Hugh Jackman's new take on Pan moved back to winter release
Pan is a new take on the Peter Pan story, picking things up before Wendy when a young English boy makes his first visit to Neverland. Origin stories are fun to play with certainly, and there's the inevitable fact that they're also the way studios go about setting up a new franchise, so we were interested to see how this revamp worked out, especially with directo Joe Wright (Hanna, Anna Karenina) at the helm.Well now we're going to have to wait a little longer as Pan has been pushed back by several months to a nebulous release date in October 2015. That sees it move from the prime box office fields of July to a place between blockbusters and heavy awards fare. The move has been explained by the production in a couple of different ways - Wright says he wants to make sure all the effects are finished properly and a distribution fella from Warner Bros says its about giving the film some room to breathe out of the cluttered summer season.It's reasonable to assume there's some truth to both - Wright has a history of crafting gorgeous-looking films and the first trailer for Pan was pretty light on spectacle while summer 2015 is one of the more stacked seasons ever in terms of blockbusters. And as a re-imagining of a long-loved property Pan has a lot of work to do; it has to satisfy existing fans and also work as an original story for those who have never met Peter and friends.It would also benefit from a lot more marketing focus, particularly once those Avengers, dinosaurs and Mad Maxes have moved off the table. This first trailer, while attractive, did little enough to set up the world and there's been nothing since.
