Until today, Ben Wheatley’s film High-Rise was stuck in an ivory tower, similar to its namesake.The Tom Hiddleston-led adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s sci-fi novel remained in limbo for many months after receiving mixed reviews at the Toronto Film Festival in February. According to /Film, the distribution rights were recently picked up by Magnolia Pictures, explaining why we’re getting a trailer now and a presumed 2016 release, even though the film was screened almost a year ago.
In the film, Hiddleston’s character, Dr. Robert Laing, moves into a fully autonomous apartment building whose residents eschew the outside world, to the point where classism leads to violent conflict.
Though High-Rise has been widely described as “unfilmable,” producer Jeremy Thomas, who was friends with Ballard, believes the film would have lived up to the author’s expectations.
“When I met Cronenberg and he said he wanted to do Naked Lunch, I saw immediately the film,” Thomas told The Hollywood Reporter. “Because if you understood Cronenberg’s cinema, you can think: ‘Yes, I can see that, I can’t see anybody else doing that, but I can see you doing it.’ You’ve seen his other films and you know the book, you put two and two together in your producer hard drive and think: ‘Yes, I want to see that film because it’s going to be extraordinary.’ With Crash, it was the same thing. [Ballard] adored that film, and I think he would have adored High-Rise.”
High-Rise is expected to hit theaters in 2016.