Jude Law is negotiating to join Robert Downey Jr. in “Sherlock Holmes,” the drama that Guy Ritchie will direct for Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow Pictures. Law is expected to close a deal shortly to play Watson, the super-sleuth’s sidekick.
Combined with its sensational performance at the US box office, “The Dark Knight” has totaled $919 million worldwide and become only the 10th pic to go past $900 million by that measure. It’s the second-best foreign performer this year, trailing only “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” with $466 million.
“Australia” was slated to release Stateside Nov. 14, about 48-hours after its November 13 world preem Down Under, but now the Oz date will also shift to tally with the U.S. Recently, Warner Bros. moved its next “Harry Potter” movie from Nov. 21 to next summer.
Bond titles have traditionally opened the weekend before Thanksgiving, but Sony didn’t want to open too close to Warner Bros.’ “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” so it originally settled on Nov. 7. But the landscape changed last week when Warners announced it was pushing back “Half-Blood Prince” from Nov. 21 to July.
Rumour has it that Warner Bros. decided to push back the release of ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ because of Daniel Radcliffe’s flesh-flashing in the Broadway production of Equus. As Fox News so eloquently puts it, “That’s not the image Warner Bros. wants associated with bespectacled Harry, who remains chaste and virginal.”
Even though Warner Bros.’ “The Dark Knight” took third yesterday with $5 million at 3,590 sites, the superhero pic only weathered a 35% dip in its fifth Friday. Having accumulated $459.7 million to date, “Dark Knight” is on the verge of overtaking 1977’s “Star Wars” and its 1997 reissue on the all-time domestic grossers list.
The move of the highly anticipated sixth installment of the Potter franchise comes as Warner Bros. is looking for ways to beef up its summer schedule, which had been light on major tentpoles — a result attributed mostly to the writers strike, which kept the studio from developing big-budget pics.
The Sony comedy nabbed a record-breaking $12.5 million at the US box office. For the first time in its run, Warner’s “The Dark Knight” came in No. 3 for the day, behind “Pineapple Express” and “Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants.”