Netflix usually reserves its rare forays into actual brick and mortar theaters for attempts to curry favor with the Academy—if not outright bribes, aimed at big-name filmmakers like Greta Gerwig, who it’s hoping to lure into making prestige-loaded films that can then eventually be shoved into the company’s ever-hungry content servers. Which is why it’s kind of surprising to learn that Charlie Vs. The Chocolate Factory—a recently announced animated film in which Taika Waititi voices a version of Willy Wonka who served time for the body horror crimes he committed against England’s children—is now getting a full theatrical run from the streamer.
At first, we were wondering if the company was hoping to squeeze a Best Animated Picture nomination out of the film, which is being directed by Jared Stern and Elaine Bogan, and which co-stars Kit Connor as a very different, much harder Charlie than that poor sap Bucket. But, no: This is no token two-week run, meant to very obviously satisfy the Oscar requirements for consideration.
Charlie Vs. The Chocolate Factory will,
per Deadline, run in theaters from November 5, 2027 to December 22, a full 47 days—like actual movies get!—before landing on Netflix.
It’s almost enough to make you wonder if the streamer isn’t up to something, honestly. Netflix made a lot of noises, back when it was trying to buy Warner Bros., about its respect for the theatrical window (despite years of showing this to not really be the case), and public skepticism on that score (
including from guys like James Cameron) was one of the things that eventually helped screw up the sale. By adhering to the window here—and with a few other recent projects—it seems possible that Ted Sarandos and company are hoping to defang such future complaints the next time they get hungry to chow down on a traditional movie studio. (Or maybe they’re just still smarting from losing a lot of potential box office cash by not sticking
Kpop Demon Hunters into theaters for two months before it began to stream.)
Anyway, that’s a lot of industry wankery for a movie where teenager Charlie Paley launches a heist to rob Willy Wonka just as he’s being released from prison for the crime of turning a young girl into a blueberry. And, sure, you could argue that that idea sounds like the first piece of fan-fiction everybody writes in their first 20 minutes on the internet—but we would have said that about
Coyote Vs. Acme, too, and that turned out great, so who are we to judge? Meanwhile, Netflix has also rolled out a more full cast list for the movie, adding Nicola Coughlan, Charithra Chandran, Samson Kayo, Christopher Chung, Kate Winslet, and Helena Bonham Carter to its roster.
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