Next week, on June 7, the entertaining and highly acclaimed geek-goes-undercover-as-contract-killer screwball romantic thriller “ Hit Man ,” starring It Dude of the moment Glen Powell, drops on Netflix . But this weekend, in case you hadn’t noticed, the movie opened “in theaters.” How many theaters? If you use your hands and feet to count, you’ll have most of them covered.
Netflix, the company that did for streaming what McDonald’s did for fast food (made it everyone’s new normal), always likes to make a big show of when it’s playing a movie “in theaters.” It has long amused me to see entertainment journalists get suckered into this public-relations gambit, for the simple reason that so many of them live in New York and L.A.
, where the tiny number of theaters occasionally playing a Netflix movie tend to be. A film opens five blocks from your house, and you think, “Yes, there it is! In theaters. ” But seriously, you could fit the number of people who will see “Hit Man” in theaters onto the head of a pin.
It’s a Netflix movie, and it has been ever since Netflix bought it at the Venice Film Festival last September for $20 million. I can’t say how many people will watch “Hit Man” on Netflix, and maybe that number will be huge. Or maybe, as is often the case, we won’t know.
(Netflix is a cagey monolith when it comes to revealing viewership numbers.) But here’s something you can take to the bank: When “Hit Man” starts streaming next wee.
