The coronavirus pandemic has forced change on a lot of people and businesses, including the movie industry. Obviously, fans aren’t eager to crowd into windowless rooms for two hours at a time when there’s a communicable disease going around, and even though a good chunk of people in the U.S. are now vaccinated, things like the Delta variant still pose a danger.
In light of all this, back in December, Warner Bros. announced that it would be releasing all of its big tentpole movies in both theaters and on its new streaming service HBO Max. That’s helped people watch films like Wonder Woman 1984, Space Jam: A New Legacy and the recently released The Suicide Squad without having to go to the theater and risk their health, but it ruffled a lot of feathers. Filmmakers Denis Villeneuve and Christopher Nolan were both upset that their films (Dune and Tenet) wouldn’t exclusively debut in theaters, and theater owners worried that they would lose out on box office revenue.
Now, The Hollywood Reporter has it that Warner Bros. movies will once again premiere exclusively in theaters come 2022, at least in AMC theaters. “We’re especially pleased Warner Bros. has decided to move away from day-and-date,” AMC CEO Adam Aron said in an earnings call in shareholders the other day. “We are in active dialogue with every major studio.” While Aron said that the theater chain was “not at all happy” with Warner’s decision to go day-and-date in the first place, he credited the company with reversing course, adding that “an exclusive window is an important way to build big and successful franchises.”
All that said, things aren’t going back to exactly the way they were before. Prior to the pandemic, movies would run in theaters for 90 days before they became available on streaming services. In 2022, Warner Bros. movies will stay in theaters for only 45 days before being released into the wild.
To stream or not to stream?
For the record, I think Warner Bros. made the right decision in releasing its movies straight to streaming. Yes, it upset some of the creatives, and yes, the theater chains lost money, but it allowed people to stay home when going to the theater would have put their health at risk; that’s well worth it.
In fact, I wish the day-and-date strategy continued forever. Sure, it would mean fewer people going to the theater, but it would also mean that ordinary viewers have more choice over how they watch their entertainment, and I’m always in favor of that.
Disney also experimented with day-and-date releases on Disney+, although that led to issues like Scarlett Johansson suing the studio over the release of Black Widow. It seems to me that the move towards streaming services is inevitable, and that what we’re seeing now is a pushback from industry insiders that will eventually (hopefully) crumble in the face of ordinary moviegoers enjoying the choices that streaming movies offer them.
But there’s multiple ways to look at it. What do you think? And the next big Warner Bros. release, Dune, comes out on October 22. Unless something unexpected happens, it’ll probably be both in theaters and on HBO Max.
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