Last year Kevin Spacey was one of the highest-profile celebrities to be hit hard by allegations of sexual assault. Not only was he dropped from Netflix’s House of Cards, but he was removed from Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World and replaced by Christopher Plummer. For all intents and purposes we had seen the last of Spacey in anything new for a while. Or so we thought.
A couple of years ago Spacey shot the crime film Billionaire Boys Club, which also stars Taron Egerton, Ansel Elgort, Billie Lourd, Suki Waterhouse, and more with Wonderland director James Cox behind the camera. Not a bad cast, but Spacey’s involvement basically forced distributor Vertical Entertainment to keep it on the shelf. Well, they’re done with that now, and the film will be opening later this summer. The story follows a group of rich Los Angeles private school boys who set up a Ponzi scheme in the 1980s, only to end up murdering their benefactor.
Here’s Vertical Entertainment’s statement on the release: “We hope these distressing allegations pertaining to one person’s behavior — that were not publicly known when the film was made almost 2.5 years ago — do not tarnish the release.”
“We don’t condone sexual harassment on any level and we fully support victims of it. At the same time, this is neither an easy nor insensitive decision to release this film in theaters, but we believe in giving the cast, as well as hundreds of crew members who worked hard on the film, the chance to see their final product reach audiences,” the statement continued. “In the end, we hope audiences make up their own minds as to the reprehensible allegations of one person’s past, but not at the expense of the entire cast and crew present on this film.”
I actually don’t think Vertical has anything to apologize for or explain. I don’t hold them responsible for Spacey’s actions anymore than I would if someone else in the cast did something awful. They should be free to release the movie without scrutiny so that people who want to see it can do so. I for one really do want to check this out and will be doing so when it hits VOD and select cities on August 17th. Looks like some Wolf of Wall Street/Boiler Room shit and that’s my jam.
You can check out a trailer for last week’s international release below.
