With the pandemic making it hard (or impossible) to go the movies, Warner Bros. is considering new options for releasing Wonder Woman 1984.
Wonder Woman 1984 has not had an easy time. The sequel to 2017’s highly acclaimed Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, was originally slated to come out on June 5 of this year…but we all know how that turned out. With the coronavirus shutting down theaters around the world, Warner Bros. made the choice to push WW84 back to August. And then, again, to December 25.
But with that Christmas Day release now little more than a month away, theaters are still largely vacant or, in many places, closed altogether. There are no real signs that things will be safe enough to encourage the massive audiences needed to make a theatrical release hit the numbers WB is surely hoping for. What’s a studio to do?
According to sources at Variety, Warner Bros. is mulling over a couple options. The first is to delay the film again, this time to Summer 2021, in hopes that the pandemic has lessened enough by that time to fill theaters. But so far the pandemic has been preeeetty difficult to predict, as WW84‘s numerous delays prove, so it’s a risk.
Obviously, Warner Bros. is well aware of that fact. “I don’t think anybody can be confident of anything right now,” said Patty Jenkins, the film’s director and screenwriter. “We just don’t know what the course of COVID is going to be like.”
The second and more intriguing idea is to carry on with the planned December 2020 release, which would basically make Wonder Woman 1984 the only big tentpole film of the holiday season. But since theaters are still in the state they’re in, Warner Bros. would reportedly follow the theatrical run with a release to HBO Max in January.
With this plan, the hope is that Wonder Woman 1984 would help theaters on the edge of collapse get through the holiday season, as well as help HBO Max, which has struggled to gain solid footing in the streaming wars against competitors like Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+. With both Wonder Woman 1984 and the much-hyped Snyder Cut of Justice League coming to the service, it would give HBO Max some headline-grabbing releases early in the year.
Jenkins has been pretty open about having made the movie for the big screen. So far, Warner Bros.’ only public comment is, “WW84 will be in theaters.”
Considering that the studio invested a reported $200 million into Wonder Woman 1984 and the massive success of the first movie, it’s no surprise that the company is holding out to show this huge film the way it was meant to be seen. The question, as ever, is when that will be. Disney had some success releasing Mulan straight to streaming (with Pixar’s new movie Soul soon following suit), so it’s not like Warner Bros. doesn’t have options.
With WW84‘s tentative December release date looming, expect an answer to this question soon.
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