Amazon and Netflix Play on Big Screen

Last year, Netflix’s Beasts of No Nation arrived in an unorthodox way. It received a token release in theaters for awards eligibility (star Idris Elba won a Screen Actors Guild award), but it was meant to be watched at home, a sign of streaming services’ growing ambition.

This summer, Netflix will stream The Do-Over (May 27), starring Adam Sandler, and The Fundamentals of Caring (June 24), in which Paul Rudd plays caretaker to a teen (Craig Roberts) with muscular dystrophy. Amazon, perhaps stung by poor box office for Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq (which arrived online an unusually brief two months after its debut in theaters), is giving some of its movies breathing room. At some point this summer you will be able to stream spring movies Amazon distributed, like the Austen adaptation Love & Friendship. More traditionally, you can see Woody Allen’s Café Society at the cineplex starting July 15, or wait the standard three months until Amazon streams it. Austen, Allen, Rudd and Sandler: together they signify that new technology still needs familiar names to define it.

–D.D.