Just call it Meryl Brockovich.
The new film from director Steven Soderbergh (his second in a row for Netflix) plays like a mix between his Oscar-winning blue collar whistleblower drama Erin Brockovich and the glitzy fun of his Ocean’s trilogy.
“Based on some real sh**,” as the trailer puts it (along with a Pulitzer Prize winning investigation by journalist Jake Bernstein), The Laundromat is the story of a widow (Meryl Streep) whose dogged detective work uncovers murder and money-laundering on a global scale. Her efforts led to the international scandal known as the Panama Papers, exposing schemes (as the official synopsis puts it) of “tax evasion, bribery and other illicit absurdities that the super wealthy (epitomized in characters played by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas) indulge in to support the world’s corrupt financial system.”
That all sounds like an intense political thriller until you realize it comes from the guy who did the Ocean movies as well as the oddball espionage flick The Informant!. That film’s writer, Scott Z. Burns, also scripted this while also mounting his directorial debut The Repor ; both movies could be big players throughout the year-end awards season.
Co-starring Jeffrey Wright, David Schwimmer, Melissa Rauch, Robert Patrick, Cristela Alonzo, Will Forte, Chris Parnell, Larry Wilmore, Rosalind Chao, James Cromwell, Sharon Stone, and many more, The Laundromat opens in “select theaters” this fall.
Like Netflix’s The Irishman, its release strategy will kick off in limited release in independent theaters (not national chains) in the weeks leading up to its Netflix debut. That launch will begin small in New York and L.A. on September 27, 2019 and then expand to a few more markets on October 4 and 11, before finally arriving on Netflix on October 18.
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