We've only got 2 years left to prepare ourselves for Baz Luhrmann's Elvis biopic
If there’s a pairing of director and subject more likely to provoke an aesthetic shock to our systems than “Baz Luhrmann and Elvis Presley”—two men who, between them,. never met a sequin they couldn’t find a place to jam somewhere—then it’s too busy cowering in the corner of the Jungle Rooms of our minds to make itself known at the moment. The Great Gatsby director has been attached to a film telling Presley’s life story—with Austin Butler, who recently played the ill-fated Tex in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood, set to star—for a few years now, but Warner Bros. has now officially given us all notice of when we’ll need to have ourselves prepared for it: October 1, 2021.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, the film will cover a 20-year period tracking Presley’s rise from “very famous” to “minor American God.” And in obvious defiance of those of us still holding out quiet hope that David Lynch might have gotten this job, it’ll also operate against a very Lynch-y “backdrop of the evolving cultural landscape and the loss of innocence in America” and wait, no, now our brains are imagining a long, densely soundtracked tracking shot through the halls of Graceland, and we’re not sure two years is going to be long enough to prepare for this.
Luhrmann’s untitled film wasn’t the only scheduling note Warner Bros. made this weekend; it also announced that it was pushing Denis Villeneuve’s Dune back a month, to December 18, 2020. That probably suggests that the studio’s feeling confident about the sci-fi opus, since it puts it into direct holiday season competition with Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, Eddie Murphy’s Coming To America sequel, and the Tom Holland Uncharted movie.