The Founder release date pushed for Michael Keaton McDonald's biopic

A McDonald’s burger may be ready in minutes, but we’ll have to wait a little longer to see The Founder, Michael Keaton’s biopic about the fast food titan Ray Kroc.

The Weinstein Company has moved the release date for The Founder for the second time, shifting it from August to a more awards-friendly December release. Now, the Kroc biopic will open in limited release on Dec. 16 before going wide on Jan. 20 — right in the middle of the Oscar race.

Originally, The Founder was slated to hit limited theaters on Nov. 25, but in March, TWC announced that the film would instead open in wide release on Aug. 5 (opposite the supervillain juggernaut Suicide Squad). At the time, TWC co-chairman Harvey Weinstein said that he hoped the August release would show that “award-caliber movies should be able to open any time of year and be successful.”

Keaton has starred in the last two Oscar Best Picture winners: Birdman in 2015 and Spotlight in 2016. In The Founder, he plays Kroc, the Illinois milkshake machine salesman who turned a tiny Southern California burger joint into a billion-dollar fast food empire. Although the company was originally founded in the 1950s by brothers Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch), Kroc virtually cut them out of their own company to become the eventual CEO of the McDonald’s Corporation.

“It’s kind of Death of a Salesman with a very different last act,” director John Lee Hancock told EW earlier this year. “He saw the future, and he grabbed it with both hands.”