Opens on Friday in NYC, LA, SF, Boston, and Seattle. Opens in more cities on 14 July and even more on 28 July. Variety didn't care too much for it during the Cannes screening. Various others seem to be relatively ambivalent, saying it's destined to be a cult classic despite its talkiness, its density, and a general failure to satisfy the expectations attendant upon any Dick adaptation. And yet, according to the 300-plus votes on IMDB to date, it gets a rating equal to that of Minority Report. Hollywood Reporter said: Audiences compelled by professional obligation will be this film's most likely outreach, with those sitting in the middle of the aisles most likely to last through the duration. Commercially, "A Scanner Darkly" should be quickly remaindered to video.
They also noted that: This film involved a painstaking animation process that required up to 500 hours to create one minute of screen time.
This is egregious, not unlike the recent comments about the rendering of "Cars." If this were being done serially, that works out to nearly six years of continuous processing. If IMDB's data on filming dates is correct, and the scenes were filmed in May-June 2004, then clearly there was some parallel processing going on. They might as well have gotten 150,000 286's and spent two years generating every frame in parallel. More likely, the figure does reflect serial processing, except that "up to 500 hours" reflects an extreme outer bound, when in fact the average processing time was closer to 150 hours per screen minute. A Scanner Darkly, from Warner Independent Pictures | 
