'Seventh Son' Moves to Universal; 'Foxcatcher' gets Award Season Date; 'Ninja Turtles' Bumped Two Months

Lots of release date house cleaning going on all of a sudden, and while I don't normally concern myself with stuff like this, these are all pretty significant moves. The biggest involves Seventh Son, the upcoming fantasy adaptation from director Sergei Bodrov and starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore. Now that Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures have officially split, with the latter signing a distribution deal with Universal all that's left was to decide who got which projects.

Just days after Legendary opted out of working on the Man of Steel sequel in favor of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, they've now been given the rights to Seventh Son. That means it will no longer maintain the January 17th release date set by Warner Bros., and will be given a new one by Universal, although it's unclear when that will be. Legendary isn't completely leaving Warner Bros. behind, as they're still involved with Godzilla and 300: Rise of an Empire. They're also moving a few other major projects over to Universal, including Warcraft, a Hot Wheels picture, Mass Effect, and Michael Mann's Cyber thriller.

Next up is Foxcatcher, a film that sounded like a potential Oscar contender from the very beginning thanks to Moneyball director Bennett Miller, and a cast that includes Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Steve Carell, and Sienna Miller. Sony Pictures Classics certainly has awards season hopes for it, which is why they've slotted it for release on December 20th, when it will likely get the prestige treatment customary for the studio's Oscar hopefuls. The film tells the weird but true story of John du Pont (Carell), a multimillionaire schizophrenic who built an Olympic-class training facility called Team Foxcatcher on his massive estate. In 1996 he suddenly murdered his longtime friend, gold medal-winning wrestler David Schulz (Ruffalo), accusing him of being part of a major international conspiracy.

And finally, the Michael Bay-produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is getting bumped yet again, but at least this time it's only two months rather than six months. It will now hit theaters on August 8th 2014, apparently because Paramount and Bay want to get some distance between it and Transformers 4, which opens on June 27th. What it sounds like is they want more time to develop some hot new TMNT action figures, while selling more hot new Transformers toys. Whatever, it may be a minor nuisance but it's completely understandable looking at it from the studio perspective. With so many blockbusters cannibalizing one another it's a wise course of action getting some distance between two high-profile films as these. [Deadline]