Good news for "Downton Abbey" fans. Focus Features will release the big-screen installment of the British television drama in North America on Sept. 20, 2019, the distributor announced on Wednesday.
Universal Pictures International will debut the film internationally a week earlier on Sept. 13, 2019.
The movie, set in Edwardian England at the turn of the 20th century, began filming last week and boasts much of the ITV show's principal cast, including Hugh Bonneville, Laura Carmichael, Jim Carter, Brendan Coyle, Michelle Dockery, Kevin Doyle, Joanne Froggatt, Matthew Goode, Harry Hadden-Paton, Robert James-Collier, Allen Leech, Phyllis Logan, Elizabeth McGovern, Sophie McShera, Lesley Nicol, Penelope Wilton and Oscar and Emmy winner Maggie Smith.
New additions to the film include Oscar-nominated actress Imelda Staunton, Geraldine James, Simon Jones, David Haig, Tuppence Middleton, Kate Phillips and Stephen Campbell Moore.
Plot details for specific characters have been sparse thus far and haven't alluded at all to the finale's tidy and "English version of a happy ending." (Let's all say a little prayer for Smith's Dowager Countess, please.)
Carnival Films, the film's producer, has only said that the movie will follow the lives of the aristocratic Crawley family and the servants who work in their Edwardian country estate, which, as fans of the show know, is precisely the most all-encompassing description of the drama series.
"Since the series ended, fans of Downton have long been waiting for the Crawley family's next chapter," Focus chairman Peter Kujawski said in a statement Wednesday. "We're thrilled to join this incredible group of filmmakers, actors and craftspeople, led by Julian Fellowes and Gareth Neame, in bringing back the world of Downton to the big screen next September."
Michael Engler will return to direct the film and Brian Percival, who directed the series' pilot, will executive produce the movie alongside Nigel Marchant.
Oscar- and Emmy-winning Fellowes, who created the ITV series and wrote the film's screenplay, is producing the film with Neame and Liz Trubridge.
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