After a new teaser trailer revealed a new Matt Damon film known as The Martian, it has been recently announced that the release date has changed. This is what is known of its new release date, cast, and story.
According to Design and Trend, the release date for The Martian was bumped up from its original Thanksgiving release date to the first week of October. Originally, 20th Century Fox was going to release a horror drama Victor Frankenstein starring Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy on that day, but these two films have essentially switched release dates.
The reason for the move is because the November 25th release date would have had to compete with several other films such as a Rocky spinoff entitled Creed, a sci-fi thriller Midnight Special, an untitled Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt comedy, plus Pixar's The Good Dinosaur. Not only that, the weekend after that would be the release of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2. As it stands, it looks like the competition for that first week of October will be the Bradley Cooper comedy/drama Adam Jones, the action film London Has Fallen, and the Robert Zemeckis film The Walk, where Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a man who tightropes across the World Trade Center towers.
In an odd coincidence, The Martian opens on the same weekend that Gravity did in 2013. Gravity has a similar plot about an astronaut being stranded in space, and Matt Damon's film is quite similar, only he is on Mars.
For those that haven't seen the teaser trailer, it begins with a voice-over explaining how human beings tend to want to help each other. It then shows how Matt Damon's character, Mark Watney, a crew member of the ARES mission gets stranded on Mars. It happens when his crew gets caught in a terrible storm, and Watney is swept away and presumed dead. The crew has no choice but to leave, but Watney is actually alive. The issue is that no one can really help him as he is 140 million miles away.
The trailer then shows Watney doing a video journal saying that in order to survive, he has to "science the s__t out of this". It shows him planting seeds for food, as well as making calculations for transmitting a message to his astronaut friends that he is alive.
The Martian has quite a cast considering that Jessica Chastain, who was also in Interstellar, plays the mission commander. The rest of the astronauts include Michael Pena as the pilot, Kate Mara as the computer expert, and a surgeon played by Sebastian Stan. According to CNET, Aksel Hennie is just a German astronaut.
In addition to the astronaut cast, there is also Jeff Daniels, who looks to be playing the man on Earth, and is reporting the condition of their lost astronaut. Donald Glover, best known for his work on the show Community, is also involved, as well as Chiwetel Ejiofor, who has played many roles in many different films. Sean Bean is involved, and he is usually an actor who is known to die in his given roles. It is interesting to see Kristen Wiig, who is better known for her stint on Saturday Night Live, play a dramatic role.
At first look, the story of The Martian might resemble a 2000 movie known as Red Planet staring Val Kilmer as an astronaut who has to use his wit and ingenuity to survive on Mars. It may have inspired the book that The Martian is based on, which was published in 2012 by Andy Weir. Originally, Weir self-published a chapter at a time, and the e-book became a best-seller and Weir sold the novel to audiobook and print publishers.
The Martian will be released into theaters on its new release date of October 2, 2015.
