After a fight, she is expelled, though a supervisor (Noah Taylor) promises to try to get her back into the program. She is recruited by SpaceCorp along with other ladies as a potential companion to a male astronaut. Named Jane, the foundling grows up intelligent and able to defend herself in a fistfight. This man recalls growing up a girl, having been dropped off at Cleveland orphanage as a baby. There, the bartender (Hawke) bets an unopened bottle of booze to a patron (Sarah Snook) who promises his story is the most incredible one the barkeep has ever heard. Its tracking halted after three weeks at $68,732, Predestination stands to be discovered in this week's Blu-ray and DVD release from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.ĭesigned to disarm and keep you guessing, the film eventually settles on a setting of a New York City bar in the 1970s. A week later, that number dropped to seven theaters, from which it averaged only $500 in grosses. Don't feel bad for failing to notice the film: it opened in a mere 20 North American theaters. It moved to Russia in December and then in early January, it opened in South Korea, China, and the United States.
An Australian production convincingly passing itself off as American sci-fi, the film did a little business in its native country and neighbor New Zealand last September. Those looks are deceiving, though, because Predestination is a relatively small deal commercially. Predestination, Hawke's latest film as actor, looks like another mainstream undertaking with its genre leanings and an ad campaign reminiscent of Looper, a time travel thriller it evokes in some other ways. While Hawke's other filmmaking endeavors ( Chelsea Walls, The Hottest Scene) has been similarly produced outside of the big studios and with muted commercial prospects, he has retained star power on the opposite side of the camera with performances in big wide release films, from Training Day to Daybreakers to The Purge. He's also an integral part of Boyhood, Linklater's twelve-year coming-of-age project destined for Oscar glory later this month, which gave Hawke his second Oscar nomination in the Supporting Actor category. Hawke's contributions to the scripts for Before's two sequels earned him a pair of Adapted Screenplay Oscar nominations. The 1995 release of Before Sunrise marked the beginning of collaboration with director Richard Linklater,Ī partnership that has cemented Hawke's status as an indie icon while also giving his credibility on the other side of the camera. Hawke made his film debut thirty years ago in 1985's Explorers and remained in the mainstream for some time in movies like Dead Poets Society, White Fang, and Alive.
Perhaps no other modern actor has transitioned between independent films and mainstream ones as deftly and frequently as Ethan Hawke.