According to The Hollywood Reporter, Paramount sold the international rights to Annihilation after poor test-screening results last summer indicated the film might be “too intellectual” for general audiences. Based on a bestselling book by Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation follows a biologist (Portman) as she journeys into a hostile, unknown territory called Area X; trailers for the film have emphasized its suspenseful action and surreal visuals. Garland’s last movie, Ex Machina, was a pint-sized hit, grossing $25 million and garnering an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. For the indie studio A24, that was a solid result, and it was enough to get the director a deal at a major studio. But it seems Paramount wanted something more mainstream from Garland.

Annihilation will still hit screens in the world’s two biggest markets—the U.S. and China—but the Netflix partnership is an unusually public show of nervousness over the film’s profitability. Paramount can use the money from the deal to help recoup the film’s reported $55 million budget, but if Annihilation is a hit, the studio will miss out on any international grosses. The deal also effectively signals Paramount’s lack of trust in the vision of the filmmaker it hired. According to The Hollywood Reporter, one of the studio’s top financiers, David Ellison, clashed with Garland and the producer Scott Rudin over proposed reshoots that would have changed the ending, which the director refused to budge on. Rudin had final-cut privileges on the movie, giving him control over the finished product, and he opted to back Garland.

It’s a more extreme version of the clash between commerce and artistry that’s repeatedly played out in Hollywood in recent years, though it’s rare for such drama to break out after the film is completed. Marvel hired Edgar Wright to make an Ant-Man movie, and it parted ways with him weeks before shooting started over “differences in their vision of the film.” The Disney producer Kathleen Kennedy had Tony Gilroy reshoot huge portions of Rogue One after dissatisfaction over the initial cut; in the case of the upcoming Han Solo film, she fired the directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller in the middle of production because she didn’t like their overtly comic take on the character. Last year, the former Warner Bros. president Toby Emmerich was reported as seeking to avoid working with “auteur directors” in the future who would be given final-cut rights (aside from established box-office players like Christopher Nolan and Clint Eastwood).

Paramount selling Annihilation’s international rights feels part of a whole with these tales of friction between executives and filmmakers. Rudin’s support of Garland meant the director couldn’t be replaced for reshoots as those other filmmakers were, so instead Paramount is backing out of its commitment to promote and release the work worldwide. Garland has already communicated his negative feelings over the deal (though he acknowledged the Netflix deal would bring the movie to even more viewers). In a December 2017 interview with Collider, the director said he was disappointed to learn Annihilation wouldn’t be seen on the big screen in much of the world, including in his native Britain. “We made the film for cinema. I’ve got no problem with the small screen at all … But from my point of view and the collective of the people who made it—[it was made] to be seen on a big screen.”