Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, which opened in a limited theatrical release on January 9, 2026, will begin streaming on Netflix on May 28, 2026.
The film, directed by Van Sant and starring Bill Skarsgård, features Al Pacino in a supporting role and grossed $2.5 million during its brief box-office run. Critics have been broadly positive: one source lists a 91 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and another puts it at 92 percent, a distinction that one outlet noted made it Van Sant’s first film since 2008’s Milk to rank higher than 90 percent on that aggregator.
Dead Man’s Wire dramatizes the 1977 Indianapolis hostage crisis, when Tony Kiritsis took mortgage-company executive Richard Hall hostage after a dispute over a loan. Kiritsis rigged a sawed-off shotgun as what he described as a "dead man’s wire" and the standoff — which one timeline records as lasting 63 hours and another as more than 60 hours — was carried live on television and became a national spectacle.
The case left a legal and cultural aftermark: Kiritsis was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and the trial prompted debate about broadcasting active negotiations as well as changes to Indiana’s insanity defense laws. Kiritsis later died in 2005 at the age of 72.
Van Sant has framed the project as part of a long interest in adapting real-world stories into fiction. As he told Variety, "A lot of my films, even the fictional ones, are based on something from the real world — a news story or an article," and he added, "It’s not 'true crime' like television, but it’s about what makes someone act a certain way — that question inside the crime." Those lines set the film’s aim: less procedural reconstruction than an exploration of motive and pressure.
That artistic framing helps explain a clear tension in Dead Man’s Wire’s early reception. The film’s critical ratings — the two Rotten Tomatoes aggregates cited above — place it among Van Sant’s most acclaimed recent work, yet the theatrical footprint remained narrow and the $2.5 million gross modest. The presence of a name like Al Pacino and a headline-grabbing subject did not translate into a wide box-office haul in January.
Netflix’s May 28 streaming release changes the calculus. A limited theatrical release can leave films invisible to most viewers; streaming moves a title into every subscriber’s search bar and places it in front of audiences who never saw it in theaters. For a movie that dramatizes a live-broadcast spectacle, the reach of a global streamer offers a second life and a much larger sample for critical and public reaction alike.
For Van Sant, whose past work has frequently mined news stories for dramatic material, the Netflix window will determine whether Dead Man’s Wire remains a critics’ favorite or becomes a wider cultural moment. Given the film’s high Rotten Tomatoes scores and the names attached — from Bill Skarsgård in the starring role to Al Pacino in a featured turn — the streaming debut is likely to multiply viewers beyond the $2.5 million audience that saw it in theaters. In short: the Netflix release on May 28 will almost certainly broaden the film’s reach and finally let the wider public weigh in on a movie built around one of the most televised crimes of the 1970s.
