If you ever needed proof that the movie business can sometimes be unfairly cold and brutal, here it is: Global Road, the beloved film studio behind such hits as Hotel Artemis, A.X.L., and Show Dogs has filed for bankruptcy. Alright, so none of those moves can realistically be considered beloved, and they were all far from hits, but surely someone out there is disappointed that hard times have befallen the studio that gave us a forgettable John Wick knock-off, a similarly forgettable robot dog movie, and the family comedy that had to be re-cut to remove a scene that seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of the way sexual predators “groom” children.
As you may expect, none of those movies did particularly well at the box office (though Show Dogs at least made back its very modest budget), which played a big role in Global Road’s troubles. According to Variety, Global Road has spent the last few days selling off the rights to unrelated movies and laying off “dozens of people,” with various creditors—including Israel’s Bank Leumi and Viacom—suing for millions of dollars that Global Road owes. The company certainly didn’t make its life very easy, since it spent 2018 releasing a bunch of crummy movies, but this fall from grace was surprisingly immediate. The company was actually formed just a little over a year ago, when rich guy Donald Tang bought movie studio Open Road (which released a bunch of forgettable movies on its own).
In a perfect world, Global Road would be able to continue releasing bad movies without the suffocating constraints of capitalism, but our world is simply not that good.