Disney just announced that it has set the release of its maritime disaster drama The Finest Hours for April 15th, 2016.
Craig Gillespie (Million Dollar Arm) is helming the project, which will star Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Eric Bana, Kyle Gallner, Ben Foster and Rachel Brosnahan. The true story at the heart of The Finest Hours focuses on the valiant efforts of the U.S. Coast Guard to launch a massive rescue operation after two oil tankers are split in two by a fierce winter blizzard off the coast of Cape Cod in 1952. The project is said to focus on the human element of the rescue mission more than the disaster itself, though the film will be released in 3-D, an indicator that audiences can expect some visually riveting and intense scenes set on the sinking tankers.
The Fighter scribes Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson initially penned the script, adapting Casey Sherman and Michael J. Tougias’s 2009 nonfiction bestseller The Finest Hours: The True Story Behind the US Coast Guard’s Most Daring Rescue. Scott Silver (also The Fighter) rewrote the most recent draft.
Check out the synopsis for Sherman and Tougias’s novel, and let us know whether you’ll be witnessing The Finest Hours when it arrives in theaters next April.
In the winter of 1952, New England was battered by the most brutal nor’easter in years. As the weather wreaked havoc on land, the freezing Atlantic became a wind-whipped zone of peril, setting the stage for one of the most heroic rescue stories ever lived.
In the early hours of Monday, February 18, while the storm raged, two oil tankers, the Pendleton and the Fort Mercer, found themselves in the same horrifying predicament. Built with “dirty steel,” and not prepared to withstand such ferocious seas, both tankers split in two, leaving the dozens of men on board utterly at the Atlantic’s mercy. The Finest Hours is the gripping, true story of the valiant attempt to rescue the souls huddling inside the broken halves of the two ships.
The spellbinding tale is overflowing with breathtaking scenes, as boats capsize, bows and sterns crash into one another, and men hurl themselves into the raging sea in their terrifying battle for survival.
Not all of the eighty-four men caught at sea in the midst of that brutal storm survived, but considering the odds, it’s a miracle—and a testament to their bravery—that any came home to tell their tales at all.