Christopher Nolan blasts Warner Bros. for streaming strategy

Starting with Wonder Woman 1984, Warner Bros. is releasing its movies straight to HBO Max as well as theaters. Not everyone is happy. Lawsuits are coming?

Last week, Warner Bros. announced that it would be releasing all 17 of its 2021 movies — which includes big films like The Matrix 4, The Suicide Squad and many more — straight to its streaming service HBO Max, in addition to releasing them into theaters. It’s a move fit for our pandemic age, where people are understandably reluctant to go to movie theaters. But just as understandably, the movie theaters themselves are upset. (“I guess the movie theaters will just be Halloween stores now,” one veteran theater executive quipped.)

In fact, it could lead to legal action against Warner Bros. Legendary Entertainment financed a large part of two of those 2021 movies: Dune and Godzilla vs. Kong. According to Variety, Legendary isn’t happy that Warner Bros. made the decision to release all these movies straight to streaming without consulting them on it, seeing as they bankrolled some of the biggest ones. If the parties can’t strike an agreement that makes Legendary happy, the studio may sue to stop Warner Bros. from carrying out its plans, probably on the grounds that it breached contract.

And it’s not just the executives who are cheesed off. According to insiders, Dune director Denis Villeneuve is miffed, too, along with other folk who worked on the movie. Villeneuve thinks Dune is best suited on the big screen, and watching the trailer, it’s not hard to see why.

What’s more, Dune only adapts the first half of Frank Herbert’s seminal 1965 sci-fi book of the same name. Depending on how well the first one does, there’s presumably a sequel on the way. But will Villeneuve and company be interested if it’s going to be released exclusively into theaters? If it’s going direct to streaming, how will success be judged? How many subscriptions does it have to drive before Warner Bros. greenlights a sequel, and how do you know that Dune was what made people sign up?

Reportedly, Warner Bros. is only doing this whole joint-release thing for a year, until the theater chains recover from the pandemic, but a lot of people seem to think there’s no going back. There are a lot of questions the studio is going to have to answer as it embarks on this brave new era of movie distribution. We’ll see if it can clear any of them up by the time Dune drops on October 1 of 2021.

UPDATE: Filmmaker Christopher Nolan — the guy behind The Dark Knight, Inception and Dunkirk — has gotten in on the debate, and he’s brought his fighting words.

“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,” Nolan said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. “Warner Bros. had an incredible machine for getting a filmmaker’s work out everywhere, both in theaters and in the home, and they are dismantling it as we speak. They don’t even understand what they’re losing. Their decision makes no economic sense, and even the most casual Wall Street investor can see the difference between disruption and dysfunction.”

Notably, Warner Bros. released Nolan’s latest movie, Tenet, in the midst of the pandemic to respectable-but-not-spectacular success.

Anyway, a lot of Hollywood seems to be feeling like Nolan about this decision: they don’t like it. To start, they weren’t consulted about it, which makes them feel left out. “You had a decades-long legacy as being known as the most talent-friendly studio,” said a high-powered agent. “Now you’ve gone from that to a studio that in starburst colors lit up a sign that says, ‘We don’t give a f**k about talent.’”

To finish, profit participants in movies stand to lose out on lots of money because of this move, which is going to lead to all kinds of negotiations (at best) and lawsuits (at worst).

And that all sounds rough, but at the same time…it’s like we don’t know why Warner Bros. might want to give people the option to stay home and watch movies at home during a pandemic. Twitter, pithy as always, has some choice thoughts about this.

On the other hand, a lot of the movies Warner Bros. is going to release on HBO Max are due to come out pretty late in 2021, hopefully (fingers crossed) after we have a working coronavirus vaccine. So maybe the decision really was less about protecting people and more about attracting subscribers to HBO Max, which has struggled compared to competitors like Disney+.

What a sticky wicket is this. What do you make of it?

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels