A Million Miles Away is the inspiring true story of José Hernández, who went from being a migrant farmworker to an astronaut. The heart of the movie, though is Hernández’s family, and all the love and support they gave him on his decades-long journey.
I think that’s what my friend Rick Telles saw when he picked up the book Reaching for the Stars, which the film is based on. I interviewed him last summer about his own, not-quite-as-long journey taking the movie from page to screen. The full interview, which talks about Rick’s career as a reality TV producer going back 30 years, is 40 minutes long, but to celebrate the release of A Million Miles Away on Amazon Prime, I cut an excerpt from just that portion of the interview—
Rick invited me to a screening of the movie ahead of its online release, and I gotta say, Amazon missed out on not giving this a theatrical release. With the actors on strike, it’s just about the only movie that could’ve done a full press tour with just the real-life people the movie was based on.
Besides, as Entertainment Strategy Guy has pointed out again and again, not only do theatrically release films earn money for the studio, those same movies do better once they’re on streaming than streaming-exclusives do. Amazon left a lot of money on the table by not giving A Million Miles Away a wide release.