Scott Glassgold reveals the real reason Netflix lost his project to Amazon MGM
From Netflix flirtation to an Amazon MGM coup, Scott Glassgold pulls back the curtain on the twist-filled bidding sprint that decided where his next project landed.
Projects bounce around town all the time, but every now and then one actually sticks the landing. Case in point: producer Scott Glassgold just walked his horror movie 'Seasons' from Netflix over to Amazon MGM without letting it die on a spreadsheet. Given how often good ideas get strangled by development purgatory, that alone is worth a slow clap.
How 'Seasons' slipped at Netflix and landed at Amazon MGM
Glassgold, who has wrangled genre movies like 'Tarot' and the indie cult favorite 'Prospect', broke down the whole saga on The Town with Matt Belloni. And no, this was not some messy creative showdown. The project simply lost oxygen when the Netflix execs who bought it left the building. With its internal cheerleaders gone, the movie stalled and eventually reverted back to the producers.
"It was where it was meant to be."
That is Glassgold on finally parking the movie at Amazon MGM. The person who made that happen: Amazon MGM executive Alicia Holmes. She had chased 'Seasons' back when she was at MGM but lost the bidding war to Netflix. Years later, when the rights snapped back into play, Holmes moved fast and brought it in. Persistence beat paperwork.
The quick timeline
- MGM circles the project, but Netflix wins the initial bidding war.
- Netflix loses momentum after the execs who acquired it exit.
- Rights revert to the producers when the project stalls.
- Alicia Holmes, now at Amazon MGM, swoops in and sets it up there.
If that all sounds familiar, it is. Studios shift, regimes change, and movies get orphaned. Ask 'Superman Lives' or Guillermo del Toro's 'At the Mountains of Madness' how that goes. This one just got lucky - and had someone refusing to let it gather dust.
So what is 'Seasons'?
It is a supernatural horror story that did not come out of nowhere. Matt Query first posted it as a six-part hit on Reddit, then expanded it into the novel 'Old Country'. That viral-to-page-to-screen path usually breaks somewhere along the way. This one kept picking up speed and sparked a real Hollywood bidding war.
The setup: Harry, a veteran trying to settle into civilian life, and his wife Sasha score an idyllic ranch in rural Idaho after their surprisingly low offer is accepted. Neighborly welcome wagon? Not quite. Locals warn them the valley has a malignant presence, and survival depends on following a strict list of rules left by the previous owners.
The hook that makes it squirmy: the entity shows up with clockwork precision at the start of each of the four seasons. Every few months, a new round of dread. The calendar becomes the countdown.
Why the move makes sense
Given the story's momentum and that tightly wound concept, you can see why Glassgold thinks the movie ended up where it belongs. Amazon MGM is now the one bringing it to life. And in a business where projects often get buried by changing guard and ballooning budgets, this is one that crawled out of the grave and kept walking.
Curious where you land on this: did 'Seasons' dodge a bullet, or did Netflix let something special slip? Tell me.