Matthew McConaughey returns to live-action feature acting after a five-year break in The Rivals of Amziah King, opening in US theatres on Friday, 14 August. His last live-action film role was in 2020's The Gentlemen (Deadline).

The film is the second directing credit for Andrew Patterson, whose debut — the 1950s-set science-fiction drama The Vast of Night — was made for roughly $700,000 and premiered at the Slamdance film festival in January 2019 after being rejected elsewhere (Deadline). Amazon MGM Studios acquired that film for theatrical release, but the Covid-19 pandemic scuttled those plans and it wound up streaming on Amazon (Deadline).

Patterson, a former multiplex projectionist and local commercial filmmaker, began writing The Rivals of Amziah King in 2018 (Deadline). He opted to keep the project independent rather than pursue a studio route, drawing support from producers David Heyman and Teddy Schwarzman of Black Bear Pictures (Deadline; Deadline). Schwarzman has called Patterson "one of the most exciting directors working today" and said McConaughey delivers an iconic performance (Deadline).

The film folds together a western, a bee-hive heist, a bluegrass musical, comedy, and a father-daughter drama. McConaughey plays Amziah King, a small-town Oklahoma beekeeper who plays in a ragtag bluegrass band. Angelina LookingGlass co-stars as Kateri, Amziah's foster daughter, in her first feature film role. Kurt Russell and Cole Sprouse round out the principal cast (Deadline; Deadline).

McConaughey has said that one of the reasons he signed on was Patterson's "sense of place and space I knew of" (Deadline). The film received a standing ovation at its world premiere in March 2025 at SXSW, held at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas (Deadline). Rotten Tomatoes' critics' summary describes it as a "sprawling, unpredictable, and genre-blurring epic" anchored by McConaughey and LookingGlass (Rotten Tomatoes).

What makes the journey notable is the eight-year arc from page to screen. Patterson wrote the first pages in 2018, the same year a $700,000 debut was still gathering rejections on the festival circuit. Steven Soderbergh met with him after that Slamdance premiere and offered him a script to direct; Patterson instead signed with WME agent Mike Simpson — whose clients include Quentin Tarantino, Park Chan-wook, Tim Burton and Bong Joon Ho — and kept building his own project (Deadline). The film now reaches theatres with a major star, a celebrated festival reception, and the same independent spirit with which it started.