Update (4/12): Great news, everybody: Turns out the film is actually still called The Many Saints of Newark, despite earlier reports.
On Thursday, HBO revealed when we’ll finally see David Chase’s extremely stacked Sopranos prequel film—but it’s, uh, going to be a little while. The movie, which was originally titled The Many Saints of Newark but is now apparently just called Newark for some reason, is set to drop in September 2020, Deadline reports.
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Details on the prequel are still pretty scant, but we know it’ll be set in late 1960s New Jersey during the Newark race riots, and will star Jon Bernthal, Vera Farmiga, Corey Stoll, and Billy Magnussen, alongside James Gandolfini’s son, Michael, who recently signed on to play a young Tony Soprano.
“I was interested in Newark and life in Newark at that time,” Chase told Deadline in an interview about the film last January. “But the thing that interested me most was Tony’s boyhood. I was interested in exploring that.”
Casting news and vague plot details aside, the only other information we have about the movie so far is that it’s based a script co-written by Chase, it’s helmed by former Sopranos director Alan Taylor, and, apparently, we’re going to have to wait a goddamn year and a half to actually see it.
Sure, fall of 2020 seems like a long way off, but it makes sense, seeing as how the project is still rounding out its cast list and hasn’t even gone into production. What doesn’t exactly make sense, though, is the wonky-ass new name.
The Many Saints of Newark may have been a mouthful of a title, but it had a certain ring to it, and it was a nod to the film’s reported central character, Dickie Moltisanti, Christopher’s dad. Shortening the thing to Newark lumps it in with a thousand other forgettable, saccharine indie movies named after towns and cities and whatever. Ultimately, though, who cares what it’s called? It’s a Sopranos movie. We’ll take it.
Garden Sta—or, sorry, Newark—is set to hit theaters on September 25, 2020.
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