Ryan Reynolds’ Sci-Fi Thriller Selfless Gets A Winter 2015 Release Date
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Actor Ryan Reynolds didn’t have a very good 2013. After two of his movies bombed terribly on the same weekend this past summer — Turbo from DreamWorks Animation and the afterlife cop comedy R.I.P.D. — the 37-year-old actor desperately needs a hit on his hands. It seems like Reynolds’ career never recovered from the Green Lantern. One of the next films he’s got in the gate is the science fiction thriller Selfless, which was originally positioned for some after-summer success in 2014, but now has shifted to a winter 2015 release.
As reported by Deadline, after FilmDistrict and Focus Features’ merger a few months ago, a few FilmDistrict titles such as Selfless, Insidious: Chapter 3, and Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii have been somewhat lost in the shuffle with pushed release dates. Selfless was originally going to open wide in September 2014, but now will hit theaters on February 27, 2015. At the moment, Selfless has the whole weekend to itself without any competition from other movie releases, as opposed to the more fierce competition its fall slot would have faced.
Selfless is about a wealthy elderly man who is dying of cancer, so he undergoes a radical procedure to transplant his consciousness into a younger, healthier body. At first this seems like an ideal situation, but the man soon discovers that his new body belonged to a recently murdered man whose killer is trying to find him. Now on the run, the man must figure out who his body belonged to and why people are trying to kill him. Screenwriters Àlex and David Pastor wrote the film’s screenplay, which was on the Hollywood Blacklist of the best unproduced screenplays of 2011.
Selfless will follow the controversial Fifty Shades of Grey, which opens a week earlier on February 13, 2014. While it’s unclear how successful Fifty Shades of Grey will be once it opens, it’s most likely that it will be extremely frontloaded in its first week of release. If Selfless were going to be released in September 2014, the sci-fi movie would have to contend with Resident Evil 6, The Maze Runner, and the Denzel Washington adaptation of ’80s action series The Equalizer from director Antoine Fuqua.
Tarsem Singh directed Selfless, which will be his follow-up to the dull Greek Mythology action film Immortals from 2011 and the underrated family fantasy film Mirror, Mirror in 2012. Tarsem is also attached to direct a Marco Polo biopic featuring Chinese actor Gong Li. The Marco Polo project has been in the works since 2011, but it doesn’t seem to have built up much steam yet. Tarsem has also signed on for the science fiction thriller The Panopticon from screenwriter Craig Rosenberg (The Uninvited) and producer Andrew Lazar (Jonah Hex). The Panopticon follows a man who receives a mysterious package with a pre-recorded message from himself inside. The message is a warning that the world will end if he doesn’t act quickly to stop the destruction.
In addition to Reynolds, Selfless also features Natalie Martinez, Matthew Goode, Ben Kingsley, Sandra Ellis Lafferty, Victor Garber, and Derek Luke. It will hit theaters everywhere on February 27, 2015.
