The new Road House reboot is heading straight to streaming instead of theaters. The reason? A weird budget, MGM acquisition, and more.

It's typical for disagreements about how a movie is released, but it's quite a bit when it comes to this hard-punching flick, Variety reports. And it resulted in the director even boycotting the unreleased film.

So how did it get so ugly? Let's start with the budget.

Road House and the budget 

The whole debacle started back in November of 2021 when Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy ran MGM. At that time, they were negotiating with director Doug Liman. Plus, they were in talks with Jake Gyllenhaal to star in the film. John Silver, the original producer for Patrick Swayze's version, was also brought in.

MGM was all about making big-screen movies, but streaming came into play when Amazon closed its $8.5 billion acquisition of the studio.

De Luca and Abdy left in July of 2022. At this point, Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke got the film back into motion. It led to negotiations with the filmmakers and Gyllenhaal and a choice. Either make the film for $60 million and get released into theaters, or take $85 million and have it just stream.

The streaming won out.

A theatrical release was still wanted

Silver kept pushing for a theatrical release and also grew combative. So much so that the studio threatened not to have anything to do with him. Salke eventually did boot Silver from the film due to verbal abuse of staffers. Also, he was released from working on a Mark Wahlberg film, Play Dirty. Bryan Freedman was brought in to replace him.

Liman wrote an open letter about boycotting his film with no theatrical release happening because Amazon had “no interest in supporting cinemas.”

Still, despite all this, there are high hopes that Road House will be an epic fight film that will boost Amazon. Who knew a movie about fighting would have such a battle behind the scenes?

Road House will be available for streaming on Prime Video on March 8.