HomeWHYWhy Can't I Watch Sling Blade

Why Can’t I Watch Sling Blade

Nope; the Weinstein Brothers sold Miramax to The Walt Disney Company in 1993 (which subsequently divested of in most of its catalogue, which is currently owned by some division of Paramount), and while they maintained certain aspects of creative control and development options for some time after that they eventually left (or were forced out) and started The Weinstein Company in 2005. While the catalogue of many TWC films is in limbo (albeit more because the company went bankrupt in 2018 rather than ownership issues per se) and all of their in-development productions stopped cold once the ‘revelations’ about Harvey Weinstein came to public notice (although so widely known within the industry that people like Tina Fey and Ricky Gervaise openly ridiculed Weinstein many years before), popular Miramax films like Good Will Hunting, Rounders, Chocolat, The Gangs of New York, et cetera, are widely available. Even films produced and distributed under the Dimension Films label which the Weinsteins took with them to TWC are still widely available through distribution agreements.

I suspect the reason Sling Blade is not more widely available is because while it was a critical darling it wasn’t a very popular movie (it made a profit because of its tiny production budget and mostly word-of-mouth promotional campaign, but not enough to make a modern film executive even read past the title today) and there are relatively few people other than cinema nerds who would seek it out today. While people thought that streaming services would really revive classic moves through availability beyond independent ‘art film’ cinemas and The Criterion Collection, in reality services like Netflix and HBOMax have hewed toward a formula of really popular films and algorithmically-approved clones, while Amazon Prime seems to largely buy up catalogues of old films on the cheap, and Apple TV is still pouring massive amounts of money into shows that look great but often have no substance whatsoever. A film like Sling Blade that doesn’t really have a built-in audience of even casual film enthusiasts like the way that, say, the collective work of Coen Brothers or Fellini does, just falls between the crack even though online distribution has essentially negligible distribution costs.

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For what it is worth, you can find the short film that proceeded it, Some Folks Call It A Sling Blade, on Youtube.com. Frankly, I think the short film format is really better for this kind of character study anyway. Sling Blade has some great performances but there isn’t really much of a plot, and the more than two hour run time really just kind of drags in parts for a story that would barely justify a 90 minute runtime.

Stranger

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