Greetings, and welcome to a fresh new edition of The Monitor, WIRED’s entertainment news roundup. This time around we have some news about a dust-up between AMC Theatres and Universal Pictures, and some good news for—and from—Netflix. Let’s get going.
AMC Theatres Axes Universal After It Releases Trolls World Tour on Demand
If you’ve been anywhere near a TV lately—and you probably have—you likely saw that, amidst theater closings and coronavirus lockdowns, Universal Pictures released Trolls World Tour via video-on-demand a few weeks back. Well, AMC Theatres, which likely would’ve offered the movie if they’d been allowed to open, wasn’t too happy with that. In a letter published in The Hollywood Reporter, the cinema chain said that as a result of the incident, it will no longer feature any Universal picture.
“This policy is not aimed solely at Universal out of pique or to be punitive in any way, it also extends to any movie maker who unilaterally abandons current windowing practices absent good faith negotiations between us, so that they as distributor and we as exhibitor both benefit and neither are hurt from such changes,” AMC chairman Adam Aron write in the letter. “Currently, with the press comment today, Universal is the only studio contemplating a wholesale change to the status quo. Hence, this immediate communication in response.”
That comment Aron is referring to
