Amazon has reportedly paid $12 million to acquire the US rights for The Big Sick at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The film incited a bidding war between Amazon, Netflix, Fox Searchlight, and Sony Pictures after its premiere this past Friday. As far as I’m aware, this is the most Amazon has paid for a film, beating out last year’s $10 million purchase of Manchester By The Sea, which has since won a Golden Globe and grossed close to $40 million.
The Big Sick is directed by Michael Showalter and produced by Judd Apatow. The film was written by Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani based on their real love story. Kumail, a comedian from Pakistan, and Emily, a grad student, struggle with love as their cultures clash. After Emily contracts an illness, they deal with the crisis between her parents, his family, and their love.
@AFTVnews
AFTVnews
While I appreciate Amazon’s effort to broaden the Movie and TV show offer on their platform I personally see this kind of bidding wars as damaging to better distribution of the digital content (be it Movies, TV Shows, music, books, games or anything else distributable in digital form). Monopoly and division to region markets might (in short term) benefit the license holders and distributors but what we really need is to the whole approach to the digital distribution to change (as it has with music mainly) to be “global” to benefit the customers and in long run the producers / distributors of the content as well.
Nice. I heard this was good, but it’s called “The Big Sick” (not Stick)
Whoops! Thanks, I’ve fixed the post.