Repeatedly-delayed Jacob Tremblay horror movie Before I Wake coming to Netflix

The long-delayed horror film Before I Wake will premiere on Netflix, Jan. 5, director Mike Flanagan announced Wednesday on Twitter. The movie stars Kate Bosworth and Thomas Jane as a grieving couple who welcome a foster child played by Jacob Tremblay into their lives, but they soon discover he has a strange ability. One of horror’s hottest rising directors, Flanagan’s previous credits include Oculus, Hush, and Gerald’s Game.

“After almost four years of intense frustration, I’m thrilled to confirm that Netflix will release Before I Wake in the US on January 5th,” the director wrote.

Before I Wake was originally slated for release by Relativity on May 8, 2015 but the film became a victim of the company’s financial woes and its release date was pushed back before being pulled from the schedule altogether.

“It was a great deal, and it was a big fat wide release, and coming off of what they did with Oculus, it was like, This is going to be great,” Flanagan told fellow filmmaker Mick Garris (Psycho IV) on the latter’s Post Mortem podcast last August. “And so we sold the movie to Relativity, and we had a release date, and we were all set, and I moved on to the next project… And then things just got weird. Everything kind of stalled. We weren’t getting trailers and posters and materials. It was kind of cagey. We didn’t know it at first, but it was because of the collapse… And so they moved it off the date, and they didn’t really have a good reason, and they didn’t ask us to change anything, which was odd… And it was testing better than Oculus ever tested. We were in a really good place… We just couldn’t get these materials. And we eventually found out that a lot of the vendors had cut them out because they had too much debt and so the vendors weren’t turning the materials over… And then we started to really learn about how much trouble the company was in, and they finally came to us, and it was like, ‘Yes, we’re going to file Chapter 11, but we’re confident we’re going to pull out of it.’ But they’d pushed the date back twice at that point, and we had had international buyers that had picked it up based on the wide release commitment in the States, and so we kicked and screamed and shook our fists, but there was no choice but to kind of wait it out and hope they emerged from bankruptcy and would pick up where they left off and do right by the movie.”

In the meantime, Tremblay’s profile had risen dramatically thanks to his acclaimed performance in 2015 drama Room. “He was seven when we shot and we thought, ‘We’ve made this incredible discovery, this kid is amazing!’” said Flanagan. “And we were in post on it when we heard that he was up for this movie called Room, and we shared some footage to try to help him out, and then Jacob just exploded, and he’s probably the most recognized and respected child actor out there right now.”

Watch a (now somewhat vintage) trailer for Before I Wake, above.