Surprise! ‘The Green Knight’ Is Coming To Digital Earlier Than We Thought
Have you been unable to catchThe Green Knightin theaters yet or simply want to re-watch themasterful Arthurian retellingas soon as possible from the comforts of your own home? Well, the good news is you won’t have to wait “One year hence,” as the eponymous Green Knight sinisterly told Gawain. The bad news is that this unexpected development would seem to defeat the entire purpose of theone-night-only streaming eventthat we very recently reported on. Is this some test of character and resolve by forces beyond our comprehension? Probably not, although it kind of feels like it.
This news comes straight from indie studio A24 themselves, astheir official websitelists anAugust 19, 2021date for whenThe Green Knightwill be made available digitally and on-demand through traditional streaming platforms such as Apple, Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube, and more. As A24 puts it,
“This Thursday, August 19th David Lowery’s acclaimed Arthurian epic The Green Knight will be available everywhere you rent movies. StarringDev Patelas the legendary Sir Gawain — there’s no better company for a hot summer knight.”
A Questionable Call
Look, far be it from me to second-guess the bean-counters and marketing gurus who literally do this sort of thing for a living. That said, isn’t it pretty counterintuitive to tout an exclusive, one-time streaming event through the studio’s own proprietary rental platform…only to then turn around and just make the film available through the usual means a day later? Undoubtedly, there are alreadyquite a number of peoplewho’ve paid for tickets to watchThe Green Knightduring that “special” screening at the specific time, under the impression that it wouldn’t be available to stream for quite some time and unaware that they could’ve waited less than 24 hours to rent the movie and watch it whenever they wanted to.
On a larger scale, this isyet another exampleof studios rushing digital and video on demand options either soon after or during the theatrical run of a given movie. Clearly, there’s more money to be made for certain movies during this pandemic through viewers renting movies digitally than there is through the box office.The Green Knightcontinues to perform admirablyfor a movie of its budget and target audience, but industry folks are taking increasingly drastic measures to ensure that they wring as many profits out of new movies as they possibly can. There’s no telling what effect this will have ontheatrical windows moving forward, but this is clearly a developing situation with no concrete end in sight.
