The Wagner/Cuban Companys Magnolia Pictures announced today that theyve acquired US rights to I Give It a Year, a raucous British comedy written and directed by Dan Mazer, frequent Sasha Baron Cohen collaborator and writer of Borat and Brüno, and produced by Working Title Films (Love Actually, Bridget Jones’s Diary). The film was fully financed and released in the UK, France and Germany by StudioCanal.
I Give It a Year stars Rose Byrne, Anna Farris, Simon Baker, Rafe Spall, Minnie Driver and Stephen Merchant. The film opened in the UK in February, and made its North American premiere earlier this month at the SXSW Film Festival.
Both a romantic comedy and a send-up of the genre, I Give It a Year picks up where other rom-coms end, after the glamour of a fairy tale romance and wedding has worn off, and the realities of marriage start to sink in. I Give It a Year plays nagging fights, judgmental families, and extramarital hijinks to great comic effect.
Magnolia plans for a theatrical and VOD release in their Ultra VOD program later this year.
“Dan Mazer is a terrific writer who has managed to both skewer and celebrate the romantic comedy genre and also deliver a gut-bustingly funny picture, said Magnolia President Eamonn Bowles.
“Solid bidding followed a great response at SXSW and at the end we went for the strongest theatrical commitment and for the largest piece of the pie. We have full confidence in Magnolia’s first class team and their aggressive distribution model which lends itself perfectly to our film, a model they pioneered and have been so successful with” said Harold Van Lier, StudioCanal EVP International Distribution.
