Movies
Sony Infected With Airborne Virus During ‘Retreat’, First Image!
Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions has picked up all North American rights to Magnet Films’ thriller Retreat, which stars Cillian Murphy, Thandie Newton and Jamie Bell, reports Variety.
Carl Tibbetts makes his feature directorial debut on the film, which “finds Murphy and Newton heading to a remote island cottage to rebuild their frail marriage. When a wounded and armed stranger (Bell) shows up at their door with news about a deadly airborne virus, they must seal themselves inside the cottage, where the tension starts to escalate from psychological to physical.”
Magnet’s Gary Sinyor said: “The film is a very successful realization of a really strong script loaded with twists and turns and with great performances from our cast.”
Long synopsis and art inside.
“In a last-ditch attempt to save their faltering marriage, Martin & Kate (Cillian Murphy & Thandie Newton) return to a beautiful, yet remote and unpopulated Scottish island that is home to Fairweather Cottage. A place where they once shared a romantic holiday.
Despite the warmth of autumnal log fires, Kate and Martin find their relationship is still cool and things only get worse when they lose contact with the mainland, and find themselves inexplicably stranded.
One morning a bloodied military man appears seemingly out of nowhere with terrifying news –
a deadly airborne pandemic has broken out and is coming their way. Jack insists they seal themselves into the cottage to keep the fatal virus out.
Although unconvinced, Kate and Martin have little choice but to play along as Jack bit by bit seals the doors and windows. Even when he starts to board up the house, shutting them in entirely, Martin and Kate can’t agree on what to do.
With each nail that Jack hammers into the wooden doorframes, conflicts bubble to the surface, and Jack exploits the couple’s mistrust for his own ends.
But when Jack starts to turn abusive to Kate, she and Martin finally join forces to confront him.
In a series of tense twists the captive couple use all their ingenuity to try to escape from Jack, and from the retreat cottage that has become their prison.
And, just when it looks like they might gain the upper hand, a disturbing discovery turns everything upside down resulting in a violent and shocking conclusion.“
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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