Woody Allen Movie to Get ANOTHER Release, World Turns Inside Out

Will Leitch
·Editor

Three-plus years ago, "Cassandra's Dream," starring Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell and "Captain America"'s Hayley Atwell, played for about two weeks, on 107 screens, and made $973,018. Using our proprietary IRONSIDES system, that means roughly 139,000 people paid to see "Cassandra's Dream" in the movie theater. We were one of those people. Our theater was pretty empty.

"Midnight In Paris," the biggest hit of Woody Allen's career (not adjusting for inflation, of course), is being re-released in a week in a half to capitalize on all the goodwill (and to prime for an Oscar run). It has us, as lifelong Woody Allen nerds, all goggled and confused. We've been sprinting out to see Woody Allen movies by ourselves for years, hopeful, faithful that someday his audience would return to him, or at least that we'd feel a little less lonely in the theater. "Match Point" came close, and "Vicky Christina Barcelona" even closer, which made us feel even worse, considering those aren't even among our favorite latter-era Woody movies. ("Deconstructing Harry," if you're asking, is still the best one, and like Quentin Tarantino, we think "Anything Else" is so much better than people realized at the time.) But mostly it was "You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger" and "Whatever Works" and all sorts of movies that no one noticed but us.

"Midnight In Paris," we're pleased to say, is among our favorite Allen movies, and we found ourselves skipping out of the theater after it was over, as energized as Woody clearly was. And it's exhilarating to see the rest of the country responding to it as well. But still, we fear. We've been through this before. "Bop Decameron" comes out next year, and it might end up ignored just as much as "Whatever Works" was. (That Americans ignore Woody Allen movies is the reason he doesn't film them here anymore, after all.) We just wanted one Woody Allen movie, someday, to be a hit. That "Midnight In Paris" is such a big hit that it's receiving two theatrical releases -- when "Cassandra's Dream" barely got one -- is lovely, but, like Woody himself, we know life is fleeting, and people eventually move on. Let us enjoy this while we can.

'Midnight in Paris' Getting a Late-Summer Expansion [The Hollywood Reporter]