Martin Scorsese’s long-awaited Silence will finally be hitting theaters at the end of this year. Paramount confirmed to The A.V. Club that the studio has set a limited release date of December 23 for the film about 17th-century Jesuit priests who go to Japan during a period wherein Christians were not permitted to practice openly. It will then go into wide release come January. So, yes, if you care about the Oscar race, this does mean that the never-to-be-counted out director will have a horse in it.
Variety once reported that Scorsese entertained the idea of adapting Shūsaku Endō’s novel back in the late 1980s, and completed the script in 1996. Andrew Garfield joined the project as protagonist Father Rodrigues in 2013, and it got the necessary money back in 2015. Liam Neeson, Tadanobu Asano, and Adam Driver also star in the film, which may be very, very long.