After a brief teaser trailer arrived last year, Bert Kreischer’s highly anticipated comedy The Machine finally has a release date. Sony Pictures and Legendary confirmed that the film is set to be released on a big holiday weekend, arriving May 26 for the Memorial Day weekend crowd. The film will open opposite Disney’s live-action reboot of The Little Mermaid and the Lionsgate comedy About My Father, making it a pretty solid counter-programming title for the long weekend, meaning the comedy could be a surprise hit in the summer of 2023.ย
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Largely based on Kreischer’s stand-up routine of the same name, which continues to have a viral presence online, The Machine will be set decades after the events of that story. In a quick rundown, Kreischer went on a trip abroad to Russia in college when he didn’t actually know any Russian, only to become tangled up with the Russian mob through a series of sordid, alcohol-induced events. The film will tell that story but then pick back up twenty years later with facing a familial crisis and the arrival of his estranged father (Star Wars legend Mark Hamill) when the ghost of his booze-soaked past arrives: a murderous mobster (Iva Babiฤ) hellbent on kidnapping Bert back to the motherland to atone for his crimes. Together, he and his father must retrace the steps of his younger self (Jimmy Tatro) in the midst of a war between a sociopathic crime family while they attempt to find common ground. ย
Sony has also confirmed that a live pre-show will take place on Thursday, May 25 in Los Angeles at an undecided theater, which will be simulcast to over 1,000 other theaters across the country. During the show Kreischer will perform stand-up, almost certainly re-telling The Machine story in some capacity, ahead of the first preview screenings of the movie.
“It’s mind-blowing. It really is,” Kreischer previously said of the film in an interview with New York’sย Q104.3. “At times it kind of overwhelms me. They’re spending $24 million on this movie, and you see the sets and you see the amount of people working. The other day I listened to Jimmy Tatro … an amazing actor who is playing a young version of me. So in flashback scenes you see the young Bert and I got teary-eyed โ this is the dumbest thing to get teary-eyed but he introduced himself in the movie. He goes, ‘My name is Bert. I don’t go to class very much.’ [Laughs] And I got teary-eyed. I was like, ‘That is exactly who I am! That is exactly what I said, and I’m seeing someone act it out on screen!’”
Peter Atencio (Key & Peele, Keanu) directed the film, working from a script by Kevin Biegel (Couger Town, Scrubs) and Scotty Landes (Workaholics, Ma). Other cast members starring alongside Kreischer and Hamill include Robert Maaser, Stephanie Kurtzuba, Jessica Gabor, Rita Bernard Shaw, Nikola ฤuriฤko, Oleg Taktarov, Amelie Villers, and Mercedes de la Cruz.
