Posted on: Friday, May 14, 2004

Summer films doing the shuffle

By William Booth
Washington Post

LOS ANGELES — Ah, the jostling of summer begins.

The basic idea is: Only one potential blockbuster at a time, please. The first to blink is Paramount Pictures, which decided to pull its highly anticipated "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" from its original debut date of June 25 and open it in September instead.

The film, starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, has generated buzz because of its stylized, sci-fi, deco-retro look — in which a very 1939-ish futurist world of giant zeppelins and ray guns is being created from thin air by elaborate computer algorithms designed by a mad-genius techie named Kerry Conran, who literally started making this movie in his apartment. The whole film is a computerized dream, except for the actors who perform their roles against a blank blue screen. It's curvy noir and Buck Rogers and King Kong all rolled into one. Or at least that's what the early peeks reveal.

Why shove "Sky Captain" back? Rob Friedman, vice chairman of Paramount's motion picture group, decided not to go mano a mano against Sony's "Spider-Man 2," which moved its date up to June 30, with late showings the night before. "You're not going to put up a movie like this and guarantee it only four days of freedom from direct competition," he said.

Of course, another possibility for the delay: The movie wasn't going to be quite ready. The technology used to make "Sky Captain" is cutting- edge, and writer-director Conran has never made a film before — unless one counts the six-minute short that was the genesis for this movie.

Sometimes in Hollywood, a delay smells like death. And in many cases, this has been true. Movies that get pushed back often are movies that are in trouble.

The hope among film geeks this time around is that "Sky Captain" will justify its hype — and a bit of a wait.