Whenever someone talks about movies that are stuck in “development hell,” Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is the first one that comes mind. More than 20 years in the making, this film has been through a lot, including multiple recasting and script rewrites, but it is now finally ready for the wider audience and will be released in the spring of 2019.
The final version of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which stars Adam Driver, Jonathan Pryce, Stellan Skarsgard, Olga Kurylenko, and Jordi Molla among others, saw its world premiere at Cannes 2018 as the festival’s closing night film. Still, it was unclear who will handle the U.S. release of the movie until now, with Amazon recently backing out of the deal to acquire movie’s rights. Screen Media now stepped in and will handle the distribution of the film across North America.
“Terry Gilliam is a true auteur and his latest film does not disappoint,” said David Fannon, President of Screen Media, in a statement. “It is the perfect pairing of a film with a filmmaker, the story of Don Quixote, a man who believes in things that seemingly no one else believes in, until finally, they share his vision. Screen Media is thrilled that U.S. audiences will finally get to see Terry Gilliam’s quest.”
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is loosely based on the novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes and tells the story of an advertising director who travels back in time and gets mistaken for Sancho Panza. Terry Gilliam started working on the movie in 1989, but filming didn’t begin until 1998 when Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp took on the lead roles. Still, the shooting of the film was riddled with numerous issues including Rochefort’s illness and financial difficulties, so the production was canceled a month later.
Gilliam tried to resurrect the project over the years, and finally managed to do so in early 2017 when he found producers willing to invest in the project.
