Across the pond, Alex Garland’s Annihilation is hitting the big screen this weekend. The film is his directorial follow-up to the critically-acclaimed Ex Machina with a cast boasting Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and arrives on a raft of positive reviews. But the UK is getting a different kind of release — back in December Paramount sold the international rights to Netflix, which has just debuted a trailer and poster for the film’s streaming release.
Portman stars as biologist Lena who ventures into ‘the Shimmer’, a mysterious quarantined zone on the US coast filled with mutated flora and fauna, where her husband went missing on a mission. The film is based on Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach book trilogy, with Garland on script duties as well as directing.
Garland has been vocal about his disappointment that the film is skipping cinemas in the UK and heading straight to Netflix. “We made the film for cinema,” he told Collider. “One of the big pluses of Netflix is that it goes out to a lot of people and you don’t have that strange opening weekend thing where you’re wondering if anyone is going to turn up and then if they don’t, it vanishes from cinema screens in two weeks. So it’s got pluses and minuses, but from my point of view and the collective of the people who made it – [it was made] to be seen on a big screen.”
Whether Garland likes it or not, you’ll be able to stream Annihilation on Netflix UK on Monday 12 March.
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