UPDATE: Despite Box Office Mojo’s release calendar showing the film’s release date as June 4th, the studio has informed us that it does not have an official release date yet. Apologies for the confusion.
You might not have even realized that Sylvester Stallone has a new superhero movie releasing on Friday, because we haven’t seen as much as a poster from Samaritan yet, never mind any footage. The effects of the Coronavirus pandemic may have turned the theatrical industry on its head, but it’s still very strange for an effort set in cinema’s most bankable genre starring one of its greatest ever action heroes to be flying so far under the radar five days before it debuts on thousands of screens across the country.
That’s not encouraging for a project that seems to have a lot of potential on paper. Samaritan is directed by Overlord‘s Julius Avery, who knows his way around heightened fantasy, while Euphoria‘s Javon Walton takes second billing behind Stallone as Sam Cleary, a young kid obsessed with superheroes who discovers that Sly’s Stanley Kominski is alive and well, decades after being presumed dead in an epic battle.
A high concept, R-rated, gritty superhero thriller with Sylvester Stallone in the lead certainly sounds interesting, but the complete and utter lack of any sort of marketing campaign could be a sign that Samaritan is being sent out into the wilderness to die.
Then again, it might have something to do with the fact that production house MGM has been locked in takeover talks for the last little while before recently selling up to Amazon, and it’s too late for the company’s new owners to pull it from the big screen or have much interest in spending money raising awareness for it when they won’t be seeing any of the profits. Either way, it’ll be very interesting to discover what the reviews have to say about Samaritan, given that it’s arriving to precisely zero fanfare.
