Why is A24 Hiding ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’?

I received the usual late-year FYC screeners from A24 earlier in the week, but a title was missing: Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth.” What gives?

There have barely been any press screenings since the film premiered at the New York Film Festival in October and some of my fellow journalist colleagues are growing frustrated about the whole thing.

Roger Friedman had a piece about this fiasco the other other, writing “Few have seen it or even heard about it. When I’ve mentioned it to civilians, so to speak, they’ve never heard of it. Even Ruth Negga, who’ll be playing Lady Macbeth on Broadway later next winter with Daniel Craig, was fuzzy about it.”

A New York City press screening was also canceled in the last-minute this past week. The amount of critics who went on Twitter to express their discontent were aplenty, the complaints must have surely made their way to A24’s top brass …

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the campaign surrounding the film has been even stranger. There has been no full-length trailer released, just the odd 30-second teasers. It’s starting to look pretty clear that Apple has no idea how to market this film.

The Guardian’s Jordan Hoffman tweeted: “This motion picture will be on AppleTV+ in just a few weeks. Their repeated refusal to slip us a link is truly nuts, considering.”

So, to recap, Apple/A24 aren’t sending out any screeners, cancelling NYC screenings and have this strange lottery-style Shakespeare at the Cinema event going on without its stars participating.

To make matters worse, these are all New York Film Critics Circle members and that voting body is set to vote on its annual awards tomorrow morning. Unless, a last-minute screening gets scheduled by tonight then look for Coen’s movie to be completely shut out.