Since earning a six-minute standing O during its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, writer-director Richard Linklater’s Hit Man has become one of festival season’s most ecstatically reviewed films. The character-driven comedic noir — which stars Glen Powell as a mild-mannered poseur assassin who sets up sting operations for the New Orleans PD — is being described as a “crowd-pleaser” with a career-defining “movie-star turn” by Top Gun: Maverick supporting player Powell (who also co-wrote Hit Man and served as a producer). That is to say: Unlike so many minutely observed, independently financed, take-your-medicine-style dramas that force contemplation of uncomfortable yet socially redemptive subjects at Venice and the Toronto International Film Festival (where the movie made North American landfall on September 11), Hit Man pulses with mass appeal; it has been anointed by cultural first responders as an unapologetically entertaining, outrightly commercial offering with the strong potential to put butts in theater seats.
Which makes Netflix’s eye-watering $20 million distribution rights deal for Hit Man that was announced on Monday all the more confounding. After initial interest from multiple buyers (“mostly the streaming services,” an article in The Hollywood Reporter archly notes), ardor from theatrical distributors all but evaporated. Never mind that Linklater himself has publicly groused about the “suddenly it’s there … so what?” rollout for his last movie on Netflix, the animated coming-of-age drama Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, which premiered to warm reviews at SXSW last year. Asked about the state of American filmmaking around Hit Man’s Venice premiere, the director said, “It feels like it’s gone with the wind — or gone with the algorithm.”
“Apollo 10 ½, I loved that whole experience,” Linklater later elaborated to the AP. “It was such a personal experience. And then one day it showed up on a platform with no fanfare. It’s always kind of sad when you realize even your friends don’t know your film is out.”
To be sure, Hit Man’s Netflix deal includes a “theatrical component.” And toward that end, Big Red is known for “four-walling” certain titles: a process by which a studio or streamer rents out movie theaters and takes in all the box-office revenue — technically fulfilling a multiplex-rollout obligation to a picky director or for Oscars consideration but seldom furthering any public perception that the movie has been “theatrically released.”
John Sloss, CEO of the management and advisory firm Cinetic Media, is arguably indie filmdom’s foremost deal-maker, a Sundance stalwart who has set up financing and distribution arrangements for Linklater since his 1990 directorial debut, Slacker. To hear the rainmaking sales agent/entertainment lawyer/manager/producer tell it, Linklater’s decision to put out Hit Man on the Service rather than through a studio distributor ultimately boiled down to stark market realities of the post-COVID/dual-strike era. In a nutshell: Studios are increasingly timid about scheduling anything but megabudget event tentpole films for the inside of air-conditioned auditoriums. And it would be fair to argue that the way Hit Man’s distribution rights went, so goes the industry. “There is a collective reluctance or a malaise when it comes to theatrical commitment,” Sloss tells Vulture. “This is a commercial movie. Rick calls it a ‘sexy, date-night movie.’ It was surprising for me. It was eye-opening.”
How did this deal go down? Who was in the bidding? And why was it the right move to go with Netflix?
John Sloss: I’m not really going to get into that kind of detail. I’m not going to list the companies that were interested and what the bidding was. I will say this: This process proved to me that the traditional distributors in general remain very cautious and uncertain with regard to theatrical.
Given the ecstatic reviews that came out of the festivals, everyone was talking about the theatrical potential of Hit Man. Then you have Linklater talking about how Apollo 10 ½ just kind of appeared on Netflix with very little promotion. Why go back to Netflix if that situation wasn’t ideal for his last movie?
I mean, look, the deal for this film was a very, very good deal. For the U.S.-U.K.-Australia, it is close to historic. It’s not like the market’s dead or anything.
I understand. Money talks.
You and I, and maybe Rick and Glen, can all feel like this is a natural theatrical film, but how I started this conversation is really the takeaway here. The marketplace, the distributors, are very skittish about theatrical at the moment for, I would argue, all but the biggest movies. That’s not to say there wasn’t significant interest; don’t get me wrong. But I think in a time before the pandemic and before the strike, they would have looked differently at it.
Did Rick give you any sort of instruction, like, “I would prefer to go with a theatrical distributor over a streamer on this?”
Rick has a very good relationship with Netflix. He did Apollo 10 ½ with them. But he has a long history of supporting theatrical. He founded the Austin Film Society, they own a theater in Austin, and he is a cinephile. He’s a huge supporter of the theatrical experience.
But in particular, there was an interview he gave to the AP where it seems like he’s not exactly bullish on the algorithm business.
Look, suffice it to say, this was a conversation that was continued directly with Netflix in the context of this negotiation.
He let it be known that he wasn’t exactly thrilled with the way they rolled his last movie out?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think he let it be known that he had some concerns.
Okay. So what does it mean then that there’s gonna be a “theatrical component” to the release of Hit Man?
It remains to be seen, but I think the feeling is … I don’t know what level it’ll be on, but I think they’re going to lean into it. Netflix understands the opportunity here with the way Glen’s career is going, with the commercial appeal of this film, and so I think that it’ll be closer to a game-day decision. But the indications we’ve gotten is that they’re going to support this theatrically.
Are we talking about an awards push for Glen? And are you at liberty to talk about when the movie might come out?
I don’t know when the movie’s going to come out. This is a very high-quality film here. Because it’s a comedy, it’s not the first thing you think of when you think of awards, but I think there are certain categories that they would be well-advised to look at carefully. But that’s not what drove this.
What effect, if any, did the strike have on this sale? It would seem that with new productions being halted right now, people are scrambling for new content.
It’s certainly reasonable to assume that since we’re facing the possibility of up to nine months without really any new production, completed films would have a disproportionate positive value. But in my sense that is not fully how this thing played out and it really makes one think about the current state of the theatrical marketplace and the general disarray of distributors.
On the one hand, there’s that skittishness. But on the other, there’s this desire for new product to put out.
All of the elements that would lead to a vibrant marketplace for finished films are there. It’s there. And it didn’t necessarily feel that way in the moment.
