A mythic allure is building around Ari Aster’s “Disappointment Blvd.”
Aster recently screened “Disappointment Blvd” for close friends in New York. A few of them went on social media to start spreading the buzz around this movie. It’s an age-old tactic that’s been done by many prominent filmmakers over the years. It’s meant to further tie the hands of a studio, putting some much-needed pressure on them to release a film.
As it stands, there are no plans to release “Disappointment Blvd,” A24 are probably trying to figure out how to distribute this mammoth 210 minute film (especially if it even remains that long). If you’ve seen Aster’s near 3-hour “Midsommar” director’s cut then you know just how much of an improvement it was vis a vis the theatrical version, which was around 40 minutes shorter.
It would be wise for A24 to just let Aster release this unedited version. It’s not like he didn’t warn us, or them either, about what he had in mind. In a two-year-old interview, he described his next movie as a “4-hour nightmare comedy.” After all, the film is said to be “an intimate, decades-spanning portrait of one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time”.
In April, Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson stated on Katey Rich’s podcast that “Disappointment Blvd” clocked in at 4 hours.