A 'Road House' Distributed Against Itself Cannot Stand
Another example of a streamer failing to understand the appeal of its own movie.
Tomorrow, Road House, a remake of the 1989 Patrick Swayze movie of the same name, arrives on Prime Video. You didn’t miss it in theaters; it never played in them. Instead, the new movie, directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, will go straight to streaming. In fact, Amazon paid more to have the film go straight to streaming, upping the budget from $60 million for theatrical to $85 million for Prime Video only.
There’s a clumsy thinking at play here where Amazon believes that if Prime Video is the only place you can see Road House, then it sweetens the deal for viewers to sign up for a Prime account. It’s not that Amazon thinks Road House on its own is worth the subscription, but maybe if it can demonstrate that you’ll find a movie like Road House on Prime, then you’ll shell out for the larger subscription of $15/month or $139/year. In this calculation, Road House is a small piece of a much larger picture, and hey, if you watch Road House on Prime, then you’re led to other Prime stuff about tough guys who solve problems like Reacher and Jack Ryan.
The problem with this math is that Amazon is paying more money for Road House to matter less. Last month, Zack Snyder said more people watched his new Netflix movie Rebel Moon, Part 1 - A Child of Fire, than Barbie. Assuming that’s true—assuming more people watched Rebel Moon than Barbie, the highest grossing movie of 2023—that’s so much worse for Snyder! Imagine, by Snyder’s own estimate, 160 million people watching Rebel Moon, and it has zero impact whatsoever. No one talks about, no one thinks about it, no one cares about it. Also, when people watched Barbie in theaters, they watched Barbie. They drove to the theater, bought a ticket, and sat in a room to share in the experience of seeing the movie. Does Snyder really think that’s the same as someone popping on Rebel Moon as background noise while they do laundry? Considering how much time, effort, and money it takes to make a movie, is Snyder really counting that as a win?
And yet that’s the same kind of fate Amazon appears content to assign to Road House, a film that’s begging for the experience of a crowd cheering on its action mayhem. I saw the film last night in a theater for a critics/word-of-mouth screening, and people went for it! They really loved seeing Jake Gyllenhaal’s mild-mannered Dalton stroll in to a small Florida town, and then beat the snot out of ruffians trying to terrorize the local road house on behalf of a sleazy developer (Billy Magnussen). It’s not even a legacyquel! You can have zero knowledge of the original movie, and still enjoy Liman’s remake, which is a terrific blend of Gyllenhaal’s innate charisma with some exciting cinematography.
But Amazon doesn’t understand that. Furthermore, it’s not like Amazon is against any and all theatrical distribution or only does one-week releases like Netflix. They could have rethought their contract after seeing the finished film, and said, “Hey, we’ll eat the cost of the larger budget and throw in the cost of distribution because the SAG and WGA strikes created a lull at theaters, so our movie has a better chance to stand out.” What’s more, when a movie stands out in theaters, it’s more likely to encourage viewership when it arrives on streaming. Amazon can still use Road House as an enticement to a Prime subscription; it’s now just more of a draw rather than something that gets dumped onto the service with no urgency. What are you more likely to watch: something that’s added to streaming with little to no fanfare, or something that you’ve heard good things about for the past three months?
Streamers continue to operate like tech companies rather than movie studios. Part of that is because they’re either part of tech companies (Amazon, Apple) or they identify more with Silicon Valley than Hollywood (Netflix). They’re not interested in traditional modes of distribution because they’re old and therefore boring, except streaming doesn’t work for everything. Spending $85 million on a movie that fails to generate any interest is not a success even if your metric is, “Well, we’re really just trying to sell Prime subscriptions anyway, and streaming is just a small part of our larger business.” That’s a weird way to talk around why you’re pouring money into movies that an indeterminate number of people see, and even stranger when you’ve got a bona fide crowdpleaser in Road House. I can understand maybe sending a documentary or a very serious drama straight to streaming since those have always been tougher sells in theatrical distribution, but if you think Jake Gyllenhaal punching dudes and making quips is something people don’t want to see with rowdy crowd, then you may need to get out of the movie business.
Recommendations
If you asked me what kind of websites I’ve been going to the longest, it wouldn’t be ones about movies. It would be video games. In high school, I couldn’t get enough of sites like GameSpot and IGN (both still kicking, but very different from what they were in the 90s) as well as 1UP and the Gaming Intelligence Agency (may they both rest in peace). But I want to support good gaming journalism, which is why I signed up for Aftermath. It’s a collection of terrific journalists trying to make a go of it on their own with a subscription-based model. I recommend checking them out.
Also, coming off its Best Picture win, Oppenheimer is now only $20 on 4K. I watched this disc the day before the Oscars, and it will give your system a workout even though you may not think of it as the kind of VFX-heavy picture that makes use of HDR. The picture quality is stunning, and the audio is so good it had me second-guessing whether or not Zone of Interest could really win that Best Sound Oscar (although I’m glad I trusted my instincts on that).
Note: I get a small percentage of sales made through my Amazon Associates link.
