Highly Anticipated A24 Documentary on Jan. 6 Mysteriously Pulled from Amazon
AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File
The Sixth, a documentary from the super-hot studio A24 by the award-winning couple Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine, was set to have a same-day streaming release when it hit movie theaters on Friday. But seemingly without any explanation, those plans changed, and it may not be available to stream for free until after the general election in November.
Politico’s Michael Schaffer wrote about the shift in strategy on Friday, and he questioned why such a highly-anticipated, well-received documentary about one of the most important political events in modern history — one that may very well influence some of the viewing audience — has apparently been quietly kept out of the spotlight.
Schaffer reported that The Sixth, despite getting a “rapturous response at a standing-room-only D.C. screening,” was previously not listed on A24’s site, nor was it promoted on social media. He reached out to A24 to ask why, and after the call, the film now appears on the site. But it’s the backpedaling on the streaming availability of the film that raises questions:
People who were interviewed for the film were also told that it would be streaming on its release day as part of Amazon’s Prime Video service. But now that’s not happening either, and may not happen until after the election. An Amazon Prime spokesperson told me that no date had ever been scheduled, and the issue would be determined in due course by A24 and Amazon. You’ll still be able to rent it as of May 3 on Apple, Amazon and a variety of other platforms, but the lack of a distribution channel like Prime tends to severely constrict the attention to a movie.
One of the subjects of The Sixth was Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who told Shaffer:
“I don’t know exactly what is behind the sudden reticence of showing and promoting the film,” Raskin said. The national climate was on his mind: “I think it would absolutely sweep the country if it were made available to the public easily. But former President Donald Trump and right-wing forces in the country are on a daily basis trying to rewrite the history of what happened.”
Schaffer wrote:
[E]ven though The Sixth is about workaday Washingtonians grappling with the riot, it’s hard to walk away from any Jan. 6 artifact without feeling the real divide over Trump. You can see why any big company might want to avoid something likely to enrage 40 percent of viewers (not to mention the man currently leading several presidential polls).
That’s a notion that ought to concern Americans of all stripes. A shared set of facts is pretty essential to a functioning society. We stopped getting our facts from the same place long ago, but burying something because it might anger people during election season seems bad in a new way.
Schaffer did receive a response from Amazon Prime, whose spokesperson “dismissed” the notion that the streaming decision was political. It also noted that the service had other January 6-related media available on the site, including Alexandra Pelosi’s The Insurrectionist Next Door. But when it came to why there was so much mixed messaging and/or reversal on making The Sixth more widely available, there was no definitive answer from anyone.
Read the full article at Politico.
