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'Hamilton' Coming To Disney+ On July 3, Bypassing 2021 Theatrical Release

Phillipa Soo (from left), Christopher Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Anthony Ramos attend Miranda's final performance of <em>Hamilton</em> on Broadway, on July 9, 2016.
Nicholas Hunt
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Phillipa Soo (from left), Christopher Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Anthony Ramos attend Miranda's final performance of Hamilton on Broadway, on July 9, 2016.

Cue the Hamilton quotes: Soon the room where it happens will be your living room! Shout it to the rooftops that the Broadway sensation Hamilton will be available for home viewing this summer! Look around, look around to see how lucky we are to be alive in a world where Hamilton is coming to Disney+ on July 3, more than 15 months ahead of schedule!

This year, creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda announced that a Hamilton movie — filmed in 2016 with the original Broadway cast at New York's Richard Rodgers Theatre — was coming to theaters in October 2021. Given the show's continued popularity onstage — it won 11 Tony Awards, spun off popular albums and books, spawned multiple successful touring companies and became an all-around pop-culture sensation — the announcement of a considerably less pricey theatrical release was a welcome surprise.

But Tuesday morning, Miranda tweeted that fans wouldn't have to wait even that long: The recording will likely bypass theatrical release entirely and will instead come to the streaming service Disney+ in July, less than two months from Tuesday.

It's a major coup for Disney+ in its bid to compete with heavy-hitting streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu — and a major boon for Hamilton fans and viewers who've fretted about the uncertainty surrounding this year's summer movies with theaters still closed because of COVID-19. It's no doubt less welcome news for those theaters, which have lost enormous business because of the combination of closures and home streaming.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)