One of this summer’s most referenced titles when it came to potential flops has been pushed back from July 18 to Feb. 6, 2015, according to The Hollywood Reporter. That takes the $150-million sci-fi epic out of a crowded late-summer box office contest with Sex Tape, The Purge: Anarchy, Planes: Fire and Rescue and the second weekend of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and puts it against the Liam Neeson action film Run All Night, the Johnny Depp action comedy Mortdecai, and the also long-delayed Seventh Son, starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.
With a little over a month to go before Jupiter Ascending was set to be released as a major summer tentpole for Warner Bros., anticipation or awareness for the film was mum compared to buzz for other late-summer movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Jupiter Ascending has received little buzz or promotion, especially for an original sci-fi tale dropped in the middle of summer franchise cash cows like Transformers. Pulling Jupiter Ascending from an already cutthroat summer movie season (no blockbuster has been able to reign top of the box office longer than a week since the summer kicked off early May with The Amazing Spider-Man 2) in the nick of time is a surprising move, but probably a necessary one.
The Wachowskis haven’t had a solid hit since their Matrix trilogy, and Jupiter Ascending was poised to do little to buck that trend opening in summer. In 2005, V for Vendetta did decent business. Then, the Wachowski’s cartoonish live-action remake of Speed Racer was the first major bomb of summer 2008. Their most recent outing, the star-studded, century-jumping Cloud Atlas was one of the biggest box office blunders in 2012, grossing $27 million in the U.S. on a reported $102 million budget (it did save some face in the international market). Warner Bros. and the Wachowskis have been working together since The Matrix in 1999.
In Jupiter Ascending, Kunis plays a house maid who gets entangled in an intergalactic battle, and Tatum plays the space warrior who protects her.
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