By Whoa, this is getting serious. With Netflix slowly taking over all home media as we know it with its original programming, Adam Sandler deals, and decades in the making sequels, it seems its heading for the big time. While it’s acquired heavy hitting films before (such as last year’s Beasts of No Nation), this is probably the biggest deal Netflix has made to date.
According to Deadline, Netflix paid $90 million for Bright, a fantasy cop film where a human (Will Smith) has to team with an orc (Joel Edgerton) to find a powerful magic wand. David Ayer is set to direct while Max Landis wrote the script (and got $3 million himself). Netflix plans to shoot in the fall, and this is a monumental move for the company as this is their first actual tentpole release. There’s no word on a day and date release to theaters, but I’m sure Netflix is going to push this as much as they could. But why Netflix?
Speaking with Deadline, Ayer ended up going to Netflix because of the freedom the subscription service provides:
I can’t even speak to any theatrical release plans for this, I don’t even know if that’s going to happen and it wasn’t my priority. I was after the creative freedom, the ability to make really hard R rated movies with vision and voice, and see them play in the on-demand world. You do that as a theatrical release, and you’d better hit a bulls eye, some cultural zeitgeist. Otherwise it’s a gamble for studios; it’s easier for them to justify $200M budgets for tent poles than $40M to $90M for the movies I like to make.
So while no studio invests in mid budget films anymore (since the cost of making movies has pushed everything through the roof, mid budget films are a huge risk if they don’t bring in a huge amount of money) maybe Netflix can be the “studio” to take care of our problems. Either way, this is huge and I can’t wait to see what turns out from it.
[via Deadline]