OPEN ROAD FILMS
Open Road moved up the release date of their 2017 pick-up “Sleepless” starring Jamie Foxx, from its original February 24th 2017 release date, to January 13, the start of the Martin Luther King holiday weekend.
This means a few things. First, that Open Road is very confident in the film, and thinks that they’ve got a box office winner on their hands that’s been testing well with advance audience previews. Second, January has become, unexpectedly, one of the biggest release months of the year – something that seems to have only recently happened.
It wasn’t too long ago that, for many years, January, like late August/early Sept, was the dumping ground for lousy movies that studios had no confidence in, and wanted to quickly bury. But that has changed, and quite a number of films have opened to very impressive numbers in January. “Ride Along” opened to $41.5 million in January 2014, “Ride Along 2” opened this past January with $35 million, “Kung Fu Panda 3”, which opened two weeks later, made $41.2 million in its opening weekend, and 2008’s “Cloverfield” premiered in January that year with $40 million.
In Open Road’s “Sleepless,” Foxx plays undercover Las Vegas police officer Vincent Downs, who is caught in a high stakes web of corrupt cops and the mob-controlled casino underground. When a heist goes wrong, a crew of homicidal gangsters kidnap Downs’ teenage son. In one sleepless night, he will have to rescue his son, evade an internal affairs investigation, and bring the kidnappers to justice.
“Sleepless” is an English-language remake of “Sleepness Night,” the 2011 French thriller starring Tomer Sisley and directed by Frederic Jaradin.
“Sleepless” also stars Michelle Monaghan, Dermot Mulroney, Gabrielle Union, and Tip ‘T.I.’ Harris.
The film was directed by Swiss director Baran Bo Odar from a script written by Andrea Berloff.
The original film had one of the best and most exhausting fight scenes in recent film memory, in which the hero confronts a crooked cop partner in a club kitchen. Let’s see if this new remake can match it.
In anticipation of the film’s release, Open Road Films has released a new clip from the film which gives us a glimpse at their take on the above kitchen-set fight scene:
Source: Shadow & Act
