Antebellum Release Date Taken Off Calendar

As movie theaters face going into their sixth month of protracted closures across the U.S., more movies that were hoping it was safe to come back to the multiplex are now moving. The latest such delay is that of Janelle Monáe’s Antebellum. Lionsgate announced Friday it would be pushing the movie off its Aug. 21 release date indefinitely. While a new date has yet to be given, we hope it’s relatively soon given the movie’s intriguing and fairly high-concept pitch for a horror movie.

The basic setup might sound familiar: a man or woman is accidentally transported through time and has a grand adventure in the past. It’s a yarn at least as old as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and persists still on Outlander with each new season. Yet these protagonists tend to share a common trait: they can fit into the past. But what if they couldn’t? Or worse still, what if they could, but only in a specific, horrifying role? Antebellum seems to be going there as past and future merge—and that past is the slave-based economy of the American South.

In what appears to be an electrifying idea for a horror movie, Antebellum is the feature debut for writer-directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz. The film is notably produced by Raymond Mansfield and Sean McKittrick, who between them have worked as producers on Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us, and Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman.

Antebellum Release Date

Antebellum currently has no release date. The movie was recently scheduled to premiere on Aug. 21, but was delayed due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic continuing to throw movie theater exhibition into disarray. Indeed, with Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which was once scheduled for July 17 and then 31, now moving to Sept. 3 for its U.S. debut, Lionsgate is aiming to have Antebellum open some time after that.

This marks the second time Antebellum has been delayed, with the movie originally being scheduled to debut on April 24 in the sunnier, before times.

Antebellum Trailer

Watch the trailers for Antebellum, beginning with the newest one, just below.

Antebellum Cast

Antebellum features an impressive cast that includes Janelle Monáe, Kiersey Clemons, Jena Malone, Jack Huston, and Gabourey Sidibe, Antebellum is a potent time travel fantasy that takes a fresh look at an era often romanticized by a significant portion of Americans.

Antebellum Story

The official setup is that Janelle Monáe’s Veronica is a successful author in 2020 America who finds herself trapped in a horrifying reality that is anything but a romantic flight of fancy. Apparently hopping between then and now, kind of like Midnight in Paris, she must uncover the mind-bending reason she is repeatedly sent to the past or forever become trapped in mid 19th century America where the Civil War is waging. And even if she survives that, Jim Crow is just around the corner.