Is Amazon Leaving Boffo Box Office On The Table By Sending ‘Road House’ Straight To Streaming?

There’s a new Road House movie coming out, and it’s releasing into a market that’s even more throwback-y than its 1989-fresh concept of “bouncer fights guys.” (It’s actually more complicated than that; there are throat-rips, endless henchmen, and some mob justice.) Over the recent holiday season, something unusual happened at the box office that’s still going on: The Big Five movie studios are loosening their grip on the top ten biggest movies in North America. Maybe this was bound to happen, as the Big Six consolidated into the Big Five when Disney purchased 20th Century Fox. But that consolidation is supposed to enable a show of dominance over these charts, and that certainly wasn’t the case this past December. On the weekend of December 1st, a total of four movies from the box office top 10 came from Big Five studios: Napoleon and Thanksgiving from Sony, Wish from Disney, and Trolls 3 from Universal. The remaining movies included Beyoncé’s Renaissance (distributed by a deal with the AMC theater chain), Godzilla Minus One (from the monster’s Japanese home studio of Toho), a couple of releases from perpetual mini-major Lionsgate, a movie from the faith-based upstart Angel Studios, and a Bollywood offering from Moksha Movies.

Remarkably, the big-studio numbers shrunk to three the very next weekend, with the debut of the GKIDS-distributed animated film The Boy and the Heron. The last time the majors had so few movies in the top ten, they were essentially a different set of majors entirely: You’d have to go back to the 1980s, when MGM was big enough to be considered one of them (releasing the original Road House, for example, at the onset of summer 1989), and entities like Orion and Canon were a regular fixture on the charts. MGM, now owned by Amazon, re-emerged later in the season with the release of The Boys in the Boat and The Beekeeper, both hits that helped extend the top ten’s newfound diversity into January. (Holiday releases from Neon and A24 helped, too.) Even Warner Bros. unleashing a barrage of three wide releases over the course of ten days in mid-December hasn’t been enough to push the majors back to full-tilt dominance. For its part, MGM has celebrated its return to theatrical releases in a very 2020s way: by releasing a bunch of movies directly to streaming, including the hotly anticipated Road House ’24.

This isn’t entirely fair – although really, who needs to be fair to any entity controlled by Amazon? The company acquired MGM as a way of beefing up its movie business, which in 2024 means both streaming and, at least in some cases, theatrical releases. While Netflix still treats theaters as a necessary evil (at least as long as they’re necessary for Oscar qualifications), Amazon and some other streamers have begun to place some value on making their movies feel like, well, movies. Remember Napoleon, one of a handful of studio projects in that December Top 10? It was actually an Apple production, with Sony handling theatrical distribution, just as Paramount put Killers of the Flower Moon theaters before it hit Apple TV+ a few months later. Drawing extra attention to the biggest streaming movies while ginning up some cash for studios, streamers, and movie theaters seems like a win all around.

But as with Netflix’s obvious internal case system dictating which movies get those occasional month-long prestige runs in theater, Amazon’s film slate doesn’t receive equal treatment. Their first big release after The Boys in the Boat was Role Play, an action-rom-com thing that went straight to Prime Video just as The Beekeeper started buzzing around theaters. Granted, Role Play’s home seems about right for a movie where Kaley Cuoco is first-billed, but what of Road House? This remake of the 1989, uh, action-drama (its true genre is “Patrick Swayze”) just dropped a poster, with a trailer presumably incoming, prior to its March 21 Prime Video release.

On one level, Road House seems like a, uh, prime candidate for direct-to-streaming. Despite its current reputation as a classic of its kind (remember: that kind is “Patrick Swayze”), the movie wasn’t a big hit in its original release, grossing a respectable but unspectacular $30 million in North America. A 2006 sequel, sans Swayze, went direct to video, and that seemed about right. After all, this was a movie that gained its following through VHS rentals and endless cable replays.

Yet the remake is a big enough deal to score Jake Gyllenhaal and director Doug Liman (Mr. & Mrs. Smith; The Bourne Identity; yes, fine, also Jumper), and the pair felt so strongly about the movie’s theatrical prospects that they reportedly screened it for Jeff Bezos over the head of Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke, hoping he’d pull rank and insist on a big-screen berth. He did not (and Liman is boycotting the movie’s SXSW premiere because of it). Still: Isn’t part of the point of a Road House remake to confer a certain respect and prestige upon a movie that wasn’t especially respected when it debuted?

It’s a little churlish to nitpick release strategies at this particular time, when multiplexes are coming down from one of their most diverse and interesting periods in years (seriously, a Japanese Godzilla movie made nearly as much as the newest Disney cartoon; what a time to be alive!) and streaming services, sans Netflix, seem to be coming around to the idea that they might co-exist with theaters in a pandemic world with more new-movie choices at home and in theaters. MGM/Amazon has the romantic drama Challengers coming this April, and they even delayed the film from the fall (rather than sending it direct to streaming) so that could have a shot at post-strike theatrical success. But it’s a bummer to see a movie like Road House work its way from cable rediscovery to big-star remake, made by a filmmaking team who obviously like it enough to lobby for a real release, and have it released with the same glorified-TV-movie vibes as the likes of Upgraded. Then again, maybe a cosmic rebalancing is in the works. Maybe the universe invented streaming just so 35 years later, Road House would have a chance to be underestimated again.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.