Greenland is releasing via premium video-on-demand in December, ending a streak of theatrical delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. First scheduled for a mid-June release in theaters, the apocalyptic disaster starring Gerard Butler (the Fallen franchise) and Morena Baccarin (Deadpool) shifted to July 30 and then August 14 to avoid Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. Following theater showings in Belgium, France, and Scandinavia, Greenland moved to September 25 stateside but abandoned that date after Wonder Woman 1984 traded an early October window for Christmas Day. Listings that surfaced on Amazon earlier this month indicated Greenland would forgo theaters and go live for purchase starting October 13 and for rental two weeks later on October 27.
Greenland releases to PVOD on December 18, priced at $19.99 for a 48-hour rental. “Greenland has been a hit everywhere in the world, so it’s exciting to bring it to American audiences on PVOD,” Adam Fogelson, chairman of the STXfilms Motion Picture Group, said in a statement.
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Directed by Ric Roman Waugh (Snitch, Angel Has Fallen) and produced by Basil Iwanyk (The Town, the John Wick franchise), Greenland follows a family in their fight for survival as a planet-killing comet races towards Earth.
Greenland is the latest film to skip U.S. theaters and premiere on streaming, following similar trajectories for the Janelle Monรกe-starring horror Antebellum, Sarah Paulson’s Run, acquired by Hulu, and Kevin Bacon-Amanda Seyfried horror You Should Have Left. Disney experimented with PVOD by releasing the big-budgeted Mulan to Disney+, via its $29.99 priced Premier Access model, in September; Pixar’s Soul will release to the streaming service on Christmas without any additional charge to subscribers.
“If we talk about it at its basics, I just loved this idea of a family,” Butler told Entertainment Weekly about the sci-fi disaster thriller. “It starts off with a feeling of an almost simple family drama: a family struggling to get back together, the husband has just moved back into the house, the son is not sure what is going on, and you feel like it’s going one way but in the background, something more sinister is developing. And then through their drama, you’re thrown into this much larger, epic, overpowering scenario that they have no control over, and it becomes this fight for survival, but with a family you’re already grounded with and care about.”
He continued, “It becomes this road trip to save themselves, and also what they experience along the way and how is the rest of humanity dealing with this. But ultimately, it feels like this journey into love and support and connections and understanding what really is important in life. And I felt like that was a very powerful and inspiring message.”
Greenland is available to rent on PVOD starting on December 18.
