As nominations for the 2025 Oscars approach, there is increasing speculation that RaMell Ross’s film adaptation of Nickel Boys will receive recognition.
Based on Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel Nickel Boys—which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—this film tells the harrowing true story of a Florida reform school for boys that was exposed for abusing students, including beatings, rapes, torture, and murder. The school operated for over 100 years, from 1900 to 2011, before it was finally shut down. Whitehead’s novel takes place over two timelines, one in the 1960s, and one in the 2010s, and tells the story of a Nickel student named Elwood (played in the movie Ethan Herisse) and his friend, Turner (Brandon Wilson).
Ross, who is best known for his 2018 Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, co-wrote the Nickel Boys screenplay with Joslyn Barnes. The film, which was shot entirely in first-person point-of-view, has critics raving, and recently earned Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture – Drama. You don’t want to miss it, so here’s what you need to know about where to watch the Nickel Boys movie, and when we expect to see Nickel Boys streaming free on Amazon Prime.
For now, Nickel Boys will only available to watch in a movie theater, when it opens in the U.S. on Friday, December 13. You can find a showing near you via Fandango. Nickel Boys is not yet available to watch online or on streaming, but we do expect Nickel Boys to stream on Amazon Prime eventually.
Nickel Boys is not streaming on Netflix and likely will not be on Netflix any time soon, due to the fact that the film is not a Netflix movie. Red One is an Amazon MGM movie, and therefore will likely go to streaming on MGM+, the premium channel previously known as Epix, before streaming on Amazon Prime. Currently, MGM+ costs $5.99 a month, and there is a seven-day free trial.
You will be able to purchase Nickel Boys on Amazon Prime Video when the movie becomes available to buy and rent on digital, likely in about a month. But you will likely have to wait to be able to stream Nickel Boys on Prime Video free with a Prime subscription.
Nickel Boys is an MGM movie, and Amazon has owned MGM since the 2022 acquisition. The MGM movies have been streaming on Prime—albeit slowly. First, the movies go to MGM+, before they become available free on Prime. (There have been some exceptions, such as the early Amazon release of Red One on Prime this week, in time for Christmas.)
But as noted by Deadline, Amazon re-jiggered the Nickel Boys release back in October to have it more closely mirror the awards season release of another Amazon MGM film, American Fiction. In the case of American Fiction, the movie released in theaters in mid-December, release on digital about a month-and-a-half later, and began streaming free on Prime in May—nearly a full six months after it was released in theaters.
Challengers was another MGM movie that released on digital after one month in theaters, but did not stream on Amazon Prime until five months after it was released in theaters. If Nickel Boys follows a similar release pattern to American Fiction and Challengers, you might see Nickel Boys on digital around January 2025, and streaming free on Amazon Prime around April or May 2025.
But this is all speculation. If you want to watch Nickel Boys right away, you can go see the movie in theaters.
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