We are still in the midst of summer film festivals, with Cannes currently running and Tribeca starting in a few weeks. However, this doesn’t mean we can’t already look towards fall festivals, and news has just broken that the new Ron Howard film, the survival thriller “Eden,” will premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
Originally titled “Origin of species”, and starring Alicia Vikander and Daisy Edgar-Jones, the two stars have been replaced by Vanessa Kirby (Pieces of a Women, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning), and Sydney Sweeney fresh off of the hugely successful word-of-mouth hit “Anyone But You”. They will join Jude Law, Daniel Bruhl, and Ana de Armas, among others, in a film about a group of people who have abandoned society to live in the Galapagos Islands.
Production company AGC picked up the film from Cannes to be premiered in Venice, although whether it will be in or out of competition remains unconfirmed. This will presumably be one of three Ron Howard-directed movies that will have its release soon. The “Thirteen Lives” director is slated to release “The Shrinking of Treehorn,” a Netflix animated musical based on the children’s book of the same name. In addition, there’s also the Cannes documentary “Jime Henson Idea Man,” which is in competition for the Le Prix du Documentaire award. Release dates for all of these are still up in the air.
This is somewhat unusual for the director. His most recent string of films has been widely panned critically, and one has to look back to 2013’s “Rush” to find his most recent film festival premiere, which was shown at Cannes. “A Beautiful Mind” was shown retrospectively in 2011 at Tribeca, “Frost/Nixon” premiered at the London Film Festival in 2008, and the “Da Vinci Code” was received very poorly at Cannes in 2006. Does this festival release signal a return to form for the director? We’ll have to wait until 28th August – 7th September to find out.
