After years of seeing film release dates shift back, and back again, it feels quite rare for a feature’s theatrical debut to move up on the calendar, but it seems Paramount is just that confident in the potential success of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon.
The production company has announced that instead of arriving in select theaters on December 25, then going nationwide on January 6, everyone now has the chance to see the new epic on December 23. Babylon will now enter the box office ring with James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar: The Way of Water (which opens wide on Dec. 16), as well as Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and the Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody.
Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie lead Chazelle’s Babylon as a leading man of ‘20s Hollywood and an up-and-coming starlet. Both must navigate their roles in the industry as it makes the transition from silent films to talkies. Diego Calva, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella, Spike Jonze, Jean Smart, Flea, Samara Weaving, and Olivia Wilde also star in the film inspired by Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Robert Altman’s Nashville, and The Godfather.
“Babylon is the biggest number of roles I have juggled by far,” Chazelle said at TIFF, per The Hollywood Reporter. “The casting process took a long, long time. It’s a mostly fictional film where almost all of the characters are inspired by composites of real-life people.”
“It was about capturing the spirit of that time, which was a lot more Wild West,” continues. “They are building a city and industry from scratch, and to do that you need a certain kind of crazy person. I don’t think it is surprising that the people that did that did a lot of drugs and partied a lot.”