Audiences got their first glimpse at Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno — a grizzly horror about a group of do-gooder Americans that find themselves on the menu of an indigenous Amazonian tribe — way back in 2013, but there’s still no word of a cinema release date.
Having featured during the Edinburgh Film Festival, its promotion, and appearance of Roth and his lead Lorenza Izzo, implied the US release of 5 September was pretty much confirmed.
However, almost six months on, Roth’s grotesque tale of cannibalism is no closer to hitting screens.
The apparent issue is with its distributors, Open Road Films. The disagreement stems between them and Worldview Entertainment (its financier), regarding who’d assume responsibility for advertising costs.
With talks apparently in deadlock — there’s still no set cinema date, with sources suggesting March, 2015 — the delay is really dragging out longer than it should.
Over the summer, Roth confirmed that a sequel to The Green Inferno was already being written and has a title, too.
“We want to do Beyond The Green Inferno,” he said, giving the next instalment a (premature) working title.
Whether this process has now halted is anyone’s guess, but in June he was confident of a follow-up. “If this movie works, then there’s so many different stories set in this world that we’d love to tell and that was just from us being there in Peru,”
For clarity’s sake, Roth went on to make his intentions clear: “So, Beyond The Green Inferno — we are writing it now and are having a really fun time doing so.”
But perhaps he spoke too soon. No one could have foreseen the woes of its release, but Roth’s desire to expand on the narrative was evident: “You find one story and it leads to another and to another, so we are writing the script for the sequel but it really depends on how this movie does!”
I wonder if his enthusiasm has altered since?
If anything, The Green Inferno missed its ideal slot of Halloween (well, October-ish), but it’d likely do well at other points in the calendar, as it’ll appeal to the mainstream demographic that lap up horror.
There’s nothing to say The Green Inferno won’t hit cinemas in 2015, and it’ll likely do well, providing it gets a wide release for audiences to, ahem, devour.
When will we finally see The Green Inferno in cinemas? Will Roth still want to make a sequel? Let us know what you think in the comments below…
