New release date news including Sony and Columbia swapping one Roland Emmerich-directed film for another.  Check them out in brief below:

  • Roland Emmerich's White House Down has a new release date of November 1st, 2013, supplanting the other Emmerich-directed film, Singularity. The latter film does not have a new release date at this time.
  • For Fox, sequel Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters has moved up from March 27th, 2013 to March 15th, 2013.
  • Rialto's Grand Illusion re-release will open this Friday, May 11th.
  • Grassroots, starring Jason Biggs, Cobie Smulders, Cedric the Entertainer and Tom Arnold, will open July 20th of this year.
  • IFC releases are as follows:
  • Beloved opens August 17th, 2012 with Sleepwalk with Me opening a week later on August 24th.
  • Liberal Arts opens September 14th of this year with How to Survive a Plague opening a week later on September 21st.

Hit the jump for more on each film.

Emmerich  has been juggling the "Die Hard meets Air Force One" action flick, White House Down and the sci-fi spectacle, Singularity, so it's no surprise that their release dates have been tossed around as well.  Emmerich had previous delayed Singularity in order to work on the script, which stands to reason why White House Down bumped it from its previous perch on the calendar. White House Down, based on a spec script that Sony picked up from The Amazing Spider-Man scribe, James Vanderbilt, deals with an assault on the famed Presidential dwelling at 16oo Pennsylvania Avenue.  I continue to try not to confuse it with the similarly-described project, Olympus Has Fallen.

The other Emmerich project, Singularity, is left without a release date, but the script he co-wrote with partner Harald Kloser still "focuses on a young man whose body is made up of a swarm of nanobots, giving him all sorts of powers at the same time as it brings unwanted attention from an evil corporation.” Emmerich talks more about the project in this interview.

The sequel to the 2010 film, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief features the return of stars Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson and Alexandra Daddario. The second iteration adapted from the Rick Riordan series will be directed by Thor Freudenthal (Diary of a Wimpy Kid) and stars Nathan Fillion as Hermes and Anthony Head, who replaces Pierce Brosnan as Chiron.

This weekend will see the re-release of the now-75-year-old French film, Grand Illusion, which was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in 1938.  The Jean Renoir film featured two French soldiers who attempted to escape from a German POW camp in World War I.

percy-jackson-sea-of-monsters

Grassroots features a strong cast, especially with Smulders coming off of her turn in The Avengers, and a story about a recently-fired journalist (Biggs) who reluctantly helps his goofball friend (Joel David Moore) run for a seat on Seattle's City Council.  Check out more on the film here.  Beloved stars Catherine Deneuve (Persepolis) and Ludivine Sagnier (The Devil's Double), while Sleepwalk with Me stars Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under).

Liberal Arts, starring Zac Efron (17 Again), Josh Radnor (How I Met Your Mother) and Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene), was a stand-out at 2012's Sundance Film Festival.  How to Survive a Plague is a documentary about the activist groups TAG and ACT UP who helped to turn AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition with their innovative social activism. (All release date info via Box Office Mojo.)