Presented out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, the Alex Gibney documentary Musk is triggering concern at Universal, which is slated to handle its distribution outside the United States and now finds itself under the (predictable) Damocles sword of pressure from Elon Musk’s lawyers. Hollywood Reporter, which had revealed the dilemma, now informs us which direction the studio is leaning, in a very precarious crossing from which exiting is more difficult than one might imagine.
Universal would be oriented to distribute Musk anyway, despite the threats
Here’s how it played out: a prior Hollywood Reporter scoop had revealed that Universal was considering dumping Alex Gibney’s Musk to avoid the legal attacks that tend to loom on the horizon (it was indeed utopian to hope that Elon would overlook nearly four hours that challenge his public image). In such cases the rights to the film would have to be returned to the production, which would then be free to seek another distributor: but not only would the move be financially painful, since a penalty would have to be paid to the production, the disclosure is also harming the studio from a communications standpoint, deemed not very courageous to back down. This isn’t the first time conflicts like this arise: recall, for example, that Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, a biopic of Sam Altman of ChatGPT, was sold by Amazon MGM Studios to Neon after Amazon had struck a commercial deal with OpenAI. In this case, however, there wouldn’t be a true conflict of interest, more a… quiet life. The novelty is that, precisely as a consequence of the public reaction to the Hollywood Reporter scoop, someone appears to be reconsidering, because Universal’s head of communications tells the outlet: “The studio remains committed to distributing the film in international cinemas. We are currently working on a strategy for its release.”
In short, Universal’s and Elon Musk’s lawyers are gearing up for a real battle, in one of those no-holds-barred clashes that people used to joke about when the contenders would be Musk and Zuckerberg. Musk will be released in American theaters by the indie label Bleecker Street, while HBO has already acquired the rights in 2023 for television and streaming.
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