The biopic about actress-turned-princess Grace Kelly will make its U.S. premiere May 25 on the cable channel after TWC put it on indefinite delay.
- Apr 8, 2015
AceShowbiz - "Grace of Monaco" will finally see the light of day after its release was put on indefinite delay. Originally made for theatrical release, the movie is now set for small-screen debut on cable network Lifetime on May 25.
The biopic starring Nicole Kidman as actress-turned-princess Grace Kelly was supposed to be released in theaters November 2013, before The Weinstein Co. pushed it back to 2014 and later pulled it from the calendar.
Olivier Dahan who directed the film expressed his discontent with the company over the delay, saying that he had had a finished version of the film, but TWC wanted to release a different cut. "There are two versions of the film for now: mine and his...which I find catastrophic," he claimed.
Addressing this issue, Harvey Weinstein told Deadline during this year's Sundance, "The script we signed on for was like 'The King's Speech', with the big moment where Princess Grace steps up. That is what attracted Nicole... I know why she took it and why I was involved. I'd seen rushes that were great. The director is French, and he turned it more into a Hitchcock movie like a paean to 'Vertigo', which ironically Grace wasn't in."
He went on explaining, "The writer, Arash Amel, called me and said, what happened to my script? It's like welcome to Hollywood. Writers don't have any say, but we decided to pair him up with a team of people and see what he could do about restoring the movie to the way it looked when he wrote it. He did a wonderful job. You can ask Nicole. A beautiful job."
"The director refused and criticized me profusely. In the old days, I would have fought for it. Here, I said, the better part of valor was just to tell Nicole, you should get this done and if you can't then I'm not going to, because I'm tired of this. I don't want these fights. That movie would have been helped greatly by the writer's cut of the film and it's something that people should see someday. It wasn't a transformative movie but it was a damn entertaining one."
Dahan's cut of "Grace of Monaco" was premiered at Cannes Film Festival last May and it received negative reviews from critics.
