DC Film Society: Adam's Rib January 2021

Hanging by a Thread

For the past eighteen years Christopher Nolan was the Warner Brothers shining star. Nolan’s films for the studio earned over $4.6 billion in global box office, $2.4 billion of that coming from The Dark Knight Trilogy. I’m not a businessman, but I would believe that any corporation would seek to avoid angering its top earner. But this year I would be wrong.

In November WB announced that Wonder Woman 1984, already oft-delayed due to COVID, would debut in theaters and on the HBO Max streaming service simultaneously on December 25, 2020. The decision was not a big surprise given that many theaters are still closed and those still open are not drawing well. Disney had earlier moved Soul, their latest Pixar film, to Disney+, also launching on December 25. Paramount had sold the long awaited Coming to America sequel to Amazon for streaming.

Even with these moves, few expected WB’s early December announcement that its entire 2021 film slate would follow the Wonder Woman 1984 model. This includes Dune, The Matrix 4, Godzilla vs. Kong, The Suicide Squad, In the Heights, Judas and the Black Messiah, and the new Space Jam with LeBron James. Each film will be available on HBO Max on the same day it starts in theaters, a practice commonly referred to as “day and date.” As of now, no other studio has gone this far.

Nolan, as you might expect, blasted the move, telling The Hollywood Reporter that “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.” In another interview, Nolan added “In 2021, they've (WB) got some of the top filmmakers in the world, they’ve got some of the biggest stars in the world who worked for years in some cases on these projects very close to their hearts that are meant to be big-screen experiences. They’re meant to be out there for the widest possible audience ... And now they’re being used as a loss-leader for the streaming service.”

As Nolan noted, this move is as much about HBO Max as it is about the films. AT&T owns WarnerMedia, including the WB Studio and HBO Max. When Disney+ launched in 2019, it did so with “The Mandolorian,” the first Star Wars live-action TV series, as a drawing card. HBO Max was supposed to have its own drawing card, a “Friends” reunion, but by the time of its late May 2020 launch date, COVID had delayed that special indefinitely. Without this attraction, HBO Max lagged other streaming services in subscribers and pop culture impact. Ironically HBO Max may have the best content of all of them, with HBO, Comedy Central and Turner Classic Movies to draw from, but that means little to AT&T executives and shareholders.

This past month Disney+, which already had several Marvel series on the way, announced ten new Star Wars shows. Overkill? Yes, but also raising the stakes even higher in the streaming competition. HBO Max did not have anything like that, so AT&T cannibalized the Warner Brothers films to give its streaming service a boost.

As you might expect, the talent behind the WB 2021 films was not pleased. The most vocal of this group was Dune director Denis Villeneuve, who penned a scathing op-ed in Variety. Villeneuve wrote that “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.” He explains that “My team and I devoted more than three years of our lives to make it (Dune) a unique big screen experience. Our movie’s image and sound were meticulously designed to be seen in theaters.” AT&T further alienated Villeneuve and other filmmakers by not consulting them or even informing them before the decision was announced. Variety also reported that Legendary Pictures, the production company that co-financed Dune, is considering suing AT&T.

Admittedly some of the Hollywood furor about the AT&T decision is self-serving. Filmmakers and actors who drew a smaller initial salary in favor of a percentage of their movies’ grosses stand to lose considerably. Unlike theatrical box office, streaming services control all of their viewer information. If HBO Max claims that a certain number of people streamed Wonder Woman 1984, we need to take their word for it. This makes determining back-end compensation difficult if not impossible.

Bill Mechanic, a veteran producer and former chairman/CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment, cut right to the heart of the matter when he told Deadline that “WarnerMedia and others can argue day-and-date allows people to still go to see movies in theatres. In truth, they are treating anyone who does like they’re an idiot, paying $15 to $20 for the privilege instead of staying home and seeing a month’s worth of whatever for the same price regardless of the number of people who join in. This isn’t to serve filmgoers, it’s to magnify the value of their service.”

Theaters have traditionally depended on a 90-day window between a film’s big-screen debut and its video/streaming launch. Last year I wrote that “The 90-day theatrical window has grown outdated in an age when people can access content instantly. Most films don’t stay in theaters nearly that long anyway. At the same time, no window at all would remain a nonstarter for the major theater chains.” I suggested a 30-day window, which I still believe makes the most sense. It would be just long enough to give theaters the chance to make money off a film’s initial splash but would not make streaming viewers wait very long.

Granted, we are still in the thick of the pandemic. More theaters are closed than open. Even I would admit that no one should risk their life to see a movie. So even with all I have written, both here and in my earlier columns about the theatrical experience, WarnerMedia’s decision on Wonder Woman 1984 was a wise one for the current time. As noted, the film was already delayed and seeing it through streaming was better than not seeing it at all (marginally better, anyway as the movie has major story problems). For the early to middle part of 2021, the same logic will likely hold true. Distribution of the COVID vaccine will take longer than we all would like, and many areas of the U.S. may not have safe theaters for a few months.

Hope waits on the horizon though, and eventually most of us will be vaccinated. Many public health experts believe that this could happen by June or July. Once this happens, and movie theaters start reopening, they will need all the help they can get. Theatrical exhibitors were in a shaky financial position before COVID and, as I noted in my column two months ago, they are in dire shape now. One factor hurting theaters is that with postponements and moves to streaming, there currently isn’t much for them to show. Theaters sharpen attention and thought on films. Keeping them open benefits studios as well as audiences. When the theaters do reopen, when they are safe again, forcing them to share movies with streaming will make it that much harder to draw audiences back. What if other studios’ corporations follow WarnerMedia’s lead?

Of course none of us know with any real certainty that theaters and audiences will be back to normal in the summer. Life could be like it is now, or something in the middle between now and where we would hope to be. What should have been an obvious alternative to what AT&T did would be to continue with the Wonder Woman 1984 strategy for the early part of 2021 and then adjust accordingly based on the conditions. If the circumstances dictate then stay with the same day theater/streaming plan, but if conditions improve substantially then go to a 30 or 45-day theatrical window. The studio shifted its plans for Wonder Woman 1984 a few weeks before its release. There’s no reason it couldn’t do the same with other films.

Wonder Woman 1984 opened to a $16.7 million U.S. theatrical box office, better than expected but still massively lower than it would have normally. Reports are that WarnerMedia is developing some DC Comics streaming series for HBO Max. If that’s true than maybe by mid-2021 there wouldn’t be the same need to use the WB films to get subscribers. I hope so, because the theatrical experience is worth saving. No one knows if movie theaters will survive, but we know they won’t if they aren’t given a chance.

Adam Spector
January 1, 2021