Today marks the theatrical release of Zack Snyder’s “Army of the Dead,” a Netflix movie doing something not done before by any of their movies – it’s getting a wide theatrical release.
It’s only a short run, the film has just one week of exclusive play in cinemas, primarily Cinemark cinemas, before it also hits the Netflix service worldwide on May 21st.
During a virtual panel at the MoffettNathanson Media & Communications Summit this week, Cinemark CEO Mark Zoradi says they tested select theatrical releases of earlier films of theirs like “Christmas Chronicles”. ‘Army’ marks the next stage in that experiment:
“We came back to the table and said, ‘What else can we do?’ And ‘Army of the Dead’ came up. It was a little bit short in our timeframe of getting it done, and I think as we go forward we’ll have more time.”
‘Army’ is one of the most commercially friendly Netflix films to get a theatrical run of any kind. Should it fare as well as they hope, Zoradi indicates this will serve as the start of a potential wave of Netflix films at the box-office:
“We’re gonna see, how does it do in that week? How does it do the week that it goes into Netflix? We’re going to learn a lot. We believe there will be several [more theatrical releases].
We don’t believe it’s going to be a large quantity, but a limited number of their high-profile movies where they want to spend the marketing expenditure, they want theatrical exhibition and what comes along with that, we think that there will be future movies to come. Those might be 14 days, they might be 21 days. I would characterize it as a very progressive and positive relationship with Netflix.
As studios make decisions to take things to their own unique platform, perhaps we’re going to find a way to get some things from the streaming services that we otherwise would not have gotten and give them an important theatrical window.”
Snyder himself has praised the decision to take the film to cinemas, telling CinemaBlend it’s incredible that Netflix are in a position where they can literally just put a movie in theaters because they think it’s good and will sell.
Source: Deadline
