Netflix has been making a serious push to be recognized as a major awards season player in recent years with the likes of Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, and it appears as though the streaming service’s big contender this year is set to be their next collaboration with one of the industry’s finest directors in David Fincher’s Mank.
The biographical drama marks the Fight Club filmmaker’s first movie since 2014’s Gone Girl, and while he’s kept himself busy in the interim spearheading the company’s critically-acclaimed and now seemingly cancelled crime thriller Mindhunter, as well as his brief flirtation with tackling the World War Z sequel that very few people actually expected him to follow through with, expectations are already huge given the consistently high bar that Fincher has set with his previous work.
The true-life story follows screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and his battles with Orson Welles over the screenplay for Citizen Kane, leading to a high-profile falling out between the two. Mank is a project especially close to Fincher’s heart, with the script originally having been written by his late father Jack before being re-written by Forrest Gump and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’s Eric Roth.
Although no official release date has been announced as of yet, Roth claimed on a recent podcast appearance that Mank was originally slated to hit Netflix in October. While the Coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc with theatrical schedules all over the world, it hasn’t really affected projects that have always been intended for streaming, and with shooting having wrapped in February before the industry went into lockdown, the movie could still be ready by then. Then again, Fincher’s meticulous nature and the absence of a nailed-down opening day could see him spend a little longer putting the finishing touches on the hotly-anticipated period piece.
