The Ron Howard movie buried by the studio: “I think it was shameful what they did”
The list of high-profile directors who’ve never made a movie for a streaming service is one that continues to grow shorter, with Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino two of the only auteurs who’ll never be convinced to abandon the theatrical experience. Ron Howard has notched a couple, but how one of them got there left a bad taste in many mouths.
Howard’s first streaming exclusive was Hillbilly Elegy, and he was involved from the very beginning. His production company secured the rights to the source material, and Netflix won the bidding war to back the project and distribute it, so there were no surprises to be found, other than the fact the movie was crap.
However, things weren’t quite the same the second time around. Ironically, Howard found himself competing directly against his former employers but won the race by weeks. The Academy Award winner’s feature Thirteen Lives arrived on Prime Video in August 2022, less than seven weeks before the miniseries Thai Cave Rescue premiered on Netflix.
Both dramatised the events of the Tham Luang rescue in 2018 when a youth football team and their coach became trapped in a cave system, and Howard assumed his film would be getting the big screen treatment. After all, it was announced as a full-fledged theatrical title and even postponed from April to November to position it as a potential awards season contender.
When Amazon acquired MGM, the studio behind Thirteen Lives, the new regime instead decided to give it a limited run in cinemas before rolling out on streaming worldwide one week later. As the 11th highest-grossing director of all time, Howard’s track record of commercial success speaks for itself. He maintained his silence over the last-minute pivot, but the movie’s star, Viggo Mortensen, did not.
“They have all their excuses for why they did that, but it comes down to greed,” he raged to Vanity Fair. “How much money do you need? I think Amazon could certainly have respected the deal, as they said they were going to, and released it widely in theatres and let it have its run. And then they could have also made money streaming.”
Clearly, Mortensen was indignant, but he wasn’t done there. Continuing his tirade, he accused Amazon of disrespecting Thirteen Lives‘ director. “For a guy with such a storied career like Ron Howard, who has made so much money for studios, who was so deservedly well-recognised as a filmmaker historically, to do that to a guy like him, I think, is appalling,” he said. “I think it was shameful what they did.”
Thirteen Lives was well-received by critics, even if it didn’t make a splash during awards season. Was it a hit? Nobody knows because streaming services are not obligated to release viewing figures if they don’t want to, which is the point Mortensen was making. Like so many other movies that skip theatres, people talked about it for a few days, and then it was never mentioned again.
