What’s up with the Amazon film strategy?
The tech giant is still trying to figure out its movie division
The Aeronauts, an adventure film about swashbuckling 19th-century hot-air balloonists, was built for the big screen. Led by an Oscar winner, Eddie Redmayne, and a Star
Wars star, Felicity Jones, it has real cinematic sweep, with sequences that take place miles above sea level. In May, Amazon Studios announced that the movie would play exclusively on Imax screens for a one-week engagement before “a full theatrical run.”
“We look forward to giving our customers an unforgettable theatrical experience high above the clouds,” Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, said in a statement at the time.
Two months later, Amazon scrapped the IMAX engagement and shrank the theatrical release. Under the new plan, The Aeronauts would have a two-week run in a small number of theatres before becoming available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video, which is available to more than 100 million Amazon Prime subscribers.
The film’s director, Tom Harper, was disappointed by the move. “It’s not how it’s intended to be seen,” he said in an interview with The New York Times at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. “But it’s a changing world, and I want people to see the movie. If it were up to me, I’d tell them to see it in the theatres.”
The about-face also stunned the movie industry, partly because Amazon had been a friend to old Hollywood. Films from Amazon that spent months in theatres have included the two-time Oscar-winner Manchester by the Sea, the acclaimed 2017 comedy The Big Sick and this summer’s Late Night.
With the change in plan for The
Aeronauts, Amazon was behaving more like its streaming rival Netflix, which has favoured delivering movies to its subscribers quickly, rather than giving them long theatrical runs. And the abruptness of the shift contributed to questions that have been swirling among entertainment industry people about how the company’s entertainment unit, Amazon Studios, handles films.
The Amazon Studios TV arm has distinguished itself with two Emmy-winning series, Fleabag and The Marvelous Mrs
Maisel. Under Salke, who took charge in 2018, it has also struck TV deals with big name writer-producer-directors like Jordan Peele and Barry Jenkins, as well as Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The awards and prominent production deals have overshadowed Amazon’s film division to some degree. “On the film side, I still think they are figuring out what they want to be,” said Richard Greenfield, a co-founder of the LightShed Partners research firm. Salke, 55, did not inherit a cinematic gold mine when she replaced Roy Price, who was ousted after an allegation of sexual harassment. Before she stepped in, the film division had been on a losing streak, with box office flops from A-list directors like Richard Linklater and Todd Haynes.
In January, Salke attended the Sundance Film Festival for the first time as the Amazon Studios head — and the company went on a spree, shelling out significant sums for to several films, including $14 million (Dh51.41 million) for Brittany Runs a Marathon, a low-key, feel-good comedy; another $14 million for The Report, a government cover-up drama starring Annette Bening and Adam Driver that will have a limited release in November; and $13 million more for the domestic rights to Late Night, a comedy written by Mindy Kaling and starring Kaling as a neophyte TV writer and Emma Thompson in the role of an imperious talk show host.
With Late Night, Amazon hoped to repeat its success with The Big Sick, a Sundance pickup that grossed more than $56 million at the box office. At the height of its run, Late Night played on 2,200 screens across the country this summer.
Despite largely positive reviews and a $32 million marketing budget, audiences stayed away, and Late Night generated $15.4 million in domestic box office. The trade press pounced. IndieWire called the release “a disaster.”
Salke called the coverage “frustrating.” She also defended the Late Night acquisition, saying it has been streamed on Amazon Prime Video more than any other Amazon original film since it appeared on the service.
The decision to favour small-screen viewing over the cinematic experience came at a time when theatrical distribution has become less of a sure thing. “Given the state of the business, nobody is relishing the idea of having a movie out in theatres that, no matter what, the industry wants to talk about the underperformance of those movies,” Salke said. “The mission is to align the movie side to the same values of trying to get premium content to the global consumer. That’s what pays the bills. I will have streaming movies that I will deliver at a regular cadence to my customers globally.”