When “Journal Desires” premiered on the 2023 Sundance Movie Pageant, it appeared positioned to grow to be one of many 12 months’s breakout hits. Jonathan Majors was gearing up for a career-best 12 months, with roles in “Creed 3” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” to come back, whereas Elijah Bynum’s bodybuilding drama gave the actor the type of showcase that many believed might result in Oscar glory. A Sundance bidding battle broke out, with Searchlight buying the theatrical rights and planning a late 2023 launch.
However these plans collapsed when Majors was arrested on expenses of assault and harassment in March 2023 and located responsible in December 2023. Searchlight pulled the movie from its launch calendar and Majors was dropped from lots of his future initiatives, together with his function as Kang within the Marvel Cinematic Universe that was anticipated to proceed via the following two “Avengers” motion pictures.
“Journal Desires” was as soon as once more shopped to consumers and bought by Briarcliff Leisure, a distributor identified for its willingness to tackle controversial movies like Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice.” When it hits theaters in March, cinephiles will lastly get an opportunity to see a movie that would have grow to be a career-defining efficiency for Majors.
Written and directed by Bynum, “Journal Desires” follows an novice bodybuilder who struggles to remain sane whereas balancing the desires of showing in muscle magazines that gasoline his athletic ambitions and his day job working in a grocery retailer. The movie additionally stars Haley Bennett, Taylour Paige, and Mike O’Hearn.
In her preliminary assessment of the movie following its Sundance premiere, IndieWire’s Kate Erbland famous the parallels between “Journal Desires” and “Taxi Driver,” with Majors’ Killian Maddox drawing comparisons to Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle for the extent of isolation and obsession that each characters reveal. “But it surely’s arduous to think about Travis Bickle ever embracing even 1 / 4 of the management, drive, and willpower that we see from Majors’ Killian Maddox within the movie’s first act,” she wrote. “Management is on the middle of Killian’s main obsession: to grow to be a bodybuilding star, the type that graces the covers of, sure, magazines.”
Briarcliff Leisure will launch “Journal Desires” in theaters on Friday, March 21. Watch the movie’s first trailer beneath.