Just a quick update regarding the release of an upcoming “faith-based” film.
Deadline is reporting that Same Kind of Different as Me, based on the memoir by Ron Hall, Denver Moore and Lynn Vincent, has been dropped by Paramount Pictures, which was going to release the film in February. The film will now be released by Pure Flix Entertainment, the studio behind God’s Not Dead, on October 20, 2017.
This is the second time the film — which stars Greg Kinnear, Renee Zellweger, Djimon Hounsou and Jon Voight — has been bumped. It was originally going to come out in April 2016, until Paramount bumped the release date in March. Paramount then went on to release a trailer for the film in August and a poster in November (meanwhile, Bridget Jones’s Baby — which Zellweger shot a full year after Same Kind of Different as Me — came out in September), but now it has dropped the film altogether.
One wonders if this is related to the recent departure of Paramount vice chairman Rob Moore, who was once known as “Hollywood’s highest-ranking Evangelical”.
This is not the first time Pure Flix has picked up a film that was going to be released by a major studio. Hillsong: Let Hope Rise was originally going to be distributed by Warner Brothers in April 2015 — the studio even posted a trailer for the film in July 2014 — but the film was eventually released by Pure Flix in September 2016.
With Same Kind of Different as Me no longer coming out in February, it looks like the first major “faith-based” film of 2017 will be The Shack, which opens on March 3.
