Doug Liman still has a bone to pick with Amazon MGM Studios over what happened to “Road House,” but he and others may put that bad blood aside if Amazon is as serious about expanding as it’s hinting around town.
As first reported in Reuters, Amazon and MGM want to ramp up to 16 theatrical releases by the year 2027, which a source with knowledge told IndieWire is accurate.
That’s more than double where the companies are at now, with just six theatrical titles planned in 2024. The 16 titles also doesn’t include any movies Amazon would release outside the U.S., the movies that it might acquire from other studios (sometimes in the 5-6 movies range), or even include the movies it intends to release directly to streaming on Prime Video.
That would be a major increase in output, and 16 releases (it’s unclear and unlikely they’d all be wide releases) would put them in the ballpark of traditional Hollywood studios like Universal Pictures, as well as help it rival Netflix’s overall film output.
Amazon Prime Video chief Mike Hopkins is quoted in the Reuters piece about Amazon’s ambitions to develop as a real media company, something more than just a perk for Amazon Prime subscribers who want free next day shipping, and he said that vision came from Jeff Bezos himself.
“We don’t want to have a ‘Saltburn’ and then nothing else for that audience for six months,” Hopkins told Reuters.
Its expansion goals have been more than clear in Amazon’s recent aggressive push into live sports, including its Thursday Night Football deal with the NFL and the just-inked, 11-year deal with the NBA. Amazon also recently converted every Prime Video user to its ad-based plan, helping it grab an ever-bigger share of the global advertising spend pie.
But its theatrical ambitions have been less clear. There were reports back in 2022 that after it had acquired MGM for $8.5 billion and brought in film chief Courtenay Valenti from Warner Bros. that it intended to spend $1 billion to ramp up its theatrical. Ben Affleck’s “Air,” which brought in $90 million worldwide at the box office before it went to Prime Video, proved to be the first test case for Amazon’s experiment: Taking starry movies and placing them in theaters to give them a marketing boost before landing them on streaming. Apple has done the same but has partnered with other distributors to do it, and Netflix has moved even further in the opposite direction from that approach.
Now though, Amazon recently partnered with former Netflix chief Scott Stuber and his new production company on making theatrical movies under the old United Artists label, scratching an itch he never truly satisfied back when he was at Netflix. United Artists used to release the James Bond movies, and you can bet those films will wind up in theaters whenever that franchise gets up and running again.
This year, some of Amazon’s theatrical releases include the upcoming “Blink Twice” with Channing Tatum, the holiday film “Red One” with Dwayne Johnson, the Sundance acquisition “My Old Ass,” and the documentary “Frida.” Down the road movies like “Project Hail Mary” with Ryan Gosling and Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda” figure to be theatrical releases, while something like “The Accountant 2″ with Affleck is intended to be a streaming exclusive.
“What we’re really trying to build is not just a single subscription service — I think we’ve proven that we can play a much broader game,” Hopkins said to Reuters. “We’re on track to be a meaningfully profitable business in our own right.”