Elsewhere
Friends and family have mentioned to me that I may want to share what I’ve been working on outside of Commentary Track, so here’s a brief rundown:
An interview with Knox Goes Away director and star Michael Keaton for Backstage - I counted this as a major win for me, not only because I’ve been a Keaton fan for pretty much my whole life (that will happen when one of your earlier movie memories is seeing Batman Returns in theaters), but also because I was supposed to interview him back in 2010 for Toy Story 3. Sadly, they ran out of time, so I didn’t get him. I was incredibly happy with how this interview turned out, and it doesn’t hurt that I enjoyed the movie.
Oscar Predictions on The Morning X with Barnes & Leslie - I’m flattered that The Morning X (a show I listened to throughout junior high and high school!) now considers me their movie expert for when they have “movie emergencies.” While I absolutely whiffed on my Best Actress prediction, I think overall I was pretty good.
Reviews of Imaginary and Kung Fu Panda 4 for TheWrap - It’s been a minute since I wrote a straightforward movie review, but I was grateful that TheWrap asked me to cover these two movies. Imaginary was much better than I thought it would be (although I tend to support PG-13 “gateway” horror), and Kung Fu Panda 4 was a bit of a disappointment, especially after I was so charmed by the first three.
What I’m Watching
My brother recommended I start watching Ted on Peacock, and I kind of hate how good it is. Like this should be a cheap knockoff of the streaming era, and instead the two episodes I’ve watched thus far have me giggling like a total idiot. I also feel like it’s a sitcom that forces Seth MacFarlane to be a better storyteller. While I’ve enjoyed Family Guy, it’s almost impossible to cite my favorite jokes because they’re rarely attached to the plot. Ted stops MacFarlane from using his cutaway crutch, and the show is still incredibly funny as well as surprisingly heartwarming. Damn you, MacFarlane.
In bigger news, while I said that this month’s First Five selection would be Steven Soderbergh, I’m changing things up a bit. Instead, the First Five director will be… Kathryn Bigelow! I made the switch for a couple reasons:
I forgot that March is Women’s History Month, and so it was probably a wiser decision to choose a woman director. It doesn’t hurt that she’s the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director.
Her fifth film, Strange Days (1995), leaves Max at the end of the month, and it’s a surprisingly difficult movie to track down, so I figured I should get cracking on that.
For those that want to follow along, Bigelow’s first five movies are The Loveless (1981, co-directed with Monty Montgomery), Near Dark (1987), Blue Steel (1990), Point Break (1991), and Strange Days (1995). Paid subscribers can look for that article next week.
What I’m Reading
Have We Reached Peak AI? by Edward Zitron [Where’s Your Ed At?] - Mentions of AI by Fortune 500 companies went up 36% in the last quarter, so clearly this technology must be valuable…right? As Zitron points out, what’s happening with AI in the present isn’t all that impressive, and the major players in the field like OpenAI are betting heavily that it will one day be impressive…provided they ever sort out the technological hurdles needed to make that leap. Zitron does a good job of sorting out the hype from the reality, and AI continues to simply feel like the new NFT/crypto bubble: something that promises to be transformational but whose current use cases are fuzzy at best.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Targets a Generation of Politically Disaffected, Extremely Online Men by Anna Merlan [WIRED] - This is an interesting article because it’s not so much about Kennedy, but about the specific sector of extremely online guys who operate along the lines of faux curiosity. They’re the “just asking questions” brigade except every answer seems to fall along the lines of, “I trust myself more than any institution or expert.” They’re the type of guys who write off any political change as jaded wisdom when in reality political change comes from communal effort, and their toxic individuality won’t brook anything beyond their own sphere of understanding.
The War on the Woke Trumps the Truth for Many Heterodox Thinkers by Radley Balko [The Unpopulist] - Speaking of free-thinkers-but-not, Balko has a good examination of the documentary The Fall of Minneapolis, which argues that the woke mob railroaded officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. Balko did a deep dive into the claims the documentary made, and found numerous falsehoods and inaccuracies. Surely, when presenting this to supporters of the documentary who brand themselves as brave truth-seekers, they would change their opinions because they’re just following the evidence, right? As Balko found: not so much.
What I’m Hearing
My pal Curt Holman clued me into this episode of Search Engine where they have guest and NYT columnist Ezra Klein give his thoughts on why so many online news organizations are crumbling before our eyes. Klein, as usual, is a mixed bag, offering useful insights and clumsy prescriptions in equal measure (e.g. there’s a great explanation of why the print media era was successful, but the online media era can’t support journalism; however, his emphasis on individual conduct to support the media you want to see doesn’t really hold water when by his own admission the business model is a house built on sand). Still, it’s a worthwhile listen if you’re wondering how exactly we got to this point, and understanding that there are larger structural forces at play rather than any individual editorial decisions made by particular publications.
Speaking of Curt, if you don’t already, please check out the podcast he co-hosts, The Comics Canon, which is particularly useful for understanding an entertainment landscape that draws so much from comics. For example, their latest episode is about Frank Miller’s Wolverine, and that’s not bad knowledge to have when Deadpool & Wolverine comes along later this summer.
What I’m Playing
I took a brief break from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth to play…Final Fantasy VII INTERMission, the DLC from Final Fantasy VII Remake. I never got around to it, but since I’ve reached the point in Rebirth where Yuffie enters the story, I figured I should take the five hours to go back and play her side story from the first game. It’s not bad, but there’s also a “Completists Only” vibe here. However, being a completist, I happily blazed through the whole thing in a couple days. Back to Rebirth!