Postponing a Date with Death

Only recently did I finally get around to watching (via Amazon Prime) last year’s much-ballyhooed film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. You know, the one starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Willem Dafoe, Penélope Cruz, and Kenneth Branagh in the most ridiculous mustache one could ever imagine on Christie’s Belgian series sleuth, Hercule Poirot. While I found the cinematography exquisite, I thought this movie paled beside the 1974 version starring Albert Finney, Lauren Bacall, and Richard Widmark.

Nonetheless, the 2017 picture turned out to be a big box-office grosser, which makes sense of this item from In Reference to Murder:

20th Century Fox has moved Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile, based on the [1937] Agatha Christie novel featuring detective Hercule Poirot, from its planned Nov. 8, 2019, release to Dec. 20, 2019, which means it will go head-to-head against a pair of likely blockbusters: Disney/Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: Episode IX and Universal’s musical Wicked. Christie's classic story sees Poirot on vacation on the Nile pulled into the investigation of the murder of a young heiress.

Having sampled Branagh’s Poirot once, I’ll probably give Nile a pass.

POSTSCRIPT: The premiere of 20th Century Fox’s Death on the Nile has been further delayed, according to In Reference to Murder. It’s now slated for release on October 2, 2020.