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In his follow-up to the Oscar-nominated The Contender, and almost exactly a year after its release, Rod Lurie returns with The Last Castle. A strong cast anchors this movie, which tells the story of a wrongly court-martialed three-star general who leads his prison-mates in a revolt against the corrupt prison warden. The aforementioned strong cast includes Robert Redford, who returns to the big screen after a three-year absence, James Gandolfini, Robin Wright-Penn, and Delroy Lindo.

The immediate thing to look at is that this DreamWorks release shares many traits with The Contender, and the studio will most likely target this movie for early Oscar buzz. The reason we can hypothesize this is because of the recent general critical success of prison-based movies, along with the precedent set by The Contender last year, which showed that a release as early as this will not be forgotten at Oscar time.

Unfortunately for The Last Castle, The Contender had quite a weak box-office performance and was not very well received by fans, as the box office multiplier shows. Still, the tone of this film is different, and without early previews out yet, the sense is that the movie will have an action element to it. A more appropriate movie to compare it to would be Men of Honor, which had the serious dramatic/action element, the sense of injustice with regards to story, as well as a mild action element to it. Men of Honor did well at the box office and was very well received by fans. Knowing DreamWorks and how aggressive it is with advertising its films, The Last Castle should do decent-to-strong box-office business. (Walid Habboub/BOP)


September 23, 2001
DreamWorks has pushed the release of the film back one week to allow a week of additional marketing since ads had to be reworked. (Kim Hollis/BOP)

Vital statistics for The Last Castle Main Cast Robert Redford, James Gandolfini Supporting Cast Mark Ruffalo, Robin Wright Penn Director Rod Lurie Screenwriter Graham Yost, David Scarpa Distributor DreamWorks Trailer Click Here for Trailer Official Site http://www.thelastcastle.com/ Rating R Running Time 131 minutes Screen Count 2,262 Talent in red has entry in The Big Picture

Comparison films for The Last Castle
Title	Date	Opening	Adjusted Opening	Screens	PSA	Adj PSA	Total BO	Adjusted Total	Mult
Green Mile, The	12/10/99	18.02	21.47	2875	6268.00	7156.4	136.80	163.02	7.59
Men of Honor	11/10/00	13.34	14.92	2092	6377.00	6862.1	48.75	54.53	3.65
Hurricane, The	1/14/00	9.01	10.07	1465	6150.00	6617.8	50.67	56.68	4.43
Contender, The	10/13/00	5.36	5.99	1516	3536.00	3805.0	17.80	19.91	3.32
Shawshank Redemption	10/14/94	2.40	3.54	944	2542.00	3613.6	28.24	41.73	9.79