Fox Delays Release Of ‘Alita: Battle Angel’

Fox has pushed back the release date of Robert Rodriguez’s hybrid film Alita: Battle Angel from July 20 to December 21, 2018.

The manga adaptation, produced by James Cameron and Jon Landau, and co-written by Cameron, Rodriguez, and Laeta Kalogridis, is notable for its photoreal-animation approach on the main character, an amnesiac female cyborg named Alita.

The actress Rosa Salazar is credited in the role, but from the trailer released in December, it sure looks like the character is fully-animated in a lot of scenes. Alita will surely add new fuel to the ongoing debate over what constitutes an animated performance and what constitutes a live-action performance.

Alita, estimated to cost between $180-200 million, had until now been positioned as a summer blockbuster. The film is being moved into an extremely crowded holiday weekend that also includes the launches of Warner Bros.’ Aquaman and Paramount’s Bumblebee. Not to mention that the weekend prior will have the premieres of Sony’s animated Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse and Universal’s Peter Jackson-produced Mortal Engines.

Weta Digital is leading the visual effects and animation on Alita. MPC is also working on the film.