Maybe we should retitle WHITE HOUSE DOWN to SNOW WHITE MIRROR HOUSE DOWN. And maybe I should explain.
Back when MIRROR MIRROR and SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN were both in production, their respective studios kept bumping up the release dates in hopes of getting out of the gate first. As it so happens people could care less about something that looked so awful as MIRROR MIRROR, and despite being about the same general subject one of those two movies was the very clear winner. Perhaps not so much for director Rupert Sanders/star Kristen Stewart, but that’s as may be.
And now we have two competing “White House siege” projects – one is WHITE HOUSE DOWN, directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Channing Tatum, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jamie Foxx, Richard Jenkins, and James Woods. That plot “concerns a para-military takeover of the White House.” The other movie in question is OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN, directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart with a plot about “ex-Secret Service agent who must defend the White House from terrorists.”
Perhaps they’re not actually that similar in execution (poor choice of words?), but for marketing purposes/to an audience the difference may be negligable enough for ticket sales to take a hit. And so, perhaps Sony is trying to be sure that their movie gets outs first (despite OLYMPUS’ general release window of 2014). And IF so, I’m definitely not looking forward to the coming months of back and forth and forth and back as the two movies wrestle for my wallet.
Originally set to release on November 1st, WHITE HOUSE DOWN now shares its new release date of June 28th, 2013 with THE INTERNSHIP and the Ryan Reynolds/Jeff Bridges-starring comic book adaptation R.I.P.D.