Aaliyah’s film Queen Of The Damned Set Back…
The release date in America of R&B singer-actress Aaliyah’s film The Queen of the Damned has been pushed back a week, it’s thought to avoid clashing at the box office with Britney Spears’ debut movie Crossroads. Britney’s independent $10 million Paramount distributed movie which stars the 20-year-old popstar as a teenager on a road trip across the US, will open on 15 February. Warner Bros had planned to release Aaliyah’s movie on the same weekend, but the movie will now open the following weekend 22 February. Aaliyah’s brother Rashad has overdubbed her final bits of dialogue and the movie much of which was filmed in Melbourne is expected to attract a cult following the tragic death of the R&B singer aged just 22 in a plane crash in the Bahamas on 25 August last year.
Queen of the Damned, based on Anne Rice’s novel sees the vampire Lestat (Stuart Townsend) as a rock star whose music awakens the 6,000-year-old Egyptian vampire, Akasha (Aaliyah). She sets out on a plan of revenge against many of the male vampires that followed her, in the hopes of ruling the Earth with Lestat at her side. Meanwhile, Jomo Hankerson, president of Aaliyah’s record company Blackground says that a new Aaliyah album made up of three quarters of unreleased material will be released in 2002.