The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, the latest Wes Anderson film, has officially landed a new release date on Netflix.
The short film, an adaptation of the Roald Dahl story of the same name, will be released on September 27th, before then it will premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 1st.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is Anderson’s second Dahl adaptation after the feature-length stop-motion animation film Fantastic Mr. Fox back in 2009. It was originally supposed to premiere in October, but now the date has been moved up.
“So I had this waiting for me. But I really couldn’t figure out the approach,” Anderson told IndieWire earlier this year. “I knew what I liked in the story was the writing of it, Dahl’s words. I couldn’t find the answer, and then suddenly I did. It’s not a feature film. It’s like 37 minutes or something. But by the time I was ready to do it, the Dahl family no longer had the rights at all. They had sold the whole deal to Netflix.”
“Suddenly, in essence, there was nowhere else you could do it since they own it,” he added. “But beyond it, because it’s a 37-minute movie, it was the perfect place to do it because it’s not really a movie. You know they used to do these BBC things called Play for Today directed by people like Steven Frears and John Schlesinger and Alan Clarke. They were one-hour programs or even less. I kind of envisioned something like that.”
Benedict Cumberbatch stars as the title character and Ralph Fiennes features as Roald Dahl. The film also stars Dev Patel, Sir Ben Kingsley, and Richard Ayoade in supporting roles.
Check out the first look of the film down below.