The play within the acclaimed prison-set movie made its way to an off-Broadway stage this week with original cast members involved. For that matter, the performance in Manhattan was also incomplete, abridged to about 30 minutes. Scenes, involving Roman gladiators and Freddy Krueger, tantalizingly glimpsed in the film, did not make the cut.
The show was part encore, part reunion. Its cast was the same as the original version, produced by a prison program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts. The real Divine G, rather than Domingo, participated in the live performance.
Hence the presence of Freddy Krueger. But for Sing Sing, one of the best movies of the year with one of the strangest release patterns, that path has been appropriately complicated.
The movie premiered at the Toronto film festival in , where it was acquired by the premier indie distributor A The studio planned a slow-rolling, buzz-building platform release in summer , much like their acquisition The Brutalist would receive at the end of the year. Instead, for reasons that remain unclear, the expansion stalled out. The movie played on a handful of screens for a full month, then slowly expanded for a few weekends before peaking on fewer than screens. The Brutalist, by contrast, was similarly scarce at first, but just spent its second weekend on more than 1, screens.
(mh=KBgK1JcId_Qh-1Yw)0.jpg "Adult Guide in Jena")
A24 is often more reticent about rushing to streaming than other studios, but it was nonetheless surprising that Sing Sing was kept away from any kind of at-home option for a full six months, accidentally simulating home-video release windows of or so. Instead, the movie was pushed out to screens in mid-January without much promotion beyond a seeming hope for imminent Oscar nominations — then quickly vanished again. Does this indicate that A24 did their job, getting the movie in front of enough Academy eyeballs to garner this recognition, or that stronger promotion could have gotten it into best picture, or perhaps best supporting actor for Maclin?
