Speaking of big, the studio’s head of global marketing, Sue Kroll, indicated that she intends to use Amazon’s global reach to launch “bespoke [marketing] campaigns” that play out across the company’s many and varied platforms. “Thanks to Amazon’s reach, we can scale that like never before,” she said.
“Tonight is truly the beginning of a new chapter for us,” echoed Kevin Wilson, Amazon’s head of theatrical distribution. “It kind of feels like the first day of school—except we did our homework.”
Modest beginnings
While Amazon is promising 15 theatrical releases for 2027, the studio’s output is considerably smaller for 2025. The first sentence in the studio’s “new chapter” will be written by The Accountant 2, arriving in multiplexes on April 25 with Ben Affleck reprising his role from the 2016 original.
Affleck previously collaborated with Amazon on his 2023 sports drama Air, which scored a theatrical release after initially being slated for a streaming bow. The movie went on to gross $90 million globally before becoming a Prime Video tile.
After April, moviegoers will have to wait until Oct. 10 for Amazon’s next big screen offering, the Luca Guadagnino-directed After the Hunt starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edebiri. And like Affleck, several of those individuals have a history with the company.
Guadagnino directed the Zendaya tennis movie Challengers that Amazon released theatrically last year to great acclaim and solid returns. Meanwhile, Roberts starred in the first season of the Prime Video series Homecoming, while Edebiri headlined the riotous 2023 high school comedy Bottoms, which was made under the storied Orion Pictures label now owned by Amazon MGM.
Even as Amazon executives expressed a commitment to theatrical exhibition, the studio hasn’t completely abandoned streaming premieres. On May 1, Another Simple Favor—Paul Feig’s sequel to his 2018 cult favorite once again starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively—will bypass multiplexes and take its bow on Prime Video.
Speaking with Indiewire recently, Feig said there were no hard feelings about going straight to streaming. “Look, as a filmmaker, do you like to have your movie on the big screen? Yes,” he remarked. “But there’s so many fans of this film. People are going to get together in their houses and watch it as a group—that’s my favorite thing.”