Regal Cinemas and Cinemark recently announced they won’t screen Netflix’s The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, set for theatrical release in IMAX theaters this upcoming Thanksgiving weekend. While no one at Regal has commented, we now know why Cinemark won’t screen the film. In a recent mid-quarter earnings call, Cinemark CEO Sean Gable said the chain chose not to screen the film because of its very limited two-week theatrical window before being made available to stream on Netflix a week later. As Gable explains:
The Cliff Booth situation is an interesting one. We book all of our films on a case-by-case situation. In that particular situation, we always look at things through a long-term lens and how certain precedents and things we might do could affect longer-term industry dynamics. In this particular case, we don’t believe the proposed release model is constructive for the broader theatrical ecosystem, and it’s not aligned with what’s of the greatest interest in our theaters.
Gable then explained that the chain chose to prioritize the upcoming The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping in that same Thanksgiving weekend window in all its IMAX and other Premium Large Screen formats, as the film has already received strong pre-sales. The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth is written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by David Fincher. Brad Pitt returns as the titular character, first seen in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Elizabeth Debicki, Timothy Olyphant, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II also star.
Netflix is releasing it in select IMAX theaters on November 25, before making it available to stream on the service a month later, on December 25.
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