UPDATED, 4:49 PM: In the wake of notching a shiny 82% fresh Rotten Tomatoes score with critics coming out of its Telluride Film Festival premiere, Saltburn from Oscar winning filmmaker Emerald Fennell is going a week earlier on Nov. 17, limited. MGM will then expand the film on Nov. 22 to take advantage of holiday moviegoers.
The wild ride film is a deconstruction of British upper-class society in which Barry Keoghan plays a young nerdy Oxford university student who befriends a much popular, and wealthier colleague, played by Jacob Elordi. Keoghan’s character is obsessed by him, and eventually spends a summer with the friend’s eccentric family at their countryside estate.
Read Baz’s conversation with Fennell at Telluride, where she called the film “personal” and that it’s “about needing and wanting and desire and sex.”
PREVIOUSLY, July 25: Amid all the noise about studios taking apart the fall and fourth-quarter release schedule over the SAG-AFTRA strike, here’s some good news: Amazon is taking its Emerald Fennell-directed movie Saltburn out on Black Friday, November 24, in New York and Los Angeles. Pic will expand December 1.
In the wake of releasing Ben Affleck’s Air in theaters over Easter (it opened to $20.2 million over five days stateside and made close to $90M worldwide), the streamer is going theatrical again, and that’s a big thing to applaud.
Amazon is excited about Fennell’s next big feature, which has a plot that’s under wraps (logline is it’s about an aristocratic family). The cast includes Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe and Carey Mulligan.
There’s speculation out there that Saltburn is heading to the Telluride Film Festival.
Fennell’s previous Mulligan-starring movie, Promising Young Woman, won the filmmaker the Original Screenplay Oscar in 2021 among five noms overall including Best Picture.