Brooks LeBoeuf, Regal's SVP of U.S. content, calls it a chance to "turn a season fans have watched again and again into a true theatrical event."
That season is Heated Rivalry, a six-episode Canadian romance series about two hockey captains having clandestine hotel-room hookups between NHL games. When the show premiered on Crave late last year, the internet treated it like oxygen. The season finale pulled a 300% audience bump over the premiere, averaged 10.6 million U.S. viewers per episode, and pushed Rachel Reid's original paperbacks to the top of TikTok's official bestseller list.
Now, Regal is giving the series a limited theatrical run across 650 theaters in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand.
The traditional exhibition rulebook says a theater chain requires an exclusive window before a studio can dump a project onto a living-room television. Regal is running that playbook in reverse. Heated Rivalry is not exclusive. It has been sitting on HBO for nearly a calendar year, available to anyone with an active subscription and a working thumb.
Regal is splitting the six-episode run into three separate screenings: episodes one and two, three and four, five and six. Each screening costs $9.99. Watching the full season in an auditorium comes out to thirty dollars, which is roughly double the price of a monthly HBO Max tier.
The math works because BookTok is not buying access to pixels. They already own the pixels. They are paying thirty dollars to sit in the dark next to other people who also memorized the dialogue from a hockey romance series eight months ago on their phones.
For Regal, the risk profile is nonexistent. Sphere Abacus supplies catalog footage that cost zero incremental dollars to produce, while TikTok's recommendation engine handles the promotion for free. Regal's traditional theatrical model requires millions in studio marketing commits to drag bodies into seats. Heated Rivalry just needs 650 projectors and a concession stand selling oversized sodas to people rewatching a show they already watched in bed.