Last year, I was sort of obsessed with Natalie Portman’s attempt to produce her own starring vehicle, Jane Got A Gun. Portman signed on as a producer early on, and she hand-picked many of the people involved, like director Lynne Ramsey and costar Michael Fassbender. Then everything fell apart spectacularly. Ramsey pulled out on the first day of filming. Fassbender and Jude Law pulled out. Natalie begged several of her friends to take parts in the film and most of them refused. They had to get a new director, and his first order of business was shutting down the production. And to top it all off, there were reports that Natalie and her crack production team didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and that Natalie was throwing tantrums all over the place.

At the end of the day, Jane Got a Gun managed to complete their production. It was tentatively scheduled for an August release this year. But it got pushed back… until February 2015. Ouch.

The cinematic woes surrounding Jane Got A Gun have been an absolute nightmare, and it looks like things just got a little bit worse for the ailing Western production. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film has been shifted from its preliminary launch window, thereby pushing the Natalie Portman-led project from its rather tentative August 29, 2014 release date, to February 20, 2015 instead.

In truth, this can’t be good for the movie, because even if it does end up seeing the light of day, February is a near-guaranteed death trap, meaning it will likely lose a bunch of money and end up forgotten by the year’s end. Unless it’s really good, of course, in which case it may stand a decent chance of at least proving that it was worth all of the trouble it took to get it made.

Undoubtedly, those troubles have been difficult to keep up with, so here’s a brief recap of what has happened to date: After Michael Fassbender dropped out back in March of last year, director Lynn Ramsay left on the first day of shooting. Joel Edgerton was already cast as another character, but jumped over to Fassbender’s part. Still with us? Thereafter Jude Law came in to take the role Edgerton had vacated, only to exit the film as well, because he only joined in order to work with Ramsay. Bradley Cooper was then brought in to replace him, but guess what? He left less than a month later and has since been replaced by Ewan McGreggor. Oh yeah, and then the producers sued Ramsay.

At the time of writing, however, the film stars Natalie Portman, Noah Emmerich, Ewan McGregor, and Joel Edgerton, with Gavin O’Connor in the director’s chair. It tells the story of Jane Hammond, a nice girl married to a gang leader (Emmerich). When Bill turns against his own gang, led by the unruly John Bishop (McGregor) and is severely injured, Jane decides to seek retribution.

[From We Got This Covered]

At some point, it’s just got to be so big of an embarrassment that everyone involved is like, “Hey, let’s just call this a write-off and never release this turd of a film, okay?” Which is sort of what the February release is all about. Natalie will give a few interviews in support of it, she might even walk a few red carpets, but she’s hoping we just ignore everything about it.

PS… you know what else got a February 2015 release date? Johnny Depp and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Mortdecai. Considering Johnny’s last three films have been spectacular bombs, this is pretty much Hollywood’s version of the “freeze-out”. Can both Natalie and Depp come back from this? Of course. But it does seem like Hollywood is tired of both of them, right?

Photos courtesy of WENN.