Lionsgate’s feature take of Judy Blume’s classic Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret has been scheduled for Sept. 16 this year.
As Deadline first reported in early March 2020, the studio won the film rights to Blume’s 1970 novel in an auction, green lighting the feature with a $30M production cost and Kelly Fremon Craig directing her scripted take and Gracie Films’ James L. Brooks producing. The two teamed up on The Edge of Seventeen.
The feature follows Margaret, a sixth grader who moves from the city to the suburbs. She prays to God to watch over her and help her through her anxieties, including puberty and its changes to her body and her emotions. The pic stars Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, and Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret, and Benny Safdie.
Are You There God? is scheduled on a weekend against Sony’s The Woman King and Universal’s Distant.
Lionsgate is also pushing its Wonder spinoff from filmmaker Marc Forster, White Bird: A Wonder Story by a month, off Sept. 16 and to Oct. 14. It will now be up against Universal/Blumhouse/Miramax’s Halloween Ends and a Warner Bros. untitled movie.
The Devil’s Light will now be released on Oct. 28 instead of Feb. 25. The movie is the only wide release to debut over Halloween weekend.
Jacqueline Byers, Colin Salmon, Christian Navarro, Lisa Palfrey, Nicholas Ralph, with Ben Cross, and Virginia Madsen star and Daniel Stamm directs from a screenplay by Robert Zappia and a story by Zappia & Earl Richey Jones and Todd R. Jones.
The Devil’s Light is set in a Catholic exorcism school where priests are train in the sacred ritual of expelling demons. Byers plays Sister Ann, who devoutly believes that performing exorcisms is her calling, despite the fact that historically only priests—not sisters—are allowed to perform them. When one professor senses her special gift, allowing her to be the first nun to study and master the ritual, her own soul will be in danger as the demonic forces she battles reveal a mysterious connection to her traumatic past.