Fifteen years ago, I would have called McConaughey’s performance a revelation. His quiet intensity, laconic charm, and superbly timed one-liners delivered with understated swagger in his trademark drawl are hypnotic. Post-McConaissance, however, this is simply a return to his proven form, which only makes the reluctance to distribute the movie even more perplexing.
You could blame it on algorithmic risk-aversion, economic hardship, or distribution bottlenecks. Some also say that the producers, Black Bear and Heyday, were asking for too much money. But whichever way you look at it, the brutal reality is that studio execs refused to spend on a mid-budget indie that didn’t come with a pre-packaged audience. As a result, a decent movie with multiple bankable A-listers was left dangling in the breeze like a pair of geriatric testicles at a nudist retreat.
While Madman Entertainment promptly saw the value in picking up the distribution rights for Amziah in Australia and New Zealand, US distribution was an entirely different matter, which significantly slowed down the film’s global release.
Black Bear, the film’s financiers and co-producers – who also backed The Imitation Game and Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare – eventually had to launch its own distribution arm (headed by former Lionsgate exec, David Spitz) just to get it into US cinemas. This bold move may have raised a firm middle finger at a broken business model, but it also poses a bigger question: Is Hollywood’s addiction to safe IP depriving audiences of quality cinema, and shooting itself in the foot in the process?
Studios seem to have no issue blowing US$200 million+ on comic book movies and hundreds of millions more on marketing them. Yet investing a fraction of that to distribute a mid-budget movie like The Rivals of Amziah King domestically is apparently too hard basket.
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