George Clooney is doing the streaming thing again. One year after releasing The Midnight Sky, which Clooney produced, directed, and starred in, via Netflix, the Oscar-winning triple-threat is teaming up with Amazon Studios for his latest directorial effort, The Tender Bar, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The film, which is an adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning author J.R. Moehringer’s memoir of the same name, will reunite Clooney and his producing partner Grant Heslov with Ben Affleck; in 2013, the trio won the Oscar for Best Picture for their work together on Argo (which Affleck, and his bushy beard, directed and starred in).
In the case of The Tender Bar, it will be Clooney behind the camera directing Affleck and Tye Sheridan as an uncle and his fatherless nephew. According to Amazon’s official synopsis:
The Tender Bar tells the story of J.R. (Sheridan), a fatherless boy growing up in the glow of a bar where the bartender, his Uncle Charlie (Affleck), is the sharpest and most colorful of an assortment of quirky and demonstrative father figures. As the boy’s determined mother (Lily Rabe) struggles to provide her son with opportunities denied to her—and leave the dilapidated home of her outrageous if begrudgingly supportive father (Christopher Lloyd)—J.R. begins to gamely, if not always gracefully, pursue his romantic and professional dreams—with one foot persistently placed in Uncle Charlie’s bar.
(Christopher Lloyd kind of came from out of nowhere there.)
The Tender Bar will get an early theatrical release in New York City and Los Angeles on December 17, 2021, then roll out nationwide on December 22. The film will drop globally on Amazon Prime Video on January 7, 2022.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)