Relativity's bankruptcy has been murder-death-kill to a lot of projects. Some of them got released and there was no marketing so the movies tanked, like Masterminds or The Disappointments Room. Others just didn't get made at all. The many many problems with The Crow reboot that still hasn't happened? It began with Relativity's financial woes. And even though Relativity has emerged from bankruptcy, clearly some things haven't changed, and they are affecting the release of Mike Flanagan's horror, Before I Wake.
The film has been getting teased for a couple of years now. It was to be Flanagan's followup to the highly-successful Oculus, and would star Thomas Jane, Kate Bosworth, and Jacob Tremblay. It centers on a young boy whose nightmares become a reality while he sleeps. A trailer was released in March 2015, teasing May opening date. No such luck. Another one dropped more than a year later with a promised September 2016 date. Nope, nothing there either. So what's the deal? Flanagan appeared on the Post Mortem podcast and shed some light on why the film may never see the light of day...
“It was a great deal [with Relativity], and it was a big fat wide release, and coming off of what they did with Oculus, it was like, ‘This is going to be great.’ And so we sold the movie to Relativity, and we had a release date, and we were all set, and I moved on to the next project… And then things just got weird. Everything kind of stalled. We weren’t getting trailers and posters and materials. It was kind of cagey. We didn’t know it at first, but it was because of the collapse… And so they moved it off the date, and they didn’t really have a good reason, and they didn’t ask us to change anything, which was odd… And it was testing better than Oculus ever tested. We were in a really good place… We just couldn’t get these materials.”
“It was like, ‘Well where’s the marketing materials?’And we eventually found out that a lot of the vendors had cut them out because they had too much debt and so the vendors weren’t turning the materials over… And then we started to really learn about how much trouble the company was in, and they finally came to us, and it was like, ‘Yes, we’re going to file Chapter 11, but we’re confident we’re going to pull out of it.’ But they’d pushed the date back twice at that point, and we had had international buyers that had picked it up based on the wide release commitment in the States, and so we kicked and screamed and shook our fists, but there was no choice but to kind of wait it out and hope they emerged from bankruptcy and would pick up where they left off and do right by the movie.”
So could the film still be released stateside at some point? Sure, but Flanagan later admits that there wouldn't be much point since it has already been released overseas for quite some time, and it's unlikely a domestic distributor would take a risk due to its availability and piracy concerns. Whomp whomp.
Flanagan came out of it okay, though. He directed the Ouija sequel that turned out pretty well, and he's currently adapting Stephen King's Gerald's Game.
