Russell Crowe thriller Unhinged hopes to be the thing that brings Americans back to theaters
With every movie being pulled from theaters for the last few months (and many movies being pulled up to next year), everyone who follows this sort of stuff has been wondering what film will be the first big hit of the post-pandemic world. The general assumption was that Christopher Nolan’s Tenet would be the winner, since it’s a Christopher Nolan movie, it notably hasn’t budged from its July 17 release date, and… it’s not really going to have any competition in July anyway. Or so we thought! Now, a dark horse candidate has shown up, ready to take Tenet’s crown before it’s even been placed on Robert Pattinson’s time-traveling head (oh, sorry, “not” time-traveling head, wink).
According to Variety, a Russell Crowe movie called Unhinged is angling to become the post-pandemic movie that everyone sees by default, with its studio slotting in for a July 1 release—more than two weeks before Tenet and possibly before theaters in major cities have even reopened. There are two reasons for this big swing, the first being that Unhinged was originally supposed to open in September, and thanks to coronavirus schedule shifts, that would mean opening against A Quiet Place Part II and getting buried. Opening early means less competition. The other reason is that Unhinged is the very first release from a brand new movie company, Solstice Studios, so it must be kind of important for it to at least make some money.
Unhinged is based on some very pre-pandemic anxieties, specifically ones involving other people instead of a goddamn virus, and it’s about a woman who becomes the target of a particularly unhinged man (Crowe) when she beeps her horn at him in traffic and then refuses to apologize. You can see a trailer for it below. It looks alright, and Jimmi Simpson gets to play someone being harassed by a creep instead of being the creep himself, so that’s interesting.