Feb 18, 2015

Tradecraft: Pierce Brosnan's The Coup Re-titled No Escape and Delayed Six Months

The Hollywood Reporter (via Dark Horizons) reports that the Pierce Brosnan action movie The Coup (in which the actor again plays a secret agent, apparently named Hammond) has been re-titled and delayed until September 2. The new date is good news, since there's been no advertising whatsoever yet, and it would have been pretty hard to build word of mouth between now and the original March 6 release date! The title change... maybe not so much. The new title is No Escape, which not only isn't a very good title, but also one likely already familiar to Brosnan fans, as it was the name of the Ray Liotta film that Martin Campbell directed immediately prior to GoldenEye. (I remember seeing that in the theater with some high school friends back in '94 specifically so we could get a bead on this new Bond director. We weren't too impressed, but luckily history proved Campbell to be considerably better than that flick demonstrated!) Apparently dwindling educational standards are to blame for the title change. According to the trade, the old title tested poorly because Americans didn't know what a coup was. (Not part of the Common Core?) The new No Escape (the former Coup) stars Owen Wilson (I Spy) as a father trying to get his family to safety when the Southeast Asian country they're living in erupts in a violent... coup. From which there is presumably no escape. Lake Bell plays his wife. We first learned that Brosnan would star in this movie way back in May of 2012; cameras eventually rolled in late 2013, and now it seems to finally have a release date. Oddly (and unhelpfully), the THR story doesn't mention the distributor, but according to the IMDb it will be put out in North America by The Weinstein Company.

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