Netflix has become somewhat infamous for picking up, to put it gently, lesser movies from other studios and throwing them into the ever-growing pile that is their streaming library. Well, it turns out that not even Netflix wanted to buy this particular critical and box office failure, as the streaming giant reportedly declined to purchase the fantastical comedy Harold and the Purple Crayon starring Zachary Levi.
News of Netflix’s rejection comes courtesy of a report by Bloomberg, who state that, in the months before Sony planned to release the movie, studio executives “called their peers at Netflix to see if the streaming service wanted to buy the movie.” While the report does say that “Sony executives liked the film just fine,” which is not exactly a ringing endorsement, “they worried it would fail to break through competing against two other blockbuster animated films, Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4, according to people familiar with the matter.” Of course, their worries were proven right.
As stated in the report, Netflix has picked up the likes of The Cloverfield Paradox and The Trial of the Chicago 7 in the past, with the streamer often acquiring movies that studio’s fear will “lose money in theaters.” The streaming platform, “eager to have studio-produced movies for viewers at home – even if they were cast-offs — would help them get their money back,” the report continues.
But Netflix “wasn’t interested this time,” and had zero desire to add Harold and the Purple Crayon to their collection “said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks were confidential.” This decision marks a potential shift for the streamer, who are reportedly now changing tact, striving to make better movies, and “Other studios’ leftovers don’t fit into the new strategy being developed by Dan Lin, who took over as Netflix’s film chairman earlier this year.”
Critics Found Little Magic in Harold and the Purple Crayon
Directed by Carlos Saldanha and based on the 1955 children’s book by Crockett Johnson, Harold and the Purple Crayon stars Zachary Levi, Lil Rel Howery, Benjamin Bottani, Jemaine Clement, Tanya Reynolds, Alfred Molina, and Zooey Deschanel. The movie inexplicably transforms the familiar four-year-old protagonist into the adult Shazam star Zachary Levi, who draws himself off the book’s pages and into the physical world where he continues to make anything come to life simply by drawing it.
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The adaptation was largely mauled by critics, and now has a green splat right next to its title and a 26% score on Rotten Tomatoes. “A high-concept treatment that misses out on the blissful simplicity of its source material, Harold and the Purple Crayon is a tribute to imagination that’s content to only color inside the lines,” the critics’ consensus reads.
However, while the movie was roundly rejected by critics as well as Netflix, audiences were much kinder to Harold and his magic crayon. The movie achieved a score of 91% on the ‘Popcornmeter,’ and is another in the long list of examples of movies that have demonstrated a serious divide between critics and audiences. Though, Levi’s recent political revelations may have also had something to do with it…