Where The Crawdads Sing

Sony thriller Where The Crawdads Sing receives the biggest-ever release for any film directed by a woman at the UK-Ireland box office this weekend, ...

Vertigo Films is distributing Charlotte Colbert’s UK-US thriller She Will in 15 locations. It will open in 41 standard sites and 34 Imax venues, for a 75-site total opening, through Pathe. The distributor first released the film in its native France in March, taking £1.7m on opening weekend and £5m by the start of May. Screen has contacted NTLive for figures. Adapted by Lucy Alibar from Delia Owens’ 2018 novel of the same name, Where The Crawdads Sing centres on a woman who raises herself in the marshes of the US deep South, then becomes a suspect in the murder of a man with whom she was involved. Directed by Olivia Newman, the film’s total tops the 673-site release for 2019’s Frozen 2, which was directed by Jennifer Lee, alongside Chris Buck; as well as the 650-site release of Cate Shortland’s Black Widow from last year – the previous widest release by a film solely directed by a woman.

Daisy Edgar-Jones stars in the movie adaptation of Delia Owens' acclaimed bestselling novel. Read the Empire review.

With Delia Owens’ Where The Crawdads Sing, which has sold more than 12 million copies to date, the audience is big and the expectations are high. She is Kya, a solitary young woman left to fend for herself after her mother, then siblings, then abusive father, all desert her. Translating a much-loved novel to the big screen is always a tricky task.

Where The Crawdads Sing is now available to watch in UK cinemas but the plotline of the acclaimed novel has close similarities to Delia Owens' own life.

One Twitter user asked: “Where’s our moral compass?” while another underlines that Where The Crawdads Sing “utilizes racist stereotypes in regards to its characters of color. With the release of the new film, many have criticised the production as a whole and wondered why so many big names – including Taylor Swift – are attached to it. One example of this is reflected by the way the jailhouse cat, Sunday Justice, takes its name from a real-life Zambian man who previously worked in the Owenses’ camp as a cook. It’s explicit and in the shocking segment that shows the dead body, neither the victim nor the person(s) who delivered the fatal shots is identified. The pair spent more than two decades in Zambia, the former British colony known as Rhodesia. It’s here that they took on the roles of conservationists intent on saving elephants from poachers and corrupt government officials. Upon the book’s release and rise to prominence, many highlighted its use of “ tone deaf” language, its reliance on age-old stereotypes and its parallels to Delia Owens’ own controversial past.