George Miller says that three thousand years of longing has a guaranteed wide cinema premiere

When the distribution deal for “Three Thousand Years of Longing” was knocked out before Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, it looks like this movie is in a similar boat to “The New Mutants”, the Fox superhero movie that got a long delayed theatrical release in 2020 even after Disney’s acquisition of the studio. Disney was facing a lawsuit to change the agreed terms when it moved another superhero movie, “Black Widow,” to day-and-date, so Amazon would probably like to avoid something like that happening with Miller’s movies.

“Three Thousand Years of Longing” is edited by Miller and co-author Augusta Gore from the short story “Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by AS Byatt. Swinton plays Alithea, a narratologist who describes himself as “a lonely creature by nature.” She is a world traveler and chooses a memory in Istanbul’s grand bazaar, which happens to be a bottle that holds Elba’s spirit – or Djinn, as he is more correctly known.

Djinn offers Alithea the typical three wishes, talks about hidden wishes and asks the typical spiritual question: “What is your heart’s wish?” But as someone who deals with human storytelling (as a narratologist and all), Alithea acknowledges: “There is no story of desires that is not a warning narrative.”

As the conversation about storytelling goes beyond this film and its source material, the topic naturally came up in Miller’s interview with Variety, where he expressed optimism about the cinema’s future and said:

“I think congregations of people telling each other stories have evolved since the early man. The cinema just needs to adapt to that.”

“Three Thousand Years of Longing” is in theaters on August 31, 2022.