Baz Luhrmann watches on while Joel Edgerton,
left, rehearses during filming of The Great Gatsby in Sydney. Picture: Brad
Hunter Source:
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph reports
Joel Edgerton has defended the studio decision to bump The Great Gatsby's
release date back six months, saying the move is a show of confidence rather
than doubt in Baz Luhrmann's latest period epic.
Edgerton plays
Tom Buchanan in the Sydney-shot flick which was supposed to be released in
December in the US and January in Australia, but was last month pushed back to
mid-2013 - the US summer blockbuster season.
The switch
essentially moves it out of 2013 Oscar contention and was widely rumoured
within the industry as a sign that Warner Bros was unhappy with the rough-cut
produced by Luhrmann and demanded re-editing, hence the postponement.
However Edgerton
has given a different take, saying the new release date (in June next year) is
a positive sign.
"It's a
real show of support from the studio (Warner Bros) that they think it's big and
interesting and diversely appealing enough to appear in the most sought-after
release time for movies ... the summer in America," Edgerton told The
Daily Telegraph.
"Not that
it matters for us here, but for them over there its release in a sweltering
summer is appropriate to the book, which has a real kind of heat and humidity
to it."
The original
December 25 US release for The Great Gatsby would have clashed with another
Leonardo DiCaprio film, Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. "So Leo was
gonna cannibalise himself at the box office," Edgerton added.
There would
also have been a clash with Edgerton's upcoming film Zero Dark Thirty - about
the hunt for Osama bin Laden from The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow.
"I'd probably just nibble my own toe off. I couldn't fully cannibalise
myself," Edgerton laughed.
He is set to
begin shooting his new flick Felony in Sydney in November, with British actor
Tom Wilkinson to co-star.
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