Sony asked Netflix if it wanted to buy a Zachary Levi catastrophe and Netflix was like ‘nope’

Despite what the popular entertainment landscape and its doomsayers would have you believe, Hollywood is pretty rife with bold strategies. The key is in how we define “bold.” For instance, casting Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man way back in the aughts was a bold strategy that changed the game for the better, whereas signing off on the script of Harold and the Purple Crayon was a bold strategy in the sense that you’d have to be completely delusional to do such a thing.

This was precisely what Sony did, but apparently they didn’t actually commit to the Zachary Levi-led nothing-burger in full. According to Bloomberg, Sony executives made contact with Netflix to see if they wanted to buy Harold and the Purple Crayon, as they believed that it would lose money at the theater by competing with Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4, thereby making streaming the more financially-safe destination for the film. Netflix declined the offer, and precisely for the reason you think.

In other words, Harold and the Purple Crayon was rejected because it is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination. It claims to champion the idea of believing in oneself, and yet it doesn’t believe that children deserve more in their media than sugary CGI spectacles and incoherent shenanigans for the sake of incoherent shenanigans.

Per the same Bloomberg article, Netflix is interested in changing the way streaming is perceived by the industry at large. It wants to fight back against the notion of “straight-to-streaming” being a pejorative, and it can’t do that if it agrees to take on whatever slop is tossed its way. Netflix wants to dispel the narrative that films cannot have a cultural impact without the theatrical experience, or that a theatrical release is the only proof positive of quality.

Consider Barbenheimer. Did Barbie‘s and Oppenheimer‘s high-gross and cultural impact come only from the provocative nature of its deeply emotional ideas, ideas which viewers would then actively carry with them, forever? Let’s not kid ourselves; the Barbenheimer cultural impact began and ended with FOMO, regardless of how great both movies were; it was a cultural touchstone in the summer of 2023 to attend one, or both, in person at the cineplex.

Meanwhile, Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-winner A Fantastic Woman — a Chilean film about a transgender woman — was the catalyst for transgender rights becoming a point of Chilean national pride, and resulted in bills being passed that expanded the freedoms of Chilean trans people. A Fantastic Woman‘s box office haul? A measly $3.7 million; hardly what you’d call a “cultural impact,” and yet the film’s influence was far more palpable and nutritious than that of many other, more lucrative theatrical releases.

Perhaps, then, we should start calling the so-called “cultural impact” of the theatrical release for what it actually is; a vapid feeling of importance, rather than actually being important. There’s pros and cons to both streaming films and theatrical releases, for sure, but let’s actually be honest about them.

At the end of the day, we should just be thankful that Netflix is going to (allegedly) prioritize good movies from here on out; a goal that Sony would be wise to follow, lest we get encumbered with more films like Harold and the Purple Crayon.