The Current War is finally hitting theaters. Finally!
The biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Thomas Edison was originally scheduled for release way back in November 2017, but the Harvey Weinstein scandal caused The Weinstein Company movie to be pulled from the slate. Now that distribution rights have moved on to TWC’s successor Lantern Entertainment though, the film is at last arriving this October and EW has debuted a brand new trailer to remind us what the movie has in store.
Alongside Cumberbatch’s Edison, Michael Shannon plays George Westinghouse and Nicholas Hoult is Nikola Tesla in what’ll hopefully be a thrilling portrayal of the real-life battle between the three geniuses that saw them wage “the war of the currents” for control of the US’s electrical system.
Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon told EW that the wait for his movie to be released was “painful” and felt like “a lifetime in hell,” even admitting that “it’s been hard to move on.” But now that it’s coming to theaters, he says he’s overjoyed that the story has “a happy ending” after the “struggle” to get it out there for the past two years. He also revealed that this upcoming cut of the pic is very different from the one that was screened at the Toronto Film Festival in 2017, featuring a ton of new scenes and a redo of the score.
This is probably for the best, too, as reviews at the time weren’t great, with The Current War‘s Rotten Tomatoes score coming in at a pretty terrible 33%. Fingers crossed it’ll be lifted a lot higher by this retooled version that finally hits US theaters on October 4th. We wouldn’t expect it to make the same impact as the last couple of movies to feature both Cumberbatch and Holland – two little indie projects called Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame – but fans of the British stars may wish to check it out regardless.