What’s the holdup with the Loomis Fargo heist movie?

It was just supposed to be a silly movie about stupid criminals who robbed more than $17 million from the vault of Loomis, Fargo & Co. in Charlotte, then got caught after making a series of forehead-smacking mistakes.

But efforts to get Relativity Media’s “Masterminds” into theaters this year have been – oh, the irony! – repeatedly bungled, and it’s becoming increasingly unclear when the Zach Galifianakis comedy will ever see the light of day.

Based on the true-life 1997 heist and subsequent FBI investigation that eventually ensnared 21 crooks (mostly from Gaston County), the film was shot in Asheville and Wilmington in July and August of 2014.

Galifianakis, a Wilkesboro native, serves as the main character: vault supervisor David Scott Ghantt, who removed the tapes from two security cameras before he emptied the vault but didn’t realize a third was catching him in the act.

Owen Wilson plays armored car driver Steve Chambers, a Ghantt accomplice who – three weeks after the robbery – moved from a rural mobile home into a $635,000 Cramer Mountain mansion in Gaston County and bought his wife a $43,000 diamond ring, according to the FBI.

“Masterminds,” as far as we know, is ready to hit theaters. An amusing trailer for the movie debuted in March, and Relativity was sticking firm to the August release date it had been promising since production began last summer. So, publications all over the country included the comedy in its summer movie previews.

The trouble started in May. Actually, it started long before that for Relativity, but the chickens came home to roost in May.

The company partly responsible for megahits like “Bridesmaids” and “21 Jump Street” also had been plagued by costly misfires (“The Bourne Legacy,” “Oblivion,” “That’s My Boy,” “The Five-Year Engagement”), and found itself mired in $320 million of debt that had matured – and that they couldn’t afford to pay.

Relativity clung briefly to the August release date for “Masterminds,” hoping the movie and its star power might rake in enough cash to save (at least part of) the company’s skin.

But the “mini-major” studio couldn’t scrounge up enough spare millions to properly promote the movie and punted the flick to Oct. 9.

In July, Relatively filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, cut its staff by almost 25 percent, put itself up on the auction block and ... continued to tell everyone it would still release “Masterminds” in the fall.

Then, in August, another roadblock: The film was postponed indefinitely – as creditors tried to seize it and three other unreleased Relativity movies as collateral for unpaid loans.

And there’s still widespread confusion about what’s going on with “Masterminds.” The New York Times included the title as an Oct. 9 release in its massive fall movie preview just two weeks ago; the Arizona Republic and The Oregonian made a similar mistake, seeming to have not heard the news either.

Curiously, the Internet Movie Database touts the beleaguered movie’s release date as “8 October 2015 (Netherlands).” Rotten Tomatoes, meanwhile, is going with Dec. 31, 2016. (Dec. 31 is a date often used generically by websites instead of saying “we don’t really have the foggiest idea.”)

So for the moment, nothing is certain about “Masterminds” except this: Relativity will need a whole lot more than $17 million in stolen money to save it.

This story was originally published September 24, 2015 at 2:24 PM with the headline "What’s the holdup with the Loomis Fargo heist movie?."