Road House remake director boycotts premiere due to streaming release
The director of the Road House remake has said he won't attend the premiere of the film due to Amazon's decision to release the film on streaming rather than in cinemas.
Doug Liman, who previously helmed The Bourne Identity, Mr & Mrs Smith and Edge of Tomorrow, has remade the 1989 Patrick Swayze film with Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays a former UFC fighter that takes up a job as a bouncer at a remote bar.
Writing a guest column for Deadline, Liman called out Amazon MGM Studios for skipping a big-screen release.
"When Road House opens the SXSW film festival, I won't be attending," he wrote. "The movie is fantastic, maybe my best, and I'm sure it will bring the house down and possibly have the audience dancing in their seats during the end credits. But I will not be there.
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"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 bought MGM, one of the few remaining studios making big commercial films for theatrical release (movies like Bond, Creed), they announced that they would put a billion dollars into theatrical motion pictures, releasing at least 12 a year. They touted it as 'the largest commitment to cinemas by an internet company'.
"I can tell you what they then did to me and my film Road House, which is the opposite of what they promised when they took over MGM.
"The facts: I signed up to make a theatrical motion picture for MGM. Amazon bought MGM. Amazon said 'make a great film and we will see what happens'. I made a great film."
Liman claimed that Amazon told him that the film had tested better than any of its previous films and that audiences responded to it better than any of his previous hits.
He also said that Amazon eventually decided to only release on streaming and would not be convinced otherwise, refusing to sell the film to another studio.
"The impact goes far beyond this one movie. This could be industry shaping for decades to come," he continued.
"If we don't put tentpole movies in movie theatres, there won’t be movie theatres in the future... Without movie theatres, 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 theatres, we won't have movie stars."
Liman believes the fact people went back to cinemas after streaming premieres in the pandemic proves people want the communal experience, and pointed to data that suggests movies do better on streaming after a physical release.
"The reality is there may not be a human villain in this story," he concluded. "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 theatres.
"A computer could come up with that elegant solution as easily as it could solve global warming by killing all humans.
"But a computer doesn't know what it is like to share the experience of laughing and cheering and crying with a packed audience in a dark theatre – and if Amazon has its way, future audiences won’t know either."
Digital Spy has reached out to Amazon for comment over Liman's column.
Road House is released on March 21 on Prime Video.
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