Viggo Mortensen hits out at Amazon over their “greed” with ‘Thirteen Lives’
The Lord of the Rings and Green Book actor Viggo Mortensen has hit out at Amazon for the way they have handled the release of Ron Howard’s 2022 movie Thirteen Lives, in which he stars alongside Colin Farrell, telling the tale of the Thai Tham Luang cave rescue.
Written by William Nicholson and also starring Tom Bateman and Joel Edgerton, Thirteen Lives was meant to be screened in thousands of cinemas across the world. However, much to Mortensen’s frustration, it ended up only being shown in a handful of select theatres before finding its way onto Amazon’s Prime Video service.
Speaking with Vanity Fair, Mortensen explained that the limited cinema release came down to Amazon’s purchase of MGM, one of the production companies behind the movie. The actor said that Amazon had “promised to respect the deal that MGM had made with Ron Howard.”
However, he said they “went back on that” agreement. Mortensen added, “Basically, you saw that movie for a week in Chicago, New York and LA, London, and that was that. Then you had the streaming, which I thought was really sad. It’s a really well-shot movie.”
Mortensen felt that direct-to-streaming approach that Amazon took with Thirteen Lives was a waste of the hard work that he had done with Howard, which was also “the first time I’d worked on a huge-budget movie in a long time.”
At the core of Amazon’s decision, in the eyes of Mortensen, despite any “excuses” they might want to make, is pure “greed.” The actor asked, “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 theaters and let it have its run. And then they could have also made money streaming.”
Mortensen also thinks that Amazon figured it would be “more cost-effective” to negate the money they would have to have spent promoting the film, putting it on in cinemas and then sharing the box office with those very cinemas, which, again, the cure puts down to “greed.”
In addition, the Aragon actor said that a director like Howard should have been given more respect, noting, “[He] has made so much money for studios, who was so deservedly well recognized as a filmmaker historically – to do that to a guy like him I think is appalling. He’s a very nice guy, so he hasn’t gone out there complaining about it, but I’m happy to do it for him. I think it was shameful what they did.”
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