You wouldn’t be wrong for thinking “The Woman in the Window” has already been released. The film was originally scheduled to be released in October 2019 but was delayed by Disney (who was set to release the film under its 20th Century Studios banner) until 2020. And of course, we know what happened next with COVID-19 displacing the film further. Now, it appears the Mouse House is ready to cut bait and move on, sending the film to a streamer instead of trying to navigate the ever-complicated 2021 release schedule.
According to Deadline, Disney is in talks with Netflix about the streaming service landing the distribution rights for “The Woman in the Window.” In this post-COVID-19 world, sending a mid-budget drama to a streamer seems pretty much par for the course, as we recently saw Apple TV+ land Tom Hanks’ “Greyhound” after Sony found itself in a similar situation. But there’s also a bit more to the ‘Woman in the Window’ story than just COVID-19 issues.
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Directed by Joe Wright, “The Woman in the Window” is led by actress Amy Adams and is based on a hugely popular novel of the same name. The film was being set up as a sort of “Girl on the Train”/“Gone Girl” thriller that could have major crossover appeal. Unfortunately, the film seems to have been plagued by behind-the-scenes issues in post-production with reports that Disney/20th Century Studios was not happy with the final cut of the film and delays beginning to chip away at whatever buzz was being built up.
Now, according to the report, Disney doesn’t see a streaming home for “The Woman in the Window” on Disney+ (naturally) and is more than content to just ship the thriller to Netflix and let the streaming platform worry about attracting an audience. This allows for the Mouse House to not try to figure out the best time to release an adult-skewing thriller that might suffer from negative reviews in a landscape that seems to be overflowing with big-name titles from 2020 that are being pushed to the fall and early 2021. All that to say, it’s going to be Netflix’s problem now.
Joining Adams in the film are Julianne Moore, Gary Oldman, Tracy Letts, Bryan Tyree Henry, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Anthony Mackie, and Wyatt Russell. The film follows the story of a woman who notices a strange, perhaps deadly, situation with one of her neighbors and involves the police. However, questions about the woman’s sanity begin to arise and things don’t necessarily appear to be what she thought.
It’s unclear what Netflix might do with “The Woman in the Window” as far as release dates are concerned. The streaming service recently said it has plenty of content to last through the rest of 2020 and into 2021, but with COVID-19 production delays, Netflix is in need of content to keep customers coming back for more as it is still unclear when Hollywood will really be back to “normal.”