For my money, Rose Mary Walls is the worst mother in the whole of literature, and that includes Sophie Portnoy. A million-dollar heiress who refused her wealth because she believed it’d be good for her children to grow up in abject poverty with a profligate alcoholic, she put her daughter Jeannette through hell. Jeannette would later translate her tragic upbringing into the best-selling memoir The Glass Castle, which director Destin Daniel Cretton will soon translate once more onto the silver screen. And in addition to the first official still above, that film has inched closer to being by laying claim to a release date.

Variety reports that Lionsgate has laid a foundation for The Glass Castle on August 11, an ambiguous early sign for this heretofore quiet project. Could this be the studio attempting to get out in front of the mad squabble for Oscars and dominate the conversation moving into September, when the race begins in earnest? The film reunites Cretton with his former Short Term 12 star and Oscar darling Brie Larson, in the role of an adult Jeannette, with Naomi Watts and Woody Harrelson playing her parents — awards aren’t out of the question, especially considering the popular and poignant source material. But this could be a tacit admission of weakness just as easily; the waning days of summer have traditionally acted as a dumping ground for studios to unload ill-fated projects they don’t want cluttering up their fall calendar.

So while the question of whether The Glass Castle will actually be any good remains unanswered, at least now we know for sure that it’s happening. An August release bars it from any early festival screenings, so we’ll all just have to stay tuned until the inevitable trailer to get an impression of what to expect.

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