George Clooney said that his next directorial effort, The Monuments Men, isn’t coming out until next year. While the industry analysts are left trying to decipher exactly what that means and the reasons for it, Clooney has had his own say. The actor/writer/director said that the movie just isn’t ready for release in December and that it doesn’t have to do with the Oscars race.

As previously noted, the film was supposed to be out on Dec. 18, just days before Sony released its other Oscars contender, David O. Russell’s American Hustle, on Christmas. But Clooney told the Los Angeles Times Tuesday that it won’t be out until next year.

“We just didn't have enough time,” the Oscar winner said. He was speaking from London, where composer Alexandre Desplat (Argo) was working on the score at Abbey Road.

Clooney also stated that the CGI effects were also taking a bit longer to complete. “If any of the effects looked cheesy, the whole movie would look cheesy,” he said. “We simply don't have enough people to work enough hours to finish it.”

The Gravity star added, “All we've ever said, from the very beginning, is that we wanted to make a commercial, non-cynical piece of entertainment.” He said that the film is partly inspired by ensemble World War II movies like The Guns of Navarone. Like those movies, Monuments Men has a stacked cast, including Clooney, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Cate Blanchett and Bill Murray.

In an interview with Deadline, Clooney dismissed any notion that the problem with the film is its tone, citing positive audience test results. The fact is that they just didn’t get the effects completed on time.

It also doesn’t appear to matter to Clooney that the film won’t be eligible for the Oscars this year. It would have been competing in a tough field that includes Gravity, 12 Years A Slave, American Hustle and Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (if that one gets done in time).

“This is a bigger film than we usually do,” Clooney said in his Times interview. “It was a mad rush to do it from the very beginning.”

While Sony hasn’t rescheduled The Monuments Men, it looks like an early 2014 release could be a viable target, since there are rarely big blockbusters released during that time.

image: Claudette Barius/Sony