'Creation' Trailer - Watch if you Dare, Americans!

The new movie based on Charles Darwin's life (with Paul Bettany in the title role) is coming to the Toronto Film Festival two weeks before its release in England, and it's looking for a U.S. distributor. There is a controversy brewing, and those who live in the U.S. know exactly what it's about: evolution.

The movie, about Darwin's writing 'On the Origin of Species' and the impact it has on his personal life - is being hyped as 'too controversial' for American audiences, but I wonder how much of that is meant to court distributors. The movie is a drama that will have potential 'Academy' aspirations, so maybe this is all a marketing move. That the movie doesn't have a U.S. distributor yet is disheartening, but it doesn't necessarily mean the movie isn't going to or that the movie is, indeed, too much for American audiences to handle.

Even if the movie is having trouble finding a distributor, it's also a period drama, and period dramas are not wildly successful in America. I'm not saying that releasing a film about Charles Darwin won't have some negative backlash - it could have a lot - but if it were a documentary by Michael Moore or action movie about Darwin by Ron Howard, it probably wouldn't be having the same kind of difficulty that it's having now.