Tom Hanks is a Navy commander fighting in WWII in the trailer for Greyhound. The two-time Oscar winner famously starred in Steven Spielberg’s WWII movie Saving Private Ryan in 1998, playing the leader of a group of U.S. soldiers tasked with going behind enemy lines and finding the eponymous character (whose brothers were killed in combat). For his latest WWII project, Hanks will star as Ernest Krause, a Navy career officer who’s given his first command of a U.S. destroyer and tasked with protecting a convoy of Allied ships as they cross the North Atlantic, a wolf pack of Nazi U-boats hot on their tail.

Based on C.S. Forester’s book The Good Shepherd, Greyhound was also written for the screen by Hanks and directed by Aaron Schneider, marking the cinematographer-turned filmmaker’s first feature since his acclaimed debut on the drama Get Low in 2009. Sony once had the film scheduled to open as far back as March 2019, but later delayed it by around fourteen months to May 2020 instead. Greyhound has since moved back another month, even as the studio gets its marketing campaign up and running in full.

Today, Greyhound received a new official release date (Friday, June 12), in addition to a trailer and poster. You can check out the latter two items below.

Judging by the trailer footage, Greyhound has all the elements of a proper summer movie thrill ride, complete with a straightforward, yet high-stakes, storyline and visually impressive wartime spectacle (no surprise there; Schneider was a cinematographer first, after all). That explains why Sony is releasing this one in the heat of the summer blockbuster season, as opposed to saving it for awards season in the fall. Combine that with Hanks writing the script and lending his gravitas to the lead role and Greyhound seems a lot more promising than its multiple release date delays might suggest. Of course, there’s a very real chance Sony decided to push Greyhound back from May to June in response to the still-unfolding situation with the coronavirus outbreak. While other May tentpoles (like Black Widow) can’t really move away from their current dates without causing big problems for their studios, something smaller like Greyhound has a lot more freedom in that regard.

Either way, Greyhound is now set to open directly against Nia DaCosta’s Candyman sequel and will additionally face-off with Wonder Woman 1984 in its second weekend of release. Hanks’ WWII film will presumably have some overlap with the Wonder Woman sequel, but ought to skew a little older and may yet do alright by itself. Roland Emmerich’s similarly effects-heavy WWII movie Midway did modest business at the box office last November, though potentially better reviews and Hanks’ star-power could be enough to turn Greyhound into more of a full-blooded success by comparison. All in all, it will be interesting to see how this one is impacted by its relatively last-minute move at the box office.

Source: Sony

  • Greyhound Release Date: 2020-07-10