Chloé Zhao is riding high lately. Not only did she become the first woman of color to win an Oscar for directing for her 2020 movie Nomadland (which also won Best Picture, naturally), she also directed Eternals, one of Marvel’s next big tentpole superhero movies, which is coming out on November 5.
You’ll only be able to watch Eternals in theaters; it won’t pull a Black Widow and also be available to watch on Disney+ for an extra fee…so far as we know, anyway. With the Delta variant spreading around the world and infecting more people with the coronavirus, things could change.
And you get the idea that Zhao would rather they not. As she recently told Sight & Sound magazine, while she’s happy with some of the movies she’s seeing lately — most notably Denis Villeneuve’s Dune — she’s scared over where the movie industry seems to be heading.
“I’m both really hopeful and also really terrified,” she said, “so it varies every day. It gives me hope that a filmmaker like Denis is able to really harness his vision and put together something that’s so incredible, so cinematic. I’m just blown away by the experience I had in that room. But I’m terrified about how many people are or aren’t going to have that experience like I did, in a theatre, and what that means for the future.”
Filmmakers scared by the move to streaming
Zhao is far from the only filmmaker to express trepidation over Hollywood’s increasingly willingness to release movies on streaming services like Disney+ and HBO Max as well as in theaters. Villeneuve himself went off on Warner Bros. when they announced that all of their 2021 movies — including Dune — would follow this duel release model. “Streaming can produce great content, but not movies of Dune’s scope and scale,” he wrote. “Warner Bros.’ decision means Dune won’t have the chance to perform financially in order to be viable and piracy will ultimately triumph.”
I get that these filmmakers would rather people see their movies on big screens; that goes double for people like Zhao and Villeneuve, who really go whole hog with their grand, sweeping images. But I look at statements like this and can’t help but feel like these directors are flailing against the inevitable. Will Dune look better at the cinema than on TV? Probably — I intend to see it in the theater if I can. But people can and will watch it on their TVs or even (gulp) their phones, and they’re only going to become more willing to do that as technology improves. Theaters are still an option, but they’re not the only option, and the only graceful choice filmmakers have is to adapt and move forward.
And that’s all without touching on the reason the duel-release strategy was put into practice this soon: the coronavirus pandemic. Surely these filmmakers can understand why some might opt to watch their movies at home given that there’s a plague going around and it’s not a good idea to sit in a windowless room for two hours breathing in the air of a bunch of strangers. Yes, you made a good movie, but the health of moviegoers is definitely more important than whether it gets appreciated in exactly the way you want it to be.
Warner Bros. recently signed a deal with AMC that will have their movies returning to theater-only runs in 2022…although they’ll appear on streaming services sooner than they used to. I expect that gap to keep closing as the years go on. Dune will be out in theaters on October 22…and unless something changes, it’ll be available on HBO Max that day, too.
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h/t Indiewire