“Magazine Dreams,” a bodybuilding drama that was considered an Oscar contender last year before it was shelved when its star, Jonathan Majors, was accused of assaulting his girlfriend, is now scheduled to reach theaters in March.
Briarcliff Entertainment picked up the film in October, 10 months after Mr. Majors was convicted on two of the four charges against him. This week it gave the movie a March 21 release date.
In an email, Briarcliff’s owner, Tom Ortenberg, called “Magazine Dreams” a “brilliant, visceral film” with an “extraordinary lead performance.”
“‘Magazine Dreams’ deserves a chance to be seen by audiences and we are thrilled to have the opportunity to make the film available to moviegoers across the country,” he said.
“Magazine Dreams,” written and directed by Elijah Bynum, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in early 2023 and earned positive reviews for its harrowing portrait of a self-destructive bodybuilder attempting to get his life together. Critics praised Mr. Majors’s performance, tagging him as an early contender for a best actor nomination at the Oscars.
Searchlight Pictures, a prestigious imprint owned by Disney, acquired the movie after Sundance but pulled the film from its release calendar shortly before Mr. Majors’s trial began and later relinquished the rights.
After his conviction, Marvel Studios, also owned by Disney, said Mr. Majors would no longer appear in a series of “Avengers” films in which he had been set to play a villain, a dramatic fall for the actor who had starred in “Creed III” and “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” (This summer he was cast as the lead in the supernatural indie thriller “Merciless.”)
Mr. Majors was arrested in New York in March 2023 after an altercation with his girlfriend at the time, Grace Jabbari, who said that he physically assaulted her during an argument in the back of an S.U.V. Mr. Majors denied the allegations both in court and in an interview with “Good Morning America.”
Mr. Majors was sentenced to probation and a year of domestic violence counseling. Mr. Majors and Ms. Jabbari settled a separate civil suit last month in which she had accused him of assault and defamation.
Before picking up “Magazine Dreams,” Briarcliff was associated with another polarizing film this year, having released “The Apprentice,” about the rise of a young Donald J. Trump under the tutelage of Roy Cohn, after several other distributors balked.
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