Trailer: ‘Roald Dahl’s The Witches, with Anne Hathaway, debuting exclusively on HBO Max

Halloween will be coming early this year with the release of Warner Bros. Pictures and Robert Zemeckis’s reimagined The Witches, premiering exclusively on HBO Max in the U.S.  October 22.

Zemeckis, the Oscar-winning director of Forrest Gump, plus the Christmas classic The Polar Express, and the Back to the Future trilogy, brings a fresh sense of humor along with warmth and the unexpected to what is sure to be a Halloween favorite: Roald Dahl’s beloved story The Witches.

In addition to the film’s U.S. debut on HBO Max, the film will fly into theatres internationally beginning October 28.

Reimagining Dahl’s beloved story for a modern audience, Robert Zemeckis’s visually innovative film tells the darkly humorous and heartwarming tale of a young orphaned boy who, in late 1967, goes to live with his loving Grandma in the rural Alabama town of Demopolis.  As the boy and his grandmother encounter some deceptively glamorous but thoroughly diabolical witches, she wisely whisks our young hero away to an opulent seaside resort.  Regrettably, they arrive at precisely the same time that the world’s Grand High Witch has gathered her fellow cronies from around the globe—undercover—to carry out her nefarious plans. 

Zemeckis is joined by a world-class team of filmmakers, including Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Kenya Barris, for this fantasy adventure about a young boy who stumbles upon a secret coven of witches and, with the help of his loving grandmother, tries to stop their evil plan to turn the world’s children into mice. The cast includes powerhouse performances from Academy Award winners Anne Hathaway and Octavia Spencer, Academy Award nominee Stanley Tucci, Kristin Chenoweth and Chris Rock, with newcomer Jahzir Kadeen Bruno as the brave young hero.  

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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