Early Tuesday morning—likely in the wee morning hours—writer/director/star Nate Parker’s movie The Birth of a Nation sold to Fox Searchlight for $17.5 million at the Sundance Film Festival. No movie in the history of the festival has ever sold for that much. And it didn’t even go to the highest bidder.

Prior to the sale, both the Weinstein Company and Netflix both attempted to secure the picture, with Netflix reportedly offering a bold $20 million for the movie. It’s a huge deal, both literally and figuratively—one that (currently) tops a crazy week of Sundance acquisitions that has seen streaming giants Netflix and Amazon flexing their film-buying muscles like Draymond Green.

Netflix got started before the film festival even began, nabbing the Ellen-Page-starring Tallulah for an undisclosed amount. Just a few hours after news of the Birth acquisition broke, Amazon snagged Todd Solondz’s *Weiner-Dog—*and it had already landed the super-hyped Manchester by the Sea for a relatively large $10 million.

So why didn’t The Birth of a Nation go the same route? The folks behind the movie aren’t saying (a rep for the filmmakers said no one was available to comment for this piece), but it might have something to do with the power of the big screen.

The Prestige of the Big Screen

In a story on the deal, The Hollywood Reporter notes that Netflix wanted a day-and-date theatrical and streaming release (the industry term for a movie hitting big screens and streaming platforms on the same day). Fox Searchlight, on the other hand, promised a theatrical release timed to awards season. Considering that Fox Searchlight helped guide 12 Years a Slave to a Best Picture Oscar just two years ago, it’s easy to imagine filmmakers wanting to go with a studio that knows how to get noticed during awards season—something Netflix didn’t manage to do with Beasts of No Nation.

The Academy Awards also could have been a factor for an entirely different reason. Going into Sundance, much of Hollywood was reacting to the overwhelmingly caucasian makeup of this year’s Oscar nominees. The backlash led to a reboot of last year's #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, which took off when a similarly monolithic slate of nominees took trophies home from the Academy Awards. The Academy has responded, promising to bring more diversity to its ranks, but the Academy can only nominate films if they’re released, making Birth of a Nation that much more attractive.

That's not to say that Parker’s film, which focuses on the 1831 slave rebellion lead by Nat Turner and features a largely black cast, isn't a tour de force in its own right. (While I wasn't able to attend the premiere screening, it was by all accounts a rousing success, and made Parker the star of the festival.) But just because it's impossible for the Oscars controversy to have been the primary factor in the deal hasn’t stopped people from hypothesizing about it anyway.

(While it didn't come right out and say it, Fox Searchlight did seem keenly aware of the climate in which they were acquiring The Birth of a Nation. “From the moment we saw this film we knew we wanted to join Nate Parker in fulfilling his vision as the film’s portrayal of injustice is unfortunately still relevant today," Fox Searchlight presidents Nancy Utley and Stephen Gilula said in a statement announcing the acquisition.)

Sparking Dialog

Then again, it's similarly impossible that the current conversation isn’t influencing the reception of all the movies at the festival, whether consciously or not. And Furthering that conversation is exactly what The Birth of a Nation is trying to do. “I made this film for one reason: creating change agents,” Parker told the Sundance crowd after his film’s premiere. He added that getting the film made was “extremely difficult for many reasons ... the first was our subject matter: anytime we are dealing with history, specifically slavery, I found that desperately sanitized. There’s a resistance, I’ll say, to dealing with this material.”

In that regard, the movie has succeeded. Speaking with Spike Lee earlier this week, I asked him about working with Amazon Studios to produce his latest feature, Chi-Raq. Praising the studio, he said that he probably never could have made his movie—about a group of women who go on a sex strike to end gang violence—at a major studio. “The more options there are, the more options there are for anybody, including young filmmakers,” Lee said.

While many have praised streaming services for doing things studios won’t (Beasts of No Nation director Cary Fukunaga had similar things to say when his film was released earlier this year) what we’re learning this week is that backing a film like Chi-Raq may not be solely the provence of streaming services for long.

It took Nate Parker seven years, $100,000 of his own money, and a lot of hard work to make The Birth of a Nation. In that time, Netflix and Amazon have become major players and two awards seasons have shown there’s a lot in Hollywood that needs to change. Parker may feel like it took forever to get his movie to Sundance, but he got here just in time.