Jordan Peele knocked it out of the park with his first feature film as director and CinemaCon will be recognizing him for his directorial debut with its Director of the Year award. Peele wrote and directed the horror/thriller Get Out which is currently sitting at 99% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. The film’s earned more than $136 million since opening on February 24th and according to CinemaCon, Peele is now the “first African-American writer/director to cross $100 million with his debut film.”
“With the phenomenon known as Get Out, Jordan Peele has instantaneously become a force to reckon with as a gifted and enormously talented director and filmmaker,” noted Mitch Neuhauser, CinemaCon Managing Director. “He has audiences and critics around the globe enamored and spellbound, dare I say hypnotized, with his wildly inventive directorial debut, and we are ecstatic to be honoring him as this year’s ‘Director of the Year.’”
CinemaCon, the annual convention of the National Association of Theatre Owners, will take place at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas March 27-30, 2017. Peele will be honored with the Director of the Year award during the Big Screen Achievement Awards ceremony on March 30th.
CinemaCon will also be recognizing Goldie Hawn with the 2017 Icon Award winner, Charlie Hunnam will receive the Male Star of the Year award, Brenton Thwaites is this year’s Breakthrough Performer, and Salma Hayek is the Vanguard Award winner. Chris Meledandri will receive the Producer of the Year award, Jessica Chastain has earned the 2017 Female Star of the Year award, and John Cena is this year’s Action Star award winner. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg have been selected to receive the CinemaCon International Filmmakers of the Year award.
The Get Out Plot: In Universal Pictures’ Get Out, a speculative thriller from Blumhouse and the mind of Jordan Peele, when a young African-American man visits his white girlfriend’s family estate, he becomes ensnared in a more sinister real reason for the invitation. Now that Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), have reached the meet-the-parents milestone of dating, she invites him for a weekend getaway upstate with Missy (Catherine Keener) and Dean (Bradley Whitford).
At first, Chris reads the family’s overly accommodating behavior as nervous attempts to deal with their daughter’s interracial relationship, but as the weekend progresses, a series of increasingly disturbing discoveries lead him to a truth that he could have never imagined.
