HOLLYWOOD - It looks as though studios are beginning their holiday season movie jockeying.Originally scheduled for release on Dec. 13, space epic Solaris by director Steven Soderbergh is moving to an earlier launch date of Nov. 27.
The film stars George Clooney as an astronaut/scientist who travels to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris and discovers that the commander of an expedition studying the planet has died under mysterious circumstances. The film is based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem.
Solaris producer James Cameron told Variety, "Nov. 27 is a great date, but from what Steven has been showing me of the rough cut, Solaris is going to be such a landmark of science fiction filmmaking that it doesn't really matter when it is released."
The new date may also avoid splitting sci-fi audiences. Opening on Dec. 13 would have pit Solaris against Star Trek: Nemesis, the 10th installment of Paramount's long-running feature franchise.
The Nov. 27 release date means Solaris' only competition will come from Sony's animated feature Adam Sandler's 8 Crazy Nights and Disney's Treasure Planet. Aimed at adult audiences, Solaris will not likely steal any of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets' thunder, which opens on Nov. 15, but may pull audiences from MGM's 20th James Bond pic, Die Another Day.
To accommodate Solaris' move, 20th Century Fox has bumped its musical comedy Drumline from Nov. 27 to Jan. 10. The film, which stars Nick Cannon and Orlando Jones, follows a street drummer from New York City's Harlem neighborhood who enrolls in a Southern university and leads the school's marching band to victory.
The holiday season schedule, however, is hardly set in stone, and competing distributors are expected to start playing musical chairs with feature releases as the summer movie season begins to die down.