Jeremy Saulnier's Halloween slasher used to be called October — now it's coming out in January
A24 built the whole campaign around Halloween. The release date on the poster says January 29, and even people who worked on the film are wincing.
The teaser poster for Slayground confirmed the date this week: January 29, 2027, in theaters. The poster itself is a workplace-safety-sign parody — a big blue zero with a sad face, "Zero days since the last homicide" — and the full trailer lands October 20, right on schedule for a Halloween marketing push for a movie that will not play anywhere near Halloween.
The calendar irony is built into the title history. Jeremy Saulnier's film — his first since Rebel Ridge, with Imogen Poots, James Badge Dale, Chase Sui Wonders, Sophie Wilde, Young Mazino, and Stephen Root, scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross — was known as October for most of its development, and it's set at a haunted-house attraction gone wrong. A24 retitled it in September; the month in the old title is now the one thing the release skips.
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In the r/movies thread, the regret came from inside the building:
"I worked on this. Can't wait to see how it turned out. A shame they didn't finish it in time for an October release."
— a commenter on r/movies, identifying themselves as a crew member
That comment contains the most likely explanation: they didn't finish it in time. World of Reel's September report put the current cut at two and a half hours — enormous for a slasher, the kind of runtime that means the edit is still being argued about. For comparison, Saulnier's Green Room runs 95 minutes, and the genre's biggest 2026 hits all sit under two hours.
The other way to read January
There's a kinder interpretation, and it's about traffic. The October this film skipped was brutal: Other Mommy opened at No. 1 with a 17% Rotten Tomatoes score, Clayface and Street Fighter crowded the pre-Halloween weekend, and a mid-budget A24 slasher would have been fighting four horror titles for the same audience. January, meanwhile, has been quietly rehabilitated as a horror launchpad — M3GAN opened there to $30 million, and the post-holiday corridor is where counter-programming lives now.
The crew member's lament and A24's calendar can both be true: a 2.5-hour cut wasn't making October, and October wasn't worth making anyway.
The runtime remains the thing to watch, and it's still a report, not an announcement — A24 hasn't confirmed any cut length. If Slayground arrives in January at 150 minutes, Saulnier has made the first epic-length haunted-house slasher and the date was triage. If it arrives at 105, the long cut was a phase, and January was just the quieter room.
Previously we wrote: Clive Barker is 'proud as f**k' of a new Hellraiser — and it's not a movie