Amazon is planning to invest over $1 billion a year to produce and release movies in theaters, Bloomberg is reporting today. According to sources familiar with the matter, Amazon is expected to start things slow with just a couple of theatrical releases in 2023 before accelerating in the next couple of years.

“The world’s largest online retailer aims to make between 12 and 15 movies annually that will get a theatrical release, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the company is still sorting through its strategy,” Bloomberg wrote. With such an output, Amazon would be in a position to compete with major movie studios.

Amazon already has a pretty big foot in the movie industry thanks to its original movies and TV shows released directly on Prime Video. Amazon also completed its acquisition of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) for $8.5 million earlier this year. This was Amazon’s second biggest acquisition after Whole Foods ($13.7 billion) back in 2017.

If both Amazon and Netflix have also been releasing some of their movies in theaters in recent years, Amazon seems ready to embrace theatrical releases much more seriously. Theaters may have been hit pretty hard by the pandemic over the past two years, the biggest blockbuster movies still continue to be released in theaters.

While Amazon is set to significantly increase its investments in original movies, Netflix seems to have set its eyes on the video games industry: The streaming platform currently has five different video game studios, and it has started working on its first triple-A PC game.

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