After the failure of A Hologram for the King, Tom Hanks will be hoping to restore some lustre to his box office standing with two high-profile, pre-Christmas releases - Clint Eastwood’s Sully and the Ron Howard thriller Inferno.
Sully is based on the book Highest Duty, the autobiography of Chesley Sullenberger, the veteran pilot who saved the lives of 155 passengers and crew when he crash landed his American Airways plane on the Hudson River shortly after take-off from La Guardia airport in January 2009. Sullenberger was forced to ditch after multiple bird strikes damaged both of the plane’s engines, landing the plane in the freezing water in what became known as the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’.
Shot in Atlanta , Georgia, Kearney, New Jersey and North Carolina last autumn and winter, Sully is the first time that Eastwood and Hanks have worked together. The movie, co-starring Laura Linney, Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad), Aaron Eckhart and Jeff Kober, opens here on 2nd December and looks like an easy sell to garner Hanks his sixth ‘Best Actor’ nod at the Oscars.
Inferno is the third in the sequence of mystery thrillers adapted from Dan Browne’s Robert Langdon books, starring Hanks and directed by Ron Howard. In this one, Langdon, a professor at Harvard University, has to regain his memory while running down a demented scientist (Ben Foster) with a plan to solve the earth’s overpopulation problem.
The first two Langdon movies have been huge popular successes grossing $1.5bn at the global box office. Supporting Hanks is Felicity Jones – she will have Inferno, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, A Monster Calls and Collide opening within a few months – Omar Sy, Borgen’s Sidse Babette Knudson and Irfan Khan. The movie’s release date is October 14th.
