It’s not uncommon for a smaller distributor to be a bit behind on releasing press materials for a film, but when there’s radio silence the week of release, our eyebrows are raised. After picking up Jean-Pierre Jeunet‘s The Young and Prodigious Spivet at Cannes well over two years ago, we noticed earlier this week that The Weinstein Company would be rolling the film out to theaters this Friday. However, there was no formal announcement, zero press screenings, and not a single mention of it on their official site or anywhere else, for that matter.
Now, just a few hours before it hits some theaters, they’ve unceremoniously dumped the trailer online. While Harvey Weinstein has battled with filmmakers over such films as Snowpiercer and The Immigrant in recent years, this complete disregard certainly reaches a new low for company. As for the film, it follows a boy, T. S. Spivet (Kyle Catlett), who travels from his country home in Montana to the Smithsonian on an adventure.
Also starring Helena Bonham Carter, Kathy Bates, and Callum Keith Rennie, if you want to seek this out, we can’t imagine it’ll be sticking in theaters long, so check your local listings. Along with the trailer, we’ve also linked to a feature-length documentary on the making of the film.
T.S. Spivet lives on a ranch in Montana with his mother who is obsessed with the morphology of beetles, his father (a cowboy born a hundred years too late) and his 14 year-old sister who dreams of becoming Miss America. T.S. is a 10 year-old prodigy with a passion for cartography and scientific inventions. One day, he receives an unexpected call from the Smithsonian museum telling him that he is the winner of the very prestigious Baird prize for his discovery of the perpetual motion machine and that he is invited to a reception in his honor where he is expected to give a speech. Without telling anyone, he sets out on a freight train across the U.S.A. to reach Washington DC. There is also Layton, twin brother of T.S., who died in an accident involving a firearm in the family’s barn, which no one ever speaks of. T.S. was with him, measuring the scale of the gunshots for an experiment, and he doesn’t understand what happened.
The Young and Prodigious Spivet arrives in select theaters on Friday, July 31st.