Hollywood’s Patience Is Frustrating—But Necessary

Read: ‘I’m not lamenting the existence of Marvel’

For almost a year now, a pattern has held: Films aimed at families and small children, such as Trolls: World Tour, Soul, and Netflix’s upcoming The Mitchells vs. the Machines (acquired from Sony), can find a big audience online and are thus more easily shunted to at-home viewing. Almost everything else is still perceived as a “big screen” movie that will generate buzz and draw impressive grosses only if it’s available in theaters to huge crowds. The revival of the Chinese box office after a decline in the country’s COVID-19 cases suggests that audiences will be eager to return in droves when they can. Even in North America, Wonder Woman 1984 has earned more than $37 million in theatrical grosses despite being available for free to all HBO Max subscribers for the past month.

All of that is good news for America’s beleaguered theater companies, which continue to muddle forward despite constant chatter about a pending bankruptcy declaration for AMC Entertainment, the country’s largest cinema chain. Today, AMC CEO Adam Aron announced that his company had raised $917 million in financing to steer things through the winter. “This means that any talk of an imminent bankruptcy for AMC is completely off the table,” he said in a statement. The hope is that AMC can stay solvent long enough for audiences around the world to get vaccinated, helping the coronavirus subside, although, as the company soberly noted in its own statement, “no one knows for sure the future course of this and other strains of the coronavirus.”

That uncertainty is why WarnerMedia’s choice to put all its 2021 releases on HBO Max befuddled so many in the industry. While moving Wonder Woman 1984 to the service to encourage new subscriptions seemed reasonable in December, declaring almost a year in advance that films such as Dune (set for October 2021) and The Matrix 4 (December 2021) will premiere online makes less sense. While the strategy is likely to earn sign-ups for HBO Max (a key concern for WarnerMedia), it comes at a giant cost. The profits of a successful global film release are far beyond anything a streaming release can achieve, helping cover blockbuster budgets and pay the salaries of major stars. Wonder Woman 1984 was moved to HBO Max only after WarnerMedia negotiated a huge extra payday for its director and star last year; no such deal was made in the case of Dune or other 2021 films.

WarnerMedia’s move prompted outrage from top-tier directors who advocate for the power of the big-screen experience. Christopher Nolan, a longtime collaborator with the company, called HBO Max “the worst streaming service” and said the decision made “no economic sense.” Denis Villeneuve, the director of Dune, wrote an open letter saying that WarnerMedia’s corporate owner, AT&T, “has hijacked one of the most respectable and important studios in film history” by sacrificing the “entire 2021 slate in a desperate attempt to grab the audience’s attention.” Dune was planned as the start of a franchise, but without theatrical grosses, Villeneuve pointed out, further entries won’t seem worth the financial gamble.