Ben Affleck Animals Premiere Takes Westwood Before Netflix Date

The Ben Affleck Animals premiere gave Hollywood a familiar sight on Thursday night: two friends, one red carpet, and a movie that looks nothing like it did when they started. Affleck and Matt Damon walked the premiere of Animals at the Westwood Village Theater in Los Angeles on October 1, joined by Damon's wife Luciana, just over a week before the kidnapping thriller arrives in select theaters and on Netflix.

The Ben Affleck Animals premiere carried a strange reversal for the pair. Damon was originally set to play the lead in the film but had to drop out when scheduling conflicts with The Odyssey collided with the movie's delays, according to reporting by Just Jared. He never left the project, staying on as a producer alongside Luciana Damon, who also carries a producer credit. Affleck took over the lead himself and directed the film too.

Affleck shared the carpet with much of the ensemble. Kerry Washington, Steven Yeun, Luis Gerardo Mendez, and Adriana Paz posed for photos at the Ben Affleck Animals premiere, with Ray Fisher also in attendance, reported by Just Jared. Washington plays Abigail, the wife of Affleck's mayoral candidate, while Gillian Anderson plays a fixer named Dayle but did not attend the screening. The turnout showed how much of the cast stuck with the production through its schedule changes. The Westwood carpet has been busy lately, recently hosting the Paper Tiger premiere for Scarlett Johansson.

What the movie is about

Animals centers on a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose son is kidnapped, dragging him and his wife into a web of deception as they scramble to raise the ransom payment. According to Rotten Tomatoes, which lists Artists Equity and Fifth Season as the production companies, the couple is forced to make choices and reveal secrets that could tear their world apart. The film is rated R, and its producers include Brad Weston, Collin Creighton, Dani Bernfeld, and Luciana Damon alongside Affleck and Damon.

The film opens in select theaters and starts streaming on Netflix on October 9. The Ben Affleck Animals premiere also served as the finished film's first major outing for Artists Equity, the production company Affleck and Damon built together, which shepherded Animals from its original concept to the finished cut. Netflix film chairman Dan Lin has said the streamer shares the studio's mission to make bold, original films.

The Ben Affleck Animals premiere was also a public show of confidence for the partners' decades-long collaboration. They co-founded Artists Equity to shepherd films from script to screen on their own terms, and Animals is the latest title the company has carried all the way to a distributor as big as Netflix. Both men have spent years trading lead roles, producing credits, and directing gigs, but this was one of the rare moments where one of them handed the spotlight entirely to the other.

The Netflix argument Affleck walked into

Two nights before the Ben Affleck Animals premiere, Affleck found himself defending the streaming giant at the Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles on September 30. He was answering a January episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, on which Damon said Netflix had urged the pair to restate a film's plot three or four times because viewers might be distracted by their phones. Affleck said the remarks were misconstrued. "I've never met anybody who's had a note that idiotic and brazen," he said, adding, "There's absolutely no truth to that," according to coverage of the conference by The Wrap via Mandatory. He added that Netflix executives gave him no notes at all on Animals.

Netflix had already pushed back months earlier. Film chairman Dan Lin said in March that no such principle exists at the company, telling a slate presentation audience that the streamer does not require its movies or shows to repeatedly explain their plots. Affleck told the Screentime crowd that even if such a request had been made, he would not have followed it.

With the October release a week away, the Ben Affleck Animals premiere put the finished film and the partnership behind it in front of the cameras one more time. Damon does not appear on screen in Animals, but he was in the room when the lights went down.