Zendaya Movie ‘Challengers’ Cancels Venice Film Festival World Premiere Due To Strike; Fest Chooses New Opener

Zendaya tennis drama Challengers has become a high-profile casualty of the SAG-AFTRA strike with confirmation that its Venice Film Festival world premiere has been cancelled.

The film has also moved off its September 15 U.S. release date and will now launch next spring instead.

The movie was due to open Venice but the prospect of debuting without support from its high-profile actors — Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist also star — was understandably deemed less than ideal by the filmmakers, talent and studios MGM and Warner Bros which handle U.S and international, respectively.

Challengers, directed by Luca Guadagnino, was due to screen Out of Competition on Wednesday, August 30, in the Sala Grande, and would have marked a high-profile opening for Venice’s 80th edition.

The festival has chosen Italian WWII movie Comandante by Edoardo de Angelis, starring Pierfrancesco Favino, as a replacement opening film.

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Venice is usually a glamorous springboard for U.S. awards hopefuls and big streamer and studio fare but its plans for American buzz titles have been thrown into disarray by the strike, which forbids SAG members from promoting their projects.

Venice announces its lineup next week and the expectation is that it will have a smaller U.S. presence than usual. Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla is one movie that has long been earmarked for the festival and this week it announced its North American premiere at New York so the expectation is that Venice will have the Euro debut. But things are fluid. Studios are understandably jittery about launching projects without celebrity support and the expectation is that more changes to the release calendar will come.

With little sign of a breakthrough in negotiations between SAG and the studios, the fall festivals are likely to be heavily impacted, though TIFF boss Cameron Bailey yesterday told us he was confident of attracting a strong contingent of U.S. awards hopefuls.

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Challengers stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a tennis prodigy-turned-coach and a force of nature, who makes no apologies for her game on and off the court. Married to a champion (Mike Faist from West Side Story) on a losing streak, Tashi’s strategy for her husband’s redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against the washed-up Patrick (Josh O’Connor) – his former best friend and Tashi’s former boyfriend. As their pasts and presents collide, and tensions run high, Tashi must ask herself, what will it cost to win?

Venice chief Alberto Barbera said today about his new opener: “In the frame of period films, on which Italian cinema has invested considerable production resources, Edoardo De Angelis’ movie reverberates with unambiguously contemporary echoes. The true story of  Commander Salvatore Todaro, who saved the lives of enemy sailors who had survived the sinking of their merchant ship – endangering the safety of his own submarine and his men – is a powerful call for the need to place the values of ethics and human solidarity before the brutal logic of military protocol. I thank the author, the producers Nicola Giuliano and Pier Paolo Verga, and Paolo Del Brocco with Rai Cinema for having accepted our invitation to inaugurate the 80^th Film Festival of the Biennale di Venezia.”

The plot from the festival reads as follows: “At the start of WWII, Salvatore Todaro commands the Italian Royal Navy submarine Cappellini. One dark night in October 1940, while navigating in the Atlantic, he comes upon an armed merchant ship sailing with lights out. He shoots his cannons at the ship and sinks it. At that moment, the Commander makes a decision that was destined to go down in history: he saves the 26 shipwrecked Belgians who otherwise would have drowned in the middle of the ocean and disembarks them at the nearest safe harbor, as prescribed by the law of the sea. To make room for them on board his submarine, he is forced to navigate on the surface of the water for three days, visible to the enemy forces and endangering his life and that of his men.”