Will Speck and Josh Gordon have announced their next project. The sci-fi comedy movies/Distant/ will be available in theaters at the beginning of next year. It is a production of DreamWorks Pictures, Six Foot Turkey Productions, and Automatik Entertainment, having been shot in Budapest at the end of 2020 during the pandemic. Because of low Covid numbers, strict organisation and government support, Hungary’s studios were among the first to re-open for international productions in the summer of 2020.
Speck and Gordon are particularly recognized as film directors, who were responsible for such movies as Blades of Glory and Office Christmas Party, as well as working on tv series Flaked for Netflix and Hit-Monkey for Hulu. They are working on Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile’s adaptation as well. Probably their most remarkable success was related to the greatest television sensation of 2007, the GEICO Cavemen sitcom, which was ordered for thirteen episodes but actually aired only six before being cancelled. What could have been.
Now, let us shift our focus to what the filmmakers have next in store for us, Distant. Distant is a sci-fi story out of what we have seen from the teasers, and thus the questions that arise include: who is going to be in the cast, when and where will it be released, and what more do the people need to know about Will Speck and Josh Gordon’s Distant?
Distant: The Plot
Currently, not much is known about the plot but in general terms, we have an idea of what to expect. The major theme in the Distant movie is that of an asteroid miner who crash-lands on an alien planet and has trouble getting back home. The miner needs to survive in this hostile environment while trying to locate his ship or pick up structure. There are claims that during this mission, the miner will struggle against his AI survival suit. A hostile panorama is a maze of challenges rough landscapes and treacherous surroundings. Very soon, he finds himself able to see another survivor, a woman in an escape pod, almost out of oxygen. The miner then has to overcome treacherous landscapes to reach the woman while holding onto enough oxygen and avoiding aggressive extraterrestrials.
The film will be enhanced by the comedic approach of explaining how the miner faces new obstacles while trying to save the woman. In Speck and Gordon’s Blades of Glory fans witnessed a rather typical plot device combine two rivals who have to cooperate in order to prevail. It does seem that in this IT representation they aim to do the same.
Maybe the base materials will come in the next several months before the opening.
Distant: The Cast
Rising star Anthony Ramos from In the Heights and A Star is Born will play the role of the asteroid miner who crash lands, Andy Ramirez. His opponent, an AI suit-wearing antagonist called Ramirez, will be played by Mr. Spock, who is easy to identify as Zachary Quinto. Young Calloway, whom Ramirez tries to save, is played by Naomi Scott, the actress who gained recognition after appearing in Aladdin.
The three will be joined by Kristofer Hivju, who starred in Game of Thrones, and played a role as Dwayne in The Fate of the Furious. How Dwayne fits into the picture is yet to be determined.
As of now, the confirmed castings are these; however, it is likely that more castings will be announced later in the upcoming months.
Release Date
Distant will hit the cinema screens through Universal Pictures on the 27th of January 2023. This is the third day that has been given for the film. The first release date announced for the film was the 11th of March 2022. Later on, it was moved to September 16, 2022, probably in order to avoid coming into competition with Disney and Pixar’s Turning Red that was released on the same date. It was moved to the current January 2023 schedule because the September date was also affecting the commercial viability, with heavy weights such as Lionsgate’s Are you There God, Its Me, Margaret and Sony’s The Woman King starring Viola Davis.
Distant, as mentioned, was one of those films which shot in Budapest, Hungary during autumn of 2020 when most of the US studios were just about to resume production weeks after the Covid lockdowns. In collaboration with the Hungarian government, the film industry managed to get back to work with appropriate safety measures.
What We Know: Everything Else
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent Pedro PascalLionsgate
We also emphasize that Apart from Distant, other films that aired a year or two ago also had partial or complete production in Hungary. Dune Eternals, directed by Denis Villeneuve, was worked on in the country during the early part of the year 2019, and later went back following the reopening in 2020. Amazon’s Birds of Paradise was also filmed in Budapest from March to August 2020, which was when they took a break.
The large part of The HALO live action series The Gentleman was filmed in Hungary just as the ‘Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent’ directed by Nicholas Cage. Hungary allowed to the closed film sector to get an early foothold which indeed worked well. The country indented to recover in 2021, all the lost income quite lost factors for the year 2020. There, the studios established that, in the Covid epoch, shooting could be done and finished and there is entertainment and escapism when people need it the most.
For more movies like Distant visit 123Movies.