A new plot description for Wes Anderson’s next big awards contender has been revealed, and based on the details revealed, it seems like once again Anderson is doing the exact opposite of torture horror. Asteroid City, which will be released by Focus Features, will instead be a “poetic meditation on the meaning of life.”
Anderson wrote the script with frequent collaborator Roman Coppola, which Variety reports will take place in a fictional American desert town circa 1955, as the town’s Junior Stargazer convention serves as a backdrop “for scholarly competition, rest and recreation, comedy, drama, romance, and more.”
For fans of Anderson’s Rushmore (one of the greatest films ever made about academic overachievers) this may come as very exciting news. While Coppola wasn’t involved with that film, he and Anderson did collaborate on the scripts for Moonrise Kingdom, Isle of Dogs, and The French Dispatch, making him relatively synonymous with the Anderson brand.
The stacked cast includes not just Tom Hanks and Margot Robbie, but other familiar faces, including Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Ed Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, Grace Edwards, Aristou Meehan, Sophia Lillis, Ethan Lee, Jeff Goldblum, and Rita Wilson.
Asteroid City has no official release date yet, but expect it to be a major player this awards season — or at the very least, expect to be charmed by it when it arrives in theaters this fall. We’ll see then where it lands on our ranking of Wes Anderson’s films to date.
