Handkerchief knot. Reminder on your cell phone. Crosses on the calendar in the kitchen. Do as you wish, but note the date of June 27, Thursday. When will Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” be released in theaters?. If you go now, the weekend is also saved. On June 27th, after some back and forth – the IMDB “bible” still reports the date of May 30th – we will see on Italian screens what Netflix subscribers in the United States, Australia, Great Britain, India, South Korea and Mexico are experiencing enjoying from June 7th.
Only three weeks, but they could undermine the Italian success of an amazing, funny, multi-genre film, with the adorable actor Glen Powell. Six minutes of applause at the Venice Film Festival (where it was out of competition). Vulture writes, we only registered the enthusiasm of everyone who was at the Lido. On Metacritic, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal give it one hundred points out of one hundred. Total Film promises “a damn good time at the movies”. And we all know how much cinema, also understood as a “cinema hall”, needs films like this. Moreover, very rare.
How did it end up on Netflix? Vulture wonders. Closer by, we ask ourselves: and why in Italy we don’t see it on Netflix, but in cinemas twenty days late, in the last week or so before the “summer closure”? Netflix’s choices are always mysterious – in the sense that they prefer to stay silent, throwing out a few numbers every now and then. The Italian distribution Bim, if asked for explanations, refers to “the international”: a mythical creature that also has provisions for Italian cinemas.
In this time of famine, a comic-tender-criminal-brilliant film like Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” is precious. Keeping it in stock for about ten months is also a waste for Netflix, which paid the handsome sum of 20 million – TWENTY MILLION dollars – against a production budget that did not reach 9. At the Toronto Film Festival, scoring a record. With the promise to send it to theaters that Netflix puts in the contract.
The lucky ones were few and all in the United States on May 24th. Probably with the “four wall” model: rent some cinemas, keep the takings, allow the director – or the actor, the amazing Glen Powell – to participate in the Oscars. While the viewer knows almost nothing about it.
Vulture questioned John Sloss, CEO of Cinetic Media, which has financed Richard Linklater’s films since “Slacker” in 1990: “A strong resistance, almost a malaise, emerges when it comes to distribution in cinemas”. Even for a commercial film, even a date movie like this (you can’t take your girlfriend to see “Planet of the Apes”, even if perhaps the invitation to the cinema is for ultra-boomer). Distributors are cautious with offers, and on the other hand there was the offer from Netflix: a historic figure for the United States, Australia, Great Britain.
Also historic because the film is defined in the Vulture title as “Anti-Algorithm”. Romantic and gangster, ironic and tender: it seems difficult that Netflix had the category to fill (and it seems even more difficult that cinemas have let a “four-quadrant” film slip away: capable of interesting males and females, old and – perhaps a little less – young.
Generations raised with the cult of authenticity, and incapable of irony – it has become the eighth deadly sin – will probably struggle to appreciate it. But it’s their problem: they’re trying to chase all the fun out of life and cinema, they’ll grow old cursing themselves with tweets.
