Doug Liman (Edge of Tomorrow, The Bourne Identity) is going to the mat with Amazon Studios. The Road House director penned a searing op-ed in Deadline, declaring he would be boycotting the remake’s premiere at SXSW. The reason? Amazon MGM Studios canceled Road House‘s theatrical release, opting to send it straight to streaming.
Liman wrote, “My plan had been to silently protest Amazon’s decision to stream a movie so clearly made for the big screen. But Amazon is hurting way more than just me and my film. If I don’t speak up about Amazon, who will? So here we go.”
When Amazon Studios bought MGM in 2022, they promised to invest a billion dollars into films for theatrical release, calling their plan “the largest commitment to cinemas by an internet company.” But despite a strong response from studio execs and focus groups, Amazon decided to release the film on Prime Video instead.
He continued, “What else could I have delivered to the studio? Nothing, it turns out. Because contrary to their public statements, Amazon has no interest in supporting cinemas. Amazon will exclusively stream Road House on Amazon’s Prime. Amazon asked me and the film community to trust them and their public statements about supporting cinemas, and then they turned around and are using Road House to sell plumbing fixtures.”
Liman isn’t just upset about Road House, but the ramifications for the film industry at large. “If we don’t put tentpole movies in movie theaters, there won’t be movie theaters in the future. Movies like Road House, people actually want to see on the big screen, and it was made for the big screen. Without movie theaters, we won’t have the commercial box office hits that are the locomotives that allow studios to take gambles on original movies and new directors. Without movie theaters we won’t have movie stars,” he wrote.
Liman reserved his ire not for the studio executives, but for the larger implications of our increasingly algorithm-driven world. “The reality is there may not be a human villain in this story – it may simply be an Amazon computer algorithm. Amazon will sell more toasters if it has more subscribers; it will have more subscribers if it doesn’t have to compete with movie theaters. A computer could come up with that elegant solution as easily as it could solve global warming by killing all humans.”
He ended his column by noting that while algorithm can predict a lot, they will never be able to account for the human communal experience of going to the movies. And he’s not wrong. The movie-going experience is singular and will hopefully be part of the culture for years to come. Streaming is great, but nothing beats the real thing.
(featured image: Prime Video)
