‘Downton Abbey’ heading to big screen

Good news for “Downton Abbey” fans. Focus Features will release the big-screen installment of the British television drama in North America on Sept. 20, 2019.

Universal Pictures International will debut the film internationally a week earlier on Sept. 13, 2019.

The movie, set in Edwardian England at the turn of the 20th century, began filming earlier this month and boasts much of the ITV show’s principal cast, including Hugh Bonneville, Laura Carmichael, Jim Carter, Brendan Coyle, Michelle Dockery, Kevin Doyle, Joanne Froggatt, Matthew Goode, Harry HaddenPaton, Robert James-Collier, Allen Leech, Phyllis Logan, Elizabeth McGovern, Sophie McShera, Lesley Nicol, Penelope Wilton and Oscar and Emmy winner Maggie Smith.

New additions to the film include Oscarnominated actress Imelda Staunton, Geraldine James, Simon Jones, David Haig, Tuppence Middleton, Kate Phillips and Stephen Campbell Moore.

Plot details for specif- ic characters have been sparse thus far and haven’t alluded at all to the finale’s tidy and “English version of a happy ending.” (Let’s all say a little prayer for Smith’s Dowager Countess, please.)

Carnival Films, the film’s producer, has only said that the movie will follow the lives of the aristocratic Crawley family and the servants who work in their Edwardian country estate, which, as fans of the show know, is precisely the most all-encompassing description of the drama series.