No, your eyes do not deceive you: There is a movie called Nightbitch tearing up the charts on Disney+, and it’s not the streaming service’s remake of Lady and the Tramp (though that does exist). Nightbitch actually only appears on the Disney site if you’ve bundled that streaming service with its sibling Hulu, where new movies from Fox and Fox Searchlight tend to land after or instead of running in theaters. The Amy Adams-starring Nightbitch is sort of a hybrid in that area: It probably seems like a straight-to-Hulu movie because damned if anyone had much of a chance to catch it during its nominal theatrical release in early December, where parent company Disney welcomed it into a handful of theaters and then refused to report its (likely meager) box office earnings.
Essentially, it received the kind of release Netflix gives its prestige titles to qualify them for awards (sometimes as more of a just-in-case or sign of contractual obligation than as a genuine expectation that trophies will be forthcoming). Netflix only ever seems to release movies in theaters grudgingly, however; Disney has gotten back into theatrical in a big way, even as it sends lots of Fox and Searchlight titles straight to Hulu. The difference-maker here is that at some point – probably around the time it was greenlit – someone quite reasonably saw the teaming of writer-director Marielle Heller and acting powerhouse Adams as a movie that might have Oscar, or at least Golden Globes potential.
On t.
