Peninsula, a Korean zombie movie and follow up to the seminal Train to Busan, has finally had its North American release date revealed. It will arrive for your entertainment on August 7th on 150 screens across the US and Canada, and streaming rights have already been acquired by Shudder, where it will debut some time next year.
Picking up four years after the conclusion of its predecessor, the story follows a small group led by a former soldier who return to Korea, now a cut-off stretch of urban wilderness ruled by the undead, to locate something required by a sinister patron promising a huge payday for its retrieval. Upon their arrival, they discover that not all humans abandoned to the viral outbreak have fallen to its walking corpses, and the isolation has not done much to help the mental state of most of them.
How viable a big screen release will be in the current health climate remains to be seen, of course, as for some time box office success won’t be a true indicator of potential interest in a released title, since many people will still be hesitant to venture out to areas where large groups are gathering, even with the prospect of finally getting to see a film they’ve waited a long time for. This is even more of an issue in the US, where the coronavirus infection rate is still multiple orders of magnitude higher than almost other country on the planet as a result of conspiracy theories, hostility to wearing masks and administrative incompetence.
There’s just under a month to go until Peninsula is released, which will hopefully be enough time for something resembling a sense of normality to return and cinemas to become safe places with appropriate precautions taken to ensure the wellbeing to those trying to support them. After all, it would be a horrific irony to become fatally infected by a highly contagious pandemic in the process of watching a film depicting the aftermath of one.
