The Rivals of Amziah King premiered at SXSW in March 2025 to critical acclaim and a huge 97% on Rotten Tomatoes (it’s since settled at 89%). It was the directorial follow-up to Andrew Patterson’s celebrated 2019 debut, The Vast of Night, and had an extremely popular Oscar-winning actor in the lead role. It even had cross-generational star power in Kurt Russell and Cole Sprouse. But despite all of this, nobody in Hollywood had the guts to take a “risk” on distributing it. In fact, I’ll hazard a guess and say most of you haven’t even heard of it.
The movie, which single-handedly enticed Matthew McConaughey back to live-action productions after a five-year break, follows a morally ambiguous and dry-witted Oklahoma honey maker who spends his time tending to his bees (as you do), jamming with local Bluegrass musicians, and reconnecting with his foster daughter (played by up-and-coming Native American actress Angelina LookingGlass). But when an underground criminal conspiracy threatens his farm, things take a sinister turn for the eponymous Amziah King.
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While it has some second-act sagginess, The Rivals of Amziah King is a unique and enjoyable movie shot with sun-drenched flair; a genre-bending rollercoaster ride, blending a dirt-noir aesthetic with southern hospitality and outrageously funny, gruesome, and spectacularly cinematic disasters. Think Logan Lucky meets No Country for Old Men, but far less creepy.
Fifteen years ago, I would have called McConaughey’s performance a revelation. His quiet intensity, laconic charm, and superbly timed one-liners delivered with understated swagger in his trademark drawl are hypnotic. Post-McConaissance, however, this is simply a return to his proven form, which only makes the reluctance to distribute the movie even more perplexing.
You could blame it on algorithmic risk-aversion, economic hardship, or distribution bottlenecks. Some also say that the producers, Black Bear and Heyday, were asking for too much money. But whichever way you look at it, the brutal reality is that studio execs refused to spend on a mid-budget indie that didn’t come with a pre-packaged audience. As a result, a decent movie with multiple bankable A-listers was left dangling in the breeze like a pair of geriatric testicles at a nudist retreat.
While Madman Entertainment promptly saw the value in picking up the distribution rights for Amziah in Australia and New Zealand, US distribution was an entirely different matter, which significantly slowed down the film’s global release.
Black Bear, the film’s financiers and co-producers – who also backed The Imitation Game and Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare – eventually had to launch its own distribution arm (headed by former Lionsgate exec, David Spitz) just to get it into US cinemas. This bold move may have raised a firm middle finger at a broken business model, but it also poses a bigger question: Is Hollywood’s addiction to safe IP depriving audiences of quality cinema, and shooting itself in the foot in the process?
Studios seem to have no issue blowing US$200 million+ on comic book movies and hundreds of millions more on marketing them. Yet investing a fraction of that to distribute a mid-budget movie like The Rivals of Amziah King domestically is apparently too hard basket.
While on the surface it may seem like a safe bet to back anything with a fan base, profits are far from guaranteed.
For every billion-dollar behemoth like A Minecraft Movie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, there’s also a ginormous failure like The Marvels, which, at an estimated net loss of US$237 million (~AU$336 million), remains the single lowest-grossing film in the entire history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The risk is the same at the end of the day. In fact, you could argue that gambling on a low-to-mid-budget indie is small potatoes by comparison to the disastrous egg-on-your-face financial and reputational loss of a big-budget flop.
In a world where even an Academy Award winner like Matthew McConaughey can’t sell a project, the system is clearly broken. And reflects the steady degradation of the mid-budget movie, the exact category that propped up nineties and noughties cinema with hits like A Time to Kill, Primal Fear, and even How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. All but eradicated in favour of bloated IP-centric tentpoles… But the tides could be turning.
Black Bear’s move was brave, yes. But it builds on a playbook perfected by indie powerhouses like A24, Neon, and STX – companies established to bypass major studios and bring original storytelling directly to audiences. It’s how two low-budget indies like Obsession and Backrooms (the latter distributed by A24) could amass over half a billion Australian dollars on budgets of less than US$1 million (~AU$1.4 million) and US$10 million (~AU$14 million), respectively.
Of course, low-budget indie horrors don’t present the same financial challenges as your average mid-budget movie, which makes direct comparisons a little unfair. But films like A24’s Civil War (grossing ~AU$180 million off a ~AU$70 million budget) and Everything Everywhere All At Once (~AU$200 million from a ~AU$20-35 million budget) also indicate that the audience appetite for quality and originality is there.
Yes, we all enjoy a good switch-your-brain-off comfort watch, but cinemas and streaming platforms are oversaturated with high-volume, unimaginative content; we could now be witnessing a cultural shift towards original storytelling as the ultimate cinematic luxury for a wildly underestimated audience, willing to step out of their homes for something other than superheroes… they just need the chance.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a time and a place for comic book blockbusters. But surely it’s only a matter of time until suit-laden Hollywood bean-counters realise that not only do audiences want to engage with original content, they can make some serious coin while delivering it?
Mainstream Hollywood simply needs to wake up and accept that Black Bear, A24, and their ilk are tapping into a market with actual audience demand. It can either resist and keep taking big swings on hit-or-miss, budget-sucking behemoths or diversify its portfolio with some high-ROI originals. There can, and should, be room for both.
The Rivals of Amziah King is showing in cinemas across Australia from August 20, 2026.