Wonder Woman 1984 inspired lots of new sign-ups for HBO Max

This year, Warner Bros. is releasing all of its movies into theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously, with Wonder Woman 1984 as the canary in the coal mine.

Warner Bros. took a big swing when it announced that all of the movies it had scheduled for 2021 — including heavy hitters like The Suicide Squad, The Matrix 4 and Dune — would be dropping into theaters and on HBO Max at the same time. They ticked off some major filmmakers, but they’re betting that: A) This will be good for people who don’t want to go to theaters in 2021 on account of the pandemic, and; B) It will net them subscribers to HBO Max, which has been lagging behind competitors like Disney+ and Netflix.

The first movie to get this treatment was Wonder Woman 1984, which came out a couple of weeks ago. Opinions on the movie itself are split to say the least, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about. What I wanna know right now is: did the strategy work?

According to data film Antenna…yeah, it looks like it did, at least for now. As summarized by Vulture, HBO Max registered more new sign-ups in the three-day period after Wonder Woman 1984 debuted than any other streaming service registered over a similar period all year. The closest competitor was people signing up for Disney+ after the film version of Hamilton dropped back in July. Next came the Pixar film Soul, which also resulted in a bunch of new sign-ups for Disney+, but Wonder Woman 1984 beat those movies by 40 percent and 107 percent respectively. It also drove 5.7 times as many subscriptions as Mulan did when it debuted on Disney+, although let’s remember that Disney charged $30 to watch that one on top of the subscription fee.

Meanwhile, at the box office, Wonder Woman 1984 brought in $16.7 million on its first weekend and has currently made $118.5 million globally. That’s not fantastic by normal standards, but it’s still easily the highest grossing movie yet released during the pandemic. Back to streaming, Warner Bros. said the movie has “broken records and exceeded our expectations,” but didn’t release any specific numbers.

There are qualifiers to all this, of course. For one, a lot fewer people had HBO Max than have Disney+, so a higher proportion of interested people were brand new to the party. Also, it remains to be seen whether the people who got HBO Max to watch Wonder Woman 1984 are going to stick around or cancel their subscriptions when they’re done. Subscriber retention is a big deal in the streaming game, and WarnerMedia executives are surely biting their nails over whether these newcomers are here to stay.

Still, for now, it sounds like those executives can call this a win. And there are a lot of movies coming to the service in 2021, and with the pandemic still raging, I imagine watching them at home will still be an attractive option for a while.

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