Having now watched the few brief seconds of footage that aired on Good Morning America (at 8:36 here on the west coast feed, for those who may be looking for it in a recording), about the most I have to say is “yeah, it looks like those still images”. It really didn’t give much more clue to the timing, the way it will play across space, and so forth. I will note two good things:

• They used the Vince Guaraldi music for the clip. That doesn’t inherently mean that it will get used in the film itself, but it certainly suggest the possibility. There’s nothing wrong with the non-Guaraldi music used on Happiness is a Warm Blanket, but the Guaraldi music is not just very good stuff, it also has an emotional bond at this point.
• That they’re publicizing it at all at this point. The film is still over a year and a half away. Doing a push now suggests that they think they’ve got something that will be big, not just a quick release to play off of whatever passion people have for Peanuts (although the popularity of Peanuts is likely why they can get even that small slice of airtime now; if the studio came to them with “hey, here’s a clip of a movie you’ve never heard of with no stars that won’t be in theaters for a year and a half”, I doubt this would have happened.) An early November release suggests they don’t think they could directly win the box office for the 4-day Thanksgiving weekend (they would be up against a new Disney release, The Good Dinosaur) but they could get a few weeks of play before that and still be making some good money then. At this point, it looks like the movie will release the same weekend as a new James Bond film, with nothing big yet announced for the following weekend. (I’m going by the release schedule at Box Office Mojo.) All in all, a good release date for a family movie (says this I’m-not-in-the-movie-biz guy, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.)

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