Directors like putting their movies in movie theaters. It was one of the big Hollywood takeaways of the COVID lockdowns: You can execute all the streaming plans you want, finagle various day-one deals, do everything you can do goose viewership. But if you don’t let your directors put their Big Movies on Big Screens in a Big Dark Room, you’re going to get conflicts and revolts. (Nobody wants to be Warner Bros. right now, tossing checks at Christopher Nolan to try to get him to come back because they missed a huge Oppenheimer payday by pissing him off on Tenet.)
Netflix, meanwhile, does not like movie theaters. It never has, even when it was trying to play nice by sticking movies like Roma and The Irishman into theaters for minimal runs to try to get some awards consideration. Movie theaters mean deals with movie theater chains, after all, and movie theater chains hate it when you do stuff like stick one of your films on streaming two weeks after its release so you can feed your quarter of a billion subscribers another gallon of the content slurry they constantly crave.
So, what happens when Greta Gerwig, currently one of the planet’s hottest directors after Barbie blew up the box office last year, makes a big-budget, visually lush movie for Netflix? Well, you start getting stories like the one posted in THR today, in which it’s reported that Gerwig has been directly courting IMAX to make deals to get her new Chronicles Of Narnia movie on its ginormous screens. That’s led to reported negotiations between the streamer and the IMAX Corporation to possibly put the film on IMAX screens for Thanksgiving 2026, before releasing it on Netflix itself on Christmas of that same year. That’s a very tight theatrical window, enough to make both rival studios and theater chains (many of whom have direct business ties with IMAX) make some angry noises. On the other hand: Gerwig has a lot of pull right now, and the potential of 2,000 big-ass movie screens to show off her new take on untame lions and Turkish delight might go a long way toward making her happy. (It probably doesn’t help that Netflix just recently lost out on a deal for a big-name new movie from Barbie herself, Margot Robbie, at least partly over this exact issue: Warner Bros. secured Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation at least partially on the strength of being able to give the movie a full theatrical release.)
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