How Movies Are Changing (For Good) in 2021

Last month, Warner Bros. Pictures announced that they would debut their Wonder Woman sequel on their HBO Max streaming service at the same time as the film was released in theaters, which was a pretty monumental reveal. These 200-million-dollar blockbusters that make so much money in cinemas have not been able to release normally due to everything being shut down. So a simultaneous release on streaming, where viewers can safely watch from home, was not unprecedented, but it was a huge change from the norm. Though Wonder Woman 1984 certainly stands to make less money through HBO Max than it would in theaters during any other year, for Warner Bros., that is better than nothing. Many recognized that this could have a huge effect on the industry. What would happen if more movies were released through this format in the future? Would theaters die out completely? Would these films make enough money to warrant studios producing more? Would the future of movies as we know them completely rest in the hands of streaming? Lots of questions and far more uncertainty is what that initial Warner Bros. announcement left us with. Still, it seemed that we would have to wait for the profit numbers of Wonder Woman 1984’s release to know how it was going to truly affect things… but it turns out we did not even have to wait a month. 

On December 3rd, 2020, Warner Bros. announced that they were moving ALL of their slated 2021 films to simultaneous theater/streaming releases. This 17-title list includes such high-profile flicks as Dune, The Matrix 4, Godzilla vs. Kong, Space Jam: A New Legacy, The Suicide Squad, and The Many Saints of Newark. Big movies with big names attached that were set to make big money, all now destined for someone’s iPad come release day. It was a crazy announcement. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Variety; almost every major news publication was talking about this huge shakeup in the entertainment world. Over the past couple of weeks, we have gotten to hear the thoughts of various voices in the industry, be it studio executives, directors, actors, or people in the theater industry. Put simply, few people seem to be happy about this arrangement.

Altogether, these seventeen films represent an estimated two billion dollars in production costs, according to The New York Times. They stood to turn a large profit for Warner Bros., but now that they will be releasing on streaming, they will be fighting to draw in HBO Max subscribers instead of selling tickets. This is a particularly huge blow to movie theaters. As I detailed in a previous article, they have been forced to open in most major American cities, but the scarce selection is not doing much to draw in COVID-wary audiences. On the flip side, the low audience numbers are the thing preventing studios from exclusively releasing movies in theaters, as is tradition. It is a no-win scenario right now, and no one is making any money. It contributes to the continued supremacy of streaming services, which have been on the rise throughout the past decade and evidently stand to dominate in the 2020s. On December 10th, Disney held a live stream event to draw in investors, where they announced fifty-two upcoming titles within the next three years, most of which are destined for Disney Plus. Is that a ridiculous amount of content? Yes, yes it is. It certainly points to where the industry is headed. Investing big budgets in streaming service projects to build a large library of content to draw in subscribers; it is a tried and true method. Look at Netflix. Meanwhile, Warner Bros.’s service, HBO Max, is seeing significantly smaller growth than the almost equally-fledgling Disney Plus, so this huge streaming move seems like an attempt to broaden their subscriber base and make money where they can during this strange time. Whether or not it will pay off is a huge unknown, especially since they jumped the gun and announced all this before even seeing how Wonder Woman 1984 performed. We will know soon. 

No matter if it proves successful or not, the move has not been perceived particularly well by the actual people involved in these projects. According to The New York Times, the director of Wonder Woman 1984 -- Patty Jenkins -- and the star -- Gal Gadot -- were each paid ten million dollars to praise the HBO Max move when that film was announced for a simultaneous release in November. Now, with this much bigger shift, Warner Bros. neglected to give creators the same treatment with the other seventeen movies. Worse, they barely gave any of these people notice at all, reportedly. Naturally, none of them are too happy. Legendary Entertainment, another big film company that helped finance some of these movies, is currently weighing whether or not they should sue Warner Bros. given their costly uncooperativeness in this matter. The creators are not exactly pleased, either. Christopher Nolan, director of The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, and most recently, Tenet, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the deal: “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.” It seems that almost no one attached to these projects is pleased with the move. As mentioned, the stars involved in the 2021 slate were not paid the same earnings as Gadot (or Jenkins). Representatives for Denzel Washington, Margot Robbie, Will Smith, Keanu Reeves, Hugh Jackman, Angelina Jolie, and more are pushing hard on Warner Bros., demanding to know why their clients did not get the same treatment. Regardless of how successful the execution of this release format ends up being, the way Warner Bros. has gone about unveiling it has been incredibly sloppy. But who is really to blame?

When pointing the finger at whoever is responsible for this massive play, it can pretty safely be aimed at AT&T. In 2018, they bought Time Warner -- the parent company of Warner Bros. Pictures -- and have been prioritizing the launch of HBO Max ever since, eager to play catch up in a streaming race that everyone will inevitably lose to Disney. The response to the service has been lukewarm at best, and moving the entire Warner Bros. film slate onto HBO Max is a clear attempt by AT&T to breathe some new life into it. Denis Villeneuve, the visionary filmmaker behind Warner Bros.’s upcoming Dune adaptation, had some heated things to say about the conglomerate politics: “With this decision AT&T has hijacked one of the most respectable and important studios in film history. There is absolutely no love for cinema, nor for the audience here. It is all about the survival of a telecom mammoth, one that is currently bearing an astronomical debt of more than $150 billion. Therefore, even though ‘Dune’ is about cinema and audiences, AT&T is about its own survival on Wall Street.” It is a decision that has clearly been born out of a desperate attempt to make money during a time when movie theaters -- like almost every industry -- are struggling, with no real mind paid to the hard work filmmakers and talent have put into these projects.

As I have talked about in previous articles, there is a lot of uncertainty when it comes to movies moving forward. The pandemic has had a massive effect on the industry. Movie theaters are losing money staying open, studios are having a hard time releasing projects, and Disney… well, Disney continues to sit on their billions and they are doing just fine. Whatever the future may bring, how well Wonder Woman 1984 performs on HBO Max will be a telltale sign of whether Warner Bros. made a genius decision or whether they tanked the entire industry as we know it. But if there is anything we can be sure of when it comes to the uncertainty that is film in 2021, it is that you might want to invest in a home theater. Looks like you will be getting plenty of use out of it.