide release picture. November 30th will allow us to bring Killing Them Softly to a wide audience without competition" (but we all know why that is). The only movie that Killing Them Softly will open against now is The Frozen Ground, a new serial killer thriller starring Nicolas Cage and John Cusack. If Dominick's film had stayed where it was it would have been competing with Paranormal Activity 4 and Alex Cross.
It would be interesting if Killing Them Softly does well during that November 30th opening. I'd imagine that the hesitation to release any big movies that weekend would be the competition brought by the major Thanksgiving releases (last year had Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1, The Muppets and Hugo all fighting for the top of the box office). This year Skyfall, Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2, Life of Pi, Rise of The Guardians, Silver Linings Playbook and Red Dawn will all be in play, so we'll have to see if Killing Them Softly can live up to its title. It's worth pointing out that the new movie played at a few festivals earlier this year and got some positive write-ups, so this decision by the Weinsteins is a strange one.
