In May, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color went online and hit iTunes and Amazon Instant Video after about a month in theaters. Similar attempts by studios have been met with resistance in the past. Tim Burton’s film version of Alice in Wonderland was nearly not screened at Odeon cinemas in the UK, Ireland, or Italy in 2010 after Disney attempted to reduce the exclusive theater release window from 17 weeks to 12 weeks in order to bring forward the DVD launch. Disney also conducted an on-demand test in Portugal with a six-week window for animated movie Tangled a year later but has not repeated the experiment until now.
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