Oscar Seasoning: Whatever Happened to The Life of Chuck?

It’s awards season roundtable season, and The Hollywood Reporter has rounded up some actors! It’s a mixture of largely predictable choices, most of whom are either frontrunners for an Oscar nomination or were and are still hoping to make their way into the race: Jacob Elordi, Wagner Moura, Adam Sandler, and Michael B. Jordan feel like locks. Jeremy Allen White and Dwayne Johnson, less so. But then there’s Mark Hamill.

(Image via The Hollywood Reporter.)

Yup, Luke Skywalker/The Joker is out there campaigning. For what, you may ask? He’s got a scene-stealing villain turn in The Long Walk, but he’s actually here for another Stephen King adaptation, The Life of Chuck. In Mike Flanagan’s fantasy drama, Hamill plays the grandfather of the title character. It’s earned him some of the strongest reviews of his career, but not a ton of attention outside of that, largely because the film sank without a trace at the box office. But it wasn’t so long ago that The Life of Chuck was being held up as not only a potential Oscar winner but a major contender for Best Picture. What happened?

The Life of Chuck, based on the King novella of the same name, is not a horror story. It’s about Chuck Krantz, played by Tom Hiddleston, and his life as told in reverse, from his death, which brings about the end of the universe, to his birth. It had its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. I was there and I remember a lot of chat on the ground about the lack of major world premieres happening there. A lot of major movies screened but the ones people were talking about the most had already premiered at TIFF, Venice, or Telluride: Anora, Conclave, The Brutalist, Queer, The Room Next Door. There were exceptions, like Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, and The Life of Chuck.

TIFF is big with geeky and genre stuff, and The Life of Chuck felt like a good fit for the fest: feel-good movie with speculative elements and wide appeal, a starry cast that included Hiddleston, Hamill, Karen Gillan, and Chiwetel Ejiofor, and a musical number. I didn’t see it at TIFF but I heard a lot about its positive screenings. The festival seemed eager to promote the movie and added new screenings during the run, which is usually a solid sign that they think it’ll do well with the People’s Choice Award.

The People’s Choice Award is unique in that it’s the only major award of the fall festival season that’s decided by regular audiences. The people who pay to attend get to choose, unlike critics or a jury. This award has a surprising ability to predict Oscar winners and nominees. Since 2000, 18 of the 25 winners of the People’s Choice Award either won Best Picture or were nominated for it. From 2012 to 2023, every single one got that nom. And The Life of Chuck will not continue that streak.

I’ve been going to TIFF since 2018 (two COVID years off aside), and in that time, I’ve seen a hell of a lot of awards season storylines form and crumble. There are surprise hits that come out of nowhere to dominate the Oscar race, the long-awaited contenders that live up to lofty expectations, and the supposed sure-fire winners that shrivelled into dust the moment critics actually saw them. I have fond memories of when The Goldfinch premiered and the way the fevered gossip of how bad it was spread through the festival. Nothing is guaranteed in awards season, of course, but on the ground, you get a good sense of how certain narratives form and why. You can tell which ones will do well once audiences see them. I remember seeing Conclave at a press screening there and knowing almost immediately that it would succeed.

The Life of Chuck winning the People’s Choice Award was a bit of a surprise to me, but it also made a lot of sense. TIFF officials seemed very happy that a world premiere movie got the award over films that played elsewhere first. It gave them the sheen of being real kingmakers, and a prestigious place for a film to screen. Toronto has to compete with Venice, Telluride, New York, and London for exclusives. Studios wanting prestige are more likely to aim for Venice, which has a lot of classic glamour associated with it and is also an awards season definer with the Golden Lion. New York is hip and a centre of American indie cinema. Telluride is growing stronger and offers a smaller but safer audience. But don’t sneeze at TIFF, which has decades of history and enthusiasm in its corner. I love TIFF for a reason, although its issues are evident.

(Image via Neon.)

Despite its big award victory, The Life of Chuck left TIFF without a distributor. It would take Neon a few weeks to pick it up. Why did it go without for so long? I think the Oscar season was already looking crowded, and the big competitors, indie and mainstream, didn’t feel the need to fill out their schedules with it. But Neon’s purchase felt like a good sign for the movie, even when they decided to move it to a 2025 release.

A lot of films suffer from overscheduling and distributor priorities. In 2024, Neon had Anora, which was the Palme d’Or winner and a critical darling that was already dominating the season by the time The Life of Chuck premiered at TIFF. Indeed, Sean Baker’s eventual Best Picture winner was also an Audience Award runner-up to Chuck. There’s no way on this increasingly hot planet that Neon was going to sideline Anora or give it competition, especially since 2024 had them fighting against Conclave, The Substance, The Brutalist and (lol) Emilia Perez. By the time we get to May 2025, Neon is doing its thing by buying up half the Cannes competition lineup so it can continue its domination of Palme winners (they won it again with It Was Just an Accident, but also got North American distribution deals for Sentimental Value, Sirāt, and The Secret Agent.) So, it had another slew of frontrunners to put money into, only now its competition is two giant Warner Bros. picks in the form of Sinners and One Battle After Another. There’s no room at the inn for Chuck.

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But was there ever meant to be? It’s not unheard of for distributors to buy up competition and let it rot in the margins or a bad release date. Sometimes, you get caught up in festival hype then realise the audience outside of that niche is not as major as you need. I don’t know if I buy some conspiracies that Neon bought The Life of Chuck to make sure Anora would have no hurdles towards its domination of the season. Frankly, this was never going to topple that giant. Besides, it’s not as though they ignored the movie. It did receive a sizeable promotional campaign. They sent the actors out there to plug it. Mark Hamill is on that actors panel. That wouldn’t happen without Neon pushing for it.

But the marketing was also messy. If you didn’t know what the film was about, the trailers weren’t much help. It was tonally tricky to convey. I know some people who thought the movie looked too saccharine or old-fashioned for them because of these trailers. They also weren’t sure of its plot. Is it just about… life? Being a mid-budget original movie in a summer release spot, going up against How to Train Your Dragon, is an uphill climb already. If you can’t get potential audiences hooked through the marketing, then you’re going to get stuck. It felt like Neon sort of gave up a few weeks into the movie’s theatrical release. By July, they had Together to focus on, and once awards season fully kicked off, they had Jafar Panahi, Joachim Trier, and Park Chan-wook to juggle.

(Also, this poster is creepy. Artful, but creepy. Image via Neon.)

Screeners were sent out to voters as part of the impressive Neon boxset that I greatly covet, but I fully expect The Life of Chuck to be featured on the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast in a couple of years’ time. It’s not a bad movie. Many critics loved it. Matt Zoller Seitz described it as a “great example of popular cinema’s ability to speak to the life experiences of a large cross-section of viewers without dumbing anything down.” It was on the Best Movie of 2025 lists of the Washington Post and Boston Globe (but also the worst movies list of Variety). I do think there’s an audience for this kind of retro feel-good fare, and in cinemas too.

Maybe in another year, or a less crowded slate, it could have shone. But I don’t think this was ever a bona fide contender. The TIFF award win seems like a fluke, a boon for the festival more than the movie itself. Neon may have wanted a mainstream summer hit rather than a prestige title, but that’s not really their forte outside of horror, and The Life of Chuck is a harder sell than a typical feelgood Summer movie would require. I think it was a case of the wrong distributor and the wrong time. But hey, at least Mark Hamill’s getting a little shine this season somewhere. I wouldn’t be mad at a Supporting Actor nomination…