Back at Vanyaland‘s very first outing at TIFF in 2017, we were able to catch Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s The Current War, which we assumed would be mediocre awards-bait eventually lost in the Three Billboards and Shape of Water shuffle that year. Well, it was mediocre awards-bait, after all, but Gomez-Rejon’s film missed that year’s Oscar season, thanks to the downfall of producer Harvey Weinstein. Alongside such films as Mary Magdalene and Polaroid, The Current War seemed to poised to become film vaporware, never to be seen by American audiences after the collapse of the predator mogul’s company. However, someone, somewhere, believed there was still a dollar to be made from the husk of this film, so The Current War is finally going to hit theaters later on this year, and the first trailer for it dropped earlier on Tuesday.
Try not to fall asleep while you watch this:
Here’s the synopsis, mainly presented here for the PR hand-waving of the catastrophe surrounding this film:
Three brilliant visionaries set off in a charged battle for the future in ‘The Current War,’ the epic story of the cutthroat competition that literally lit up the modern world. Benedict Cumberbatch is Thomas Edison, the celebrity inventor on the verge of bringing electricity to Manhattan with his radical new DC technology. On the eve of triumph, his plans are upended by charismatic businessman George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon), who believes he and his partner, the upstart genius Nikolai Tesla (Nicholas Hoult), have a superior idea for how to rapidly electrify America: with AC current. As Edison and Westinghouse grapple for who will power the nation, they spark one of the first and greatest corporate feuds in American history, establishing for future Titans of Industry the need to break all the rules.
The Current War hits select theaters on October 4, before coming to theaters everywhere on October 11.