Sci-fi drama 'Arrival' set to return to theaters, thanks to 8 Oscar nominations

By Rick Marshall January 25, 2017

Arrival — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Director Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival was already one of 2016’s most critically acclaimed films, but the eight Academy Award nominations it received this week have spurred an official rerelease of the movie in theaters.

Paramount Pictures announced plans to screen Arrival in theaters again, beginning Friday, January 27. The new screenings will feature some additional footage and behind-the-scenes features only available at the screenings (which will likely be available as bonus features on some of the home-entertainment releases for the film later this year). It’s unknown how long the rerelease will last, but the duration of its second run in theaters will likely be determined by box-office numbers.

Directed by Villeneuve, Arrival casts Amy Adams as a linguist tasked with establishing communication with mysterious aliens who have arrived on Earth. With the aliens touching down at locations all around the world, Adams’ character is in a race against time to find out why they are here and avert the sort of global catastrophe that can result from a misunderstanding with extraterrestrial visitors.

The film is based on Ted Chiang’s novel Story of Your Life, and was adapted for the screen by Eric Heisserer.

Along with Adams in the lead role, the film features Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Mark O’Brien in supporting roles. The film earned $95.6 million in U.S. theaters during its initial run and $163.1 million worldwide.

Arrival was nominated in the coveted Best Picture category for this year’s Academy Awards, and also received nominations for Villeneuve in the Best Director category, Heisserer in the Best Adapted Screenplay category, and additional nominations for cinematography, film editing, production design, sound mixing, and sound editing.

Widely perceived as a long-shot to win any of the major awards at this year’s Oscars ceremony, Arrival still tied with the critically praised drama Moonlight for the second-highest number of nominations this year — a year that also saw Damien Chazelle’s modern musical La La Land tie for the most nominations in Academy Awards history — 14.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…

Entertainment

Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once directors on creating 2022’s most moving sci-fi film

The Daniels discuss a scene on the set of Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a lot of things: A sci-fi adventure, a martial arts action movie, an absurdist comedy, and now, an Oscar-winning Best Picture at the 2023 Oscars. But above all else, it’s a film about one family and its matriarch, Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), who embarks on a trip through the multiverse that tests her relationships with her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and her father (James Hong). It’s a personal and intimate journey, and seeing how directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (together, they are known as the “Daniels”) use a massive sci-fi adventure to tell it is one of the many great joys the film has to offer.

It’s an achievement that begins with the film’s opening shot, which shows Evelyn, Waymond, and Joy dancing and singing together. It’s a beautiful moment, but it’s also shown through the reflection of a living room mirror, and therein lies the brilliance of the shot itself. In a film about the multiverse, the opening image of Everything Everywhere All at Once shows viewers just the first of many reflections of Evelyn, Waymond, and Joy that they’ll meet over the course of its story.

Entertainment

5 Oscar-winning sci-fi movies you should watch

Interview: Director Alex Garland on Ex Machina

Everyone knows the Academy Awards have a bias against certain genres. Biopics, dramas, and epics are like catnip to voters, and the more tears a voter sheds, the more likely it is that they will vote for it. As a result, genres like horror and sci-fi rarely get recognized by the organization outside of technical categories like Visual Effects or Sound.

With Everything Everywhere All at Once poised to be the first science fiction film to win Best Picture at the 2023 Oscars, it's time to look back at the few sci-fi films besides 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars that managed to break through and win the coveted Academy Award in one or multiple categories. From a far-out adventure into the human body to a modern parable about the dangers of artificial intelligence, these films won Oscars for a reason and should be watched by an appreciative audience.

Entertainment

James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar returns to theaters, but has its magic faded?

Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana fall in love on Pandora.

There were plenty of reasons to wonder, in the autumn of 2009, if James Cameron had finally flown too close to the sun, burning a big budget on a boondoggle. Nearly a dozen years after emerging from a troubled production with the biggest movie of all time, the disaster-weepie phenomenon Titanic, the blockbuster maestro had once more secured enormous investment in pursuit of a bank-busting special-effects spectacle to rule them all. Except this time, the movie in question looked, from a distance, like the height of overreaching silliness: A sci-fi fantasy about a species of lithe, ocean-blue, vaguely feline aliens, prancing through a tropical paradise. The first trailer prompted chortles. Cameron, however, would have the last laugh.

Avatar, like Titanic before it, did more than silence the skeptics. It vindicated all the grand, hubristic ambition of its creator, at least from a commercial standpoint. Somehow, Cameron had done it again, and unbelievably surpassed the box-office success of his last conquest of the record books. Avatar, a hodgepodge of science fiction tropes in a cutting-edge package, was the big-screen event that everyone had to attend. Globally speaking, it quickly became the biggest movie of all time — a title it lost a decade later to Avengers: Endgame, then won again thanks to a rerelease in Chinaduring the pandemic. Even adjusted for inflation, the movie sits toward the top of the all-time charts.