There’s a lot of speculation surrounding the release of Heath ledger’s last film, the Terry Gilliam-directed The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The film doesn’t have a US distributor, and is seen by many as a tough sell. A September 24 release date that was bandied about for a couple of weeks turned out to be overly optimistic, and though a few people will tell you that some parties are interested in buying the flick, no one has written a check as of yet.
Except in the UK, where the film will be released in June. That detail was in the middle of a two-week old Ledger profile in EW. We missed it, and nearly everyone else seems to have missed it too, but The Playlist caught the mention when scanning the piece again.
Meanwhile, hopes are still high that the film will play at Cannes. The assumption is that a good showing at Cannes should be enough to lock in a US distro deal. But Cannes can be a fickle audience, and while they do favor Gilliam, other filmmakers they love have suffered dismal festival openings in the past. (David Lynch and Fire Walk With Me, for example.) A bad reception at Cannes could be worse than if the movie never played the fest at all.