The Best 90s A-List Supernatural Dark Comedy Is Being Kept Away From Fans Because Of A Criminal
Kevin Smith has delivered a wide array of cult classic films to his loving audience of pop culture obsessives. One of his greatest films, however, is mysteriously absent from streaming, and has no digital release to speak of, making it extremely difficult to locate and view. The film, 1999’s Dogma, is hemmed up in a copyright dispute with Harvey Weinstein, who inked a distribution deal with the movie long before streaming existed.
Kevin Smith’s Dogma
Kevin Smith has spoken at length about the issue of getting Dogma on streaming, explaining that the film seems to be permanently trapped by legal and financial barriers.
While promoting his 2022 film Clerks 3, Smith explained “My movie about heaven is in limbo,” before joking that “My movie about angels is owned by the devil himself.”
Smith has attempted to purchase the rights to the film back from Bob and Harvey Weinstein numerous times in the past decade, to no avail.
The Dogma Dispute
The details of this Dogma debacle are quite complex, but to simplify it, Weinstein produced the film personally before launching his now infamous venture The Weinstein Company.
After a massively successful premiere, Dogma was put on the shelf and ultimately forgotten because the Weinstein brothers had quickly expanded into other massive blockbusters.
Now that Harvey Weinstein has been outed as a sexual predator and thrown in jail, Smith’s bid for ownership of Dogma, and subsequently, the streaming rights, has become something of a quixotic mission for the filmmaker.
A Controversial Film
Dogma was a controversial film long before the director entered into a battle over the streaming rights, as the Catholic League attempted to boycott the religious satire before production even began.
The film’s plot centers on a pair of fallen angels who plan to reenter Heaven through a logical loophole within the Catholic belief system.
Doing so would effectively shatter the principle that God is an all-knowing, all-powerful being and undo the existence of the Earth as we know it.
A Box Office Hit
Much like Kevin Smith’s other films, Dogma contains foul language, sexual situations, and a wide array of pop culture references, all which infuriated deeply religious audiences in 1999, who petitioned to have the movie banned.
Despite the controversy, or perhaps because of it, the movie made over 4 times its budget at the box office, and remains one of the most financially successful films in Kevin Smith’s decades-long career. That’s why it’s so outright baffling that Dogma has never appeared on any streaming service.
Limited Options On DVD And Blu-Ray
Long before Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to prison for multiple sexual assaults, he gave Columbia/TriStar a limited option to distribute DVD and Blu-ray copies of the film.
While these Dogma copies are hard to dig up these days, they remain one of the only ways to catch the film, because the distribution rights lapsed shortly after the physical copies hit the shelves, long before streaming came into the fray.
In the years since, Smith has repeatedly reached out to The Weinstein Company with offers to buy the film back from them, but was reportedly “scoffed at” each time.
Can’t Stream Dogma
For now, there’s no legal way to stream the hit film on any major provider. Fans of Dogma are forced to dig through the annals of their local thrift store or turn to shady piracy streaming in order to catch the cult classic in order to catch the film today, which is a massive shame, given the film’s wide appeal.
Source: The Wrap
