By Emmanuel King
Brad Pitt, a script by Quentin Tarantino and David Fincher behind the camera was not enough. Regal and Cinemark, the second and third largest theater chains in the country, have declined to play Netflix's The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth on their IMAX screens when the film opens over Thanksgiving. The decision, first reported by Puck and confirmed across the trades on Friday, turns what was planned as a three-chain IMAX launch into something close to an AMC exclusive, and it lands less than a month before the film reaches theaters.
The release plan was a first for Netflix. The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth is set to open Wednesday, November 25, in an IMAX-exclusive theatrical run scheduled for two weeks, followed by its streaming premiere on Netflix on December 23, just 28 days later. With Regal and Cinemark out, the film is expected to play on roughly 550 screens worldwide, about 200 of them in the United States, nearly all of those at AMC, with a handful of smaller circuits and independent theaters filling out the map.
The objection is not the movie. It is the window. Regal said so plainly in a statement from Brooks LeBoeuf, its senior vice president of U.S. content: "Regal's premium screens are among our most valuable assets, and one of the factors we consider in how we allocate them is the level of commitment distributors make to the theatrical marketplace. Shortened theatrical windows have a direct impact on those decisions." Regal added that it will give its full IMAX support instead to The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, Lionsgate's prequel, which opens November 20 and is expected to be the number one film in the country over Thanksgiving.
The chains were able to say no because of how the deal came together. IMAX normally dictates what plays on its screens, and exhibitors have little say in the programming. On this release, IMAX came aboard as a partner late in the process, and it allowed theater chains to opt out of the booking if they chose. Regal operates roughly 100 IMAX screens in the United States and Cinemark closer to 20, so the two opt-outs remove about 120 premium screens from the film's footprint in a single stroke. Both chains would rather hold Hunger Games for a second weekend than hand their best auditoriums to a film their customers can watch at home four weeks later. According to TheWrap, an insider said Netflix anticipated that Regal and Cinemark might pass in this corridor for exactly that reason.
The shuffle behind the date tells the same story. The Thanksgiving IMAX slot originally belonged to Greta Gerwig's Narnia: The Magician's Nephew, which Netflix moved to February so the film could have a longer theatrical run and a clearer window on IMAX screens. Cliff Booth inherited the date, and with it the fight. Netflix has been inching toward theaters for a while now, and AMC has been its warmest partner: AMC screened the Stranger Things series finale at 231 locations last New Year's Eve, and this month Netflix reported box office numbers for the first time with the limited release of the Cannes drama La Bola Negra, which AMC took part in. There is a reversal buried in this week's news, too. In August 2025, Regal and Cinemark happily booked Netflix's KPop Demon Hunters sing-along while AMC declined it. This time, AMC is the chain carrying the Netflix film, and the other two are the ones walking away.
For the actors, this is the part of the business that now decides how their work is seen. Pitt is returning to the role that won him the Academy Award, playing Cliff Booth eight years on, in 1977, with the stuntman now working as a Hollywood fixer. It is his fourth film with Fincher, after Seven, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and it arrives with an unusual handoff at the top: Tarantino wrote the screenplay and Fincher directs it. The cast around Pitt includes Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Peter Weller, with Timothy Olyphant returning from the first film, and the score is by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. None of that pedigree moved the two chains, because the negotiation was never about the film. It was about the calendar.
So the biggest performance reunion of the holiday season will play its theatrical run mostly in one chain's houses, plus a few rooms with their own loyalties: Tarantino's New Beverly in Los Angeles, and his Vista Theatre, which is set to show it in 35mm in December. Everyone else gets it on December 23, on the same screen where they watch everything else. The window fight is usually described as a business story, but its real subject is the work itself: where a performance is experienced, and how big it is allowed to be.
Source: IndieWire and TheWrap reporting, October 30, 2026, on news first reported by Puck, with Deadline coverage of the exhibitor decision.