Latest in Escape Room

When Deadline runs its Most Valuable Blockbuster film profitability countdown each year, readers often ask about certain films that make big bucks but don’t make the list because they don’t hit the minimum on domestic grosses. Here are five pics that deserve honorable mentions for 2019. (The takeaway for all the…

Sony’s Escape Room 2 is jumping its release date from Aug. 14 to Wednesday Dec. 30 this year. Adam Robitel, who directed the first $9M production, returns to helm here. The first movie last year grossed $57M stateside, and $155.7M WW with 22% of that latter number coming from China. Originally, Escape Room 2 was dated…

UPDATED, 10:33 AM: Sony’s Peter Rabbit 2 is jumping away from its Feb. 7 release date to April 3, which is nine days before Easter. MGM’s 007 film No Time to Die will own the Easter frame. On the upside, with spring breaks the advance runway before Bond is an advantage for Peter Rabbit 2, as it plays to a younger…

EXCLUSIVE: Sony Pictures has picked up an untitled original Adam Robitel project to be produced by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert through their Ghost House Pictures. The project, to be directed by Robitel and written by Gavin Heffernan, is only known as a supernatural thriller, with the storyline under wraps. Romel Adam…

UPDATED with release date info: In the wake of Columbia Pictures amassing close to $119 million at the worldwide box office off the $9M horror feature Escape Room, the studio is moving forward on the development of a sequel, Deadline has learned. The studio on Monday set an April 17, 2020 release date for the sequel…

5th Update, Sunday AM Writethru after Saturday and Friday updates: Even though it’s a quiet weekend at the box office after the mad holiday rush between Christmas and New Year’s Day, studios savor the first frame of the year given its great holdover business. Kids are still off from school (K-12 was 61% off on Friday…

Sony made a pair of tweaks to its winter release schedule today, moving Escape Room up from February 1 to January 4 and Miss Bala from January 25 to that newly vacated February 1 date. Escape Room (fka The Maze) is a psychological thriller about six strangers who find themselves in circumstances beyond their control…

Sony has made some intriguing RSVPs on the fall calendar tonight: Jason Reitman’s Gary Hart biopic The Front Runner will open limited on Nov. 7, expand on Nov. 16 and break wide on Nov. 21, the Thanksgiving stretch. It would come as no surprise if The Front Runner premieres during fall’s festival trifecta of Venice…