In the Heights Movie Is Now Releasing a Little Sooner in June

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In the Heights, the feature film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hude’s Tony Award-winning musical, is now headed to theaters a little bit sooner than expected. The Jon M. Chu-directed feature film musical has had its release date pushed up from June 18 to June 11 by Warner Bros., which gives it a week in theaters all to itself. It also gets the film off the same weekend opening as Disney/Pixar’s upcoming Luca, and suggests that perhaps Warner Bros. is feeling optimistic about enough Americans continuing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine that movie theater attendance will continue to climb into early June.

The setting of In the Heights is the predominantly Latinx, largely Dominican community of NYC’s Washington Heights, where Usnavi de la Vega (Anthony Ramos) runs a corner store bodega that forms the heart of the community. He dreams of one day leaving the neighborhood to visit the island of his parents’ heritage, but doesn’t realize how that departure may affect the community around him.

In addition to Hamilton star Ramos, who played John Laurens and Philip Hamilton in the original Broadway rendition of the musical, In the Heights also stars Corey Hawkins, Leslie Grace, Daphne Rub-Vega, Jimmy Smits, Olga Merediz, Melissa Barrera, Stephanie Beatriz, Dascha Polanco, Gregory Diaz IV and Miranda himself. The film had originally been intended to be released in the summer of 2020, before the pandemic obviously upended those plans, throwing the release schedule into flux. Now, the film will be hitting both theaters and HBO Max at the same time in June, like all other Warner Bros. theatrical releases in 2021.