Festival Fever Begins: Will ‘Magnificent Seven’ Saddle Up As Toronto Opener?
While Hollywood is preoccupied with summer tentpoles, the fall festival season is right around the corner, and the fests will be announcing their rosters of Oscar-bait films shortly. In the meantime, I’m hearing the Toronto Film Festival opener will be The Magnificent Seven, the Antoine Fuqua-directed remake of the classic 1960s Western that stars Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, Haley Bennett and Peter Sarsgaard.
If true it makes an intriguing choice for the pic, from MGM, Village Roadshow and Columbia Pictures. Sony opens it wide on September 23. The Toronto fest this year runs September 8-18 and usually announces its gala premieres around this time.
Other names in the TIFF mix I’ve heard are Nate Parker’s Sundance breakout The Birth Of A Nation, the Liev Schreiber-starring boxing biopic The Bleeder and The Weinstein Company’s Lion starring Nicole Kidman and Dev Patel. All of these pics are expected to be in the awards-season mix.
With the New York Film Festival and Venice already starting to roll out titles, we’ll know soon what lands where.
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