COVID buried Birds of Prey. The Gallerist is Cathy Yan's second shot — and Sundance didn't help

The first trailer for The Gallerist arrived this week: Natalie Portman as a Miami gallerist who discovers that the hyperrealist masterpiece going viral before Art Basel is a dead body, and decides to sell it anyway. Jenna Ortega plays her assistant, Catherine Zeta-Jones an art-dealer legend, with Sterling K. Brown, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Zach Galifianakis, Daniel Brühl, and Charli XCX around them. Roadside Attractions and Vertical release it December 4.

The résumé line that matters is the director's. Cathy Yan made Birds of Prey, which opened February 7, 2020 — five weeks before lockdowns emptied every theater on earth and froze its $205 million run in place. Warner Bros. never gave her corner of the DC universe another movie, and Yan spent the following years as the standing example of a director punished by a calendar.

Six years on, nobody relitigates that movie — they relitigate its timing:

"I loved Birds of Prey- tragic the timing of that one really kneecapped any future for that world- can't wait to see more of Cathy Yan's vision"

— a commenter on r/Fauxmoi

The second shot comes pre-wounded

Her comeback already took its first hit in January. The Gallerist premiered at Sundance to a 55% Rotten Tomatoes score) — The Hollywood Reporter called it "clumsy and inert on screen," The Guardian "a major stumble" — and then sat unsold for over six months before Roadside and Vertical picked it up in August. For a film with this cast, that's the industry voting with its wallet.

Birds of Prey had five weeks before the world shut down. The Gallerist gets four weeks of marketing against ten months of bad Sundance word.

And yet the trailer is doing exactly what trailers are supposed to do and rarely can: flipping the room. The Fauxmoi response to two minutes of Portman, Ortega and a viral corpse called "The Emasculator" ran hot — "even the visuals were enough to lock me in," in one commenter's words — and the skepticism aimed itself at the critics instead of the film, with one reply swearing off reviews entirely after Klara and the Sun.

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That's the actual experiment running here. Klara proved glowing festival pedigree can't force an audience into theaters; Crystal Lake proved a fired-showrunner disaster narrative can evaporate on contact with the finished product. The Gallerist tests the inverse: whether a December release with a killer trailer, a stacked cast and a premise built for screenshots can outrun a 55% score that's been public since January. If it can, Yan gets the career resurrection the pandemic took; if it can't, she becomes the rare director buried by two different calendars — one with a virus on it, one with a festival.

Previously we wrote: The Triplets of Belleville director made Dior's holiday film; the internet says it's AI