Four marquee names attached themselves to Kenneth Lonergan’s Tomorrow Is a Drag in the span of a single Cannes market: Aubrey Plaza, Adam Driver, Vanessa Kirby and Matthew Broderick. The drama, Lonergan’s first feature in a decade, is set to shoot this fall in New York, and international buyers were circling it before a frame had been shot. No distributor has signed on, no release date exists, and the plot is still under wraps.
Yet the names on the call sheet are the easy part. The harder question for the people writing the checks is whether a director with three features in twenty-six years, and one of the most litigated edits in modern American film behind him, can deliver the picture on schedule.
The Wager Behind a Loaded Call Sheet
The project surfaced during this year’s Cannes market in mid-May as one of the most chased titles on the floor, despite the absence of a buyer or a finished script anyone outside the production has read. MK2 Films, the Paris outfit handling international rights, is selling the picture abroad. WME (William Morris Endeavor, the agency representing it for North America) works the domestic side.
That gap between heat and paperwork is the whole story. Sales agents are taking expressions of interest on a logline buyers cannot see, priced almost entirely on a director’s name and an ensemble that would headline any festival slate. It is a project sold on reputation rather than footage.
For a market that spent the past few years chasing pre-sold IP and franchise extensions, an original adult drama generating this kind of room noise is its own kind of event. The catch is that the asset does not exist yet. Everything riding on Tomorrow Is a Drag assumes the film gets made, gets cut, and gets delivered the way the brochure promises.
Three Features in Twenty-Six Years
Lonergan is one of the most respected writers in American film and one of its least prolific directors. Before this project, he had put his name on exactly three features as director since the turn of the century.
- You Can Count on Me (2000) – his directorial debut, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and earned Oscar nominations for its screenplay and for Laura Linney.
- Margaret – shot in 2005, held for years, and not released until 2011 after a string of editing battles and lawsuits.
- Manchester by the Sea (2016) – the comeback that took Best Original Screenplay for Lonergan and Best Actor for Casey Affleck, with a Best Director nomination on top. You can pull the full results from the 89th Academy Awards for the rest of the night.
Tomorrow Is a Drag would be his fourth feature in roughly twenty-six years. That scarcity is part of the appeal for talent and a real part of the risk for money. A Lonergan film is an event partly because he makes one so rarely, and partly because the last time he took this long between projects, the production nearly swallowed him whole.
The Ghost of ‘Margaret’
Anyone underwriting a Lonergan shoot has to reckon with what happened to his second film, because it is the clearest evidence of how his perfectionism collides with a delivery schedule.
- 6 years passed between principal photography in 2005 and the limited theatrical release in 2011.
- 3 separate lawsuits entangled the director, distributor Fox Searchlight and the financing producer.
- $8.2 million in damages was sought by producer Gary Gilbert, who claimed the film was never delivered on time.
- 2014 was the year the litigation finally ended, nine years after the cameras stopped.
A Three-Hour Cut and a 150-Minute Ceiling
The studio wanted a runtime no longer than 150 minutes. Lonergan’s preferred assembly ran closer to three hours, and he spent years, on and off, trying to reconcile the two without gutting the film. Martin Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker eventually shaped a 165-minute version that Lonergan approved, though it never reached theaters because the producer refused to release it. A 150-minute theatrical cut went out in 2011, with a 186-minute version later landing on home video.
A Fight That Outlasted the Film
The legal mess outlived the editing room. Gilbert pursued claims that the director had breached his agreement by missing the delivery date, and the dispute dragged on for years before resolving. The film itself has since been reclaimed as a flawed masterpiece by many critics. The cautionary part, for a financier in 2026, is the calendar, not the reviews.
Why the Ensemble Said Yes
If the risk is on the money side, the reward is obvious on the talent side. Lonergan attracts serious actors, and several of these four have history with him.
| Actor | Known for | Connection to Lonergan |
|---|---|---|
| Aubrey Plaza | Actress and producer, recently in Coppola’s Megalopolis | New collaborator |
| Adam Driver | Actor, Marriage Story and Megalopolis | Starred in Lonergan’s Off-Broadway play Hold On to Me Darling |
| Vanessa Kirby | English actress, Pieces of a Woman and The Fantastic Four | New collaborator |
| Matthew Broderick | Actor, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off | Worked with Lonergan on two films and the play The Starry Messenger |
Plaza and Driver already share a credit on Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, so the casting reunites two actors comfortable with each other and with big-swing material. Plaza in particular is on a busy stretch, with work that ranges from animation to a planned move toward a Thomas Crown Affair remake opposite Michael B. Jordan.
For actors, the math is simple. A Lonergan script does not come around often, and the downside of a delayed edit lands on the financiers, not the cast. They get the prestige credit either way.
Sara Murphy’s First Solo Bet at Fat City
The most telling vote of confidence comes from the producer’s chair. Sara Murphy is steering the film through her banner Fat City, and she arrives off the biggest possible result.
Murphy produced Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which swept the top prize at this year’s Oscars. The film won Best Picture, along with a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) for Best Film and a Gotham award, putting Murphy among the most sought-after producers in the business overnight. You can see the scale of that release on the official One Battle After Another site, and the film’s profile was high enough to draw political backlash to its best-picture win.
Fat City is the company she launched with War Pony producer Ryan Zacarias, anchored by a first-look deal with Anonymous Content. Choosing a Lonergan comeback as a marquee project is a statement about the kind of slate she wants to build, weighted toward writer-driven adult drama rather than franchise work.
Her presence is also what makes the wager bankable. A producer fresh off a Best Picture knows how to ride herd on a difficult auteur and a long post-production. That is exactly the skill set the last Lonergan production lacked, and it is the single biggest reason buyers are treating the schedule risk as manageable rather than disqualifying.
A Fall Shoot With No Safety Net
Cameras are due to roll this fall in New York with no distributor attached, which means the film will be sold off a finished or near-finished cut. That structure rewards a clean, on-time edit and punishes a drawn-out one. The interest generated in May only converts to a deal if the picture actually shows up.
If Lonergan turns the fall shoot into a tight, deliverable cut, the buyers circling early look prescient and the film walks into awards season on its own terms. If the edit stretches the way his second feature did, the same names that made this the talk of the floor become the reason its budget needs explaining.
