Doug Liman opens up on lack of pay for Road House

Doug Liman expressed his frustration at the lack of compensation for the release of Road House on Prime Video. In a conversation with IndieWire, he said, “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.”

He added, “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. 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.”

The plan to release it theatrically changed after Amazon acquired MGM.

According to Amazon, 50 million people watched Road House in the first fourteen days after its release on Prime Video, thus becoming its “most-watched produced film debut ever on a worldwide basis.”

However, Liman stated that he did not get a cent from the distributor after its massive success on the streaming platform. Liman was speaking about it as he promoted his upcoming Apple film The Instigators, starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck.