“First of all, I have no issue with streaming. We need streaming movies ’cause, we need writers to go to work and directors to go to work and actors to go to work and not every movie should be in a movie theater. So I’m a big advocate of TV series, of streaming movies, of theatrical movies, we should have it all,” Liman said in a new interview with IndieWire. “My issue on Road House is that we made the movie for MGM to be in theaters, everyone was paid as if it was going to be in theaters, and then Amazon switched it on us and nobody got compensated. Forget about the effect on the industry—50 million people saw Road House—I didn’t get a cent, Jake Gyllenhaal didn’t get a cent, [producer] Joel Silver didn’t get a cent. That’s wrong.”
Obviously, Liman and co. made a few cents on Road House, but it seems that there were possibly some tricky contract issues at play. If Liman initially negotiated a theatrical release, he would likely have had both an upfront fee and made money off of the backend post-release. The last-minute switcheroo is likely the reason behind Liman’s allegation that he, Gyllenhaal, and Silver “didn’t get a cent.” Lack of backend compensation was one of the big issues of the writers and actors strikes of 2023, and movies getting bumped to streaming (or completely disappeared) was a particular problem during and immediately after the pandemic. Scarlett Johansson sued Disney for similar complaints to Liman’s when Black Widow turned into a streaming release instead of theatrical.
No doubt Gyllenhaal has negotiated a better deal for himself to return to Road House 2. Similarly, Liman himself got a better deal working on The Instigators: “In the case of Apple, right from the beginning, we said we’re making this for streaming, our contracts compensated streaming, we’re all compensated for it being on streaming—there’s something called a streaming buyout—so Apple has been above-board from the beginning,” he told IndieWire. No doubt this is going to continue to be a talking point for creatives as Hollywood navigates a path forward in the streaming era.
