Upcoming comedy The Roses, starring Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch as a warring couple, arrives in August. Have a trailer:
On paper, everything about Searchlight’s upcoming remake of the 1989 dark comedy, The War Of The Roses looks to be in order. You get Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch as the unhappy couple, delivering withering put-downs in a steadily escalating conflict that gets rather out of hand.
Plus, it has Jay Roach at the helm, a filmmaker who knows how to craft a big studio comedy, not to mention a script from Poor Things and The Favourite writer Tony McNamara. This doesn’t look like it will have the frisson of the Danny DeVito film that starred Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, though. The original War Of The Roses was a continuation of the chemistry the duo perfected in 1984’s Romancing The Stone and the following year’s sequel, The Jewel Of The Nile.
Instead, it looks like we’ll be getting a cooler onscreen relationship in the remake, though The Roses trailer suggests there’ll be no shortage of conflict, even without the word ‘war’ in the title.
About the trailer: it does appear to show a lot of said conflict, so if you want to preserve all of the film’s shock value, you might consider skipping it as it does reveal a lot.
The supporting cast here is fantastic: Andy Samberg, Allison Janney, Ncuti Gatwa, Jamie Demetriou, Zoë Chao, Belinda Bromilow and Kate McKinnon all co-star. Here’s a synopsis, via those lovely people at Searchlight Pictures:
Life seems easy for picture-perfect couple Ivy (Olivia Colman) and Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch): successful careers, a loving marriage, great kids. But beneath the façade of their supposed ideal life, a storm is brewing – as Theo’s career nosedives while Ivy’s own ambitions take off, a tinderbox of fierce competition and hidden resentment ignites.
The Roses’ release date has shifted back slightly to September 1st in the UK, meaning it no longer shares a release date with with Macon Blair’s Toxic Avenger. A shame that: it would have been a fun opening night comedy double bill. Here’s that trailer:
