Continuing the relationship that has yielded recent box office successes such as Midnight in Paris and Blue Jasmine, Sony Pictures Classics will release Woody Allen’s next film, Magic in the Moonlight. This will be the seventh collaboration between the filmmaker and Sony Classics.
Allen notoriously keeps the subjects of each of his films a closely guarded secret. Magic in the Moonlight stars Colin Firth, Emma Stone, Eileen Atkins, Marcia Gay Harden, Hamish Linklater, Simon McBurney and Jacki Weaver.
In a recent interview with The Times, Allen referred to the film as “a romantic movie, amusing. ... It’s a romantic comedy set in the South of France in the 1920s”.
The official press release announcing Sony Classics’s acquisition of the film added only that it is set “against a backdrop of wealthy mansions, the Côte d’Azur, jazz joints and fashionable spots for the wealthy of the Jazz Age”.
The year the film opens will depend on whether it plays at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Allen said in The Times’s interview. Sony Classics released Allen’s Blue Jasmine, which has made more than $33 million (Dh121 million) to date.
The company also released Allen’s 2011 film, Midnight in Paris, which made $56 million, a high number for recent releases from the iconic filmmaker.
Allen, a four-time Oscar winner, will receive the Cecil B DeMille Award this weekend during the Golden Globes. He has already made clear he will not be attending to accept the prize, and Diane Keaton will pick it up for him instead.
“I’m not an awards person,” Allen said in the recent interview. Regarding the Golden Globes honour, he said: “I said if I don’t have to watch it and I don’t have to come to it, they can do anything they want.”
— Los Angeles Times
