Michael Flatley Directorial Debut ‘Blackbird’ Finally Hitting Theaters Four Years After World Premiere

A movie that had developed almost mythical status after effectively disappearing immediately after its splashy world premiere has — finally — been given a release date.

Blackbird, the directorial debut of famed Lord of the Dance frontman and Riverdance legend Michael Flatley is heading to cinemas in Ireland with Wildcard Distribution. The release date of Sept. 2 comes almost four years after the film had its glitzy world premiere at London’s Raindance Film Festival on Sept. 28, 2018, a premiere that famously shut out journalists and produced zero reviews or audience reactions on Twitter.

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Around the time of the premiere, the film — a thriller directed, written, produced and financed by Flatley, who also stars as the titular Blackbird, a troubled, sharply-dressed, James Bond-esque secret agent who retires from the service and seeks solace as the owner of a glamorous nightclub in the Caribbean — picked up some sizeable flak in the British press. Much of the derision was aimed at a somewhat tone-deaf poster that featured an assortment of glamorous, bikini-clad, uncredited women alongside the its much older (and credited) male stars, also including Eric Roberts and Patrick Bergin. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter ahead of its first screening, Flatley said he’d had nothing to do with the poster, and also hit back at any question that the film was a vanity project, claiming that he’d had “several offers” from international distributors.

But after the premiere, all went quiet, requests to see Blackbird were knocked back or ignored, and there were no updates about a release or any further information, even on Flatley’s Instagram account, from which he’d previously been excitedly detailing the development of his debut feature. Much like the spy at the centre of story, Blackbird soon became something of a mystery.

Over the following years, a growing legion of devoted fans and those simply curious to see what had happened to a film that had so abruptly vanished would take to social media to demand its release. Adding to the curiosity, out of the blue Blackbird was made the opening night film of the inaugural Monaco Streaming Film Festival in July 2021, where Flatley won the best actor award and seemed to claim that some “extra filming” had taken place since its 2018 premiere. However, despite the festival’s name, its opening night film was — bizarrely — not available to stream. The pleas for Blackbird‘s public release only grew louder.

For those in Ireland, at least, those pleas have finally been answered.

In a tweet on Thursday, Wildcard, one of Ireland’s most successful independent distributors, revealed that it would be releasing Blackbird in local cinemas on Sept. 2. The company also put out a trailer awash in glamorous beaches, sports cars, attractive women, pistol-toting spies and blood-splattered white tuxedos, all part of the many reasons why the film amassed such a following in the first place.

“The Blackbird is dead,” utters Flatley in the clip. Not anymore it isn’t.

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