Zendaya Movie ‘Challengers’ Cancels Venice Film Festival World Premiere Due To Strike; Fest Chooses New Opener
21.07.2023 - 17:19
/ deadline.com
Zendaya tennis drama Challengers has become a high-profile casualty of the SAG-AFTRA strike with confirmation that its Venice Film Festival world premiere has been cancelled.
The film has also moved off its September 15 U.S. release date and will now launch next spring instead.
The movie was due to open Venice but the prospect of debuting without support from its high-profile actors — Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist also star — was understandably deemed less than ideal by the filmmakers, talent and studios MGM and Warner Bros which handle U.S and international, respectively.
Challengers, directed by Luca Guadagnino, was due to screen Out of Competition on Wednesday, August 30, in the Sala Grande, and would have marked a high-profile opening for Venice’s 80th edition.
The festival has chosen Italian WWII movie Comandante by Edoardo de Angelis, starring Pierfrancesco Favino, as a replacement opening film.
Venice is usually a glamorous springboard for U.S. awards hopefuls and big streamer and studio fare but its plans for American buzz titles have been thrown into disarray by the strike, which forbids SAG members from promoting their projects.
Venice announces its lineup next week and the expectation is that it will have a smaller U.S. presence than usual. Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla is one movie that has long been earmarked for the festival and this week it announced its North American premiere at New York so the expectation is that Venice will have the Euro debut. But things are fluid. Studios are understandably jittery about launching projects without celebrity support and the expectation is that more changes to the release calendar will come.
With little sign of a breakthrough in negotiations between SAG and the