If you were looking forward to seeing Jeremy Renner fight some wicked fairy tale spellcasters, you’ll have to wait quite a while longer. Paramount has bounced HANSEL AND GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS from its originally planned release date of March 2nd all the way to January 11, 2013.
The shift is ostensibly to take advantage of the expected increase in Renner’s “international profile” after he punctures evil with arrows as Hawkeye in this summer’s THE AVENGERS and then tries to demonstrate that a BOURNE movie can be a BOURNE movie without Matt Damon and the Jason Bourne character in THE BOURNE LEGACY. His appearance in the global smash MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL must have the gears already turning.
A release date shuffle isn’t much of a shock, considering the movie was supposed to come out in two months and we haven’t even seen a teaser trailer (one was expected in December but never surfaced), but a ten-month push is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser. Once considered a dumping ground, January has become increasingly popular for genre material — Paramount themselves just had a surprise hit this past weekend with THE DEVIL INSIDE, which tons of people went to see and apparently almost everyone hated. Surely they’re hoping the HANSEL AND GRETEL CinemaScore will be a grade or two higher…
The 3D action-comedy comes from director Tommy Wirkola (of the Norwegian zomcom DEAD SNOW) and is produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. The story takes place 15 years after the siblings’ traumatic gingerbread-house incident, and finds them as bounty hunters who track and kill witches all over the world.