So is this the unraveling? Or the beginning of Hollywood’s moonshot?
Four days after the announcement, the takes on the big Max move continue to fall like passed spicy tuna tartare hors d’oeuvres at HBO poolside after the Globes.
The one thing no one disagrees about: For better or worse, this is a moment that will change lots of things, likely forever.
Let’s look at some continuing takes on the move, as the hangover from this gets its hooks in deeper.
• I think we can say this isn’t going particularly well. On day four, you’ve got the studio’s biggest director and one of Hollywood’s agentkings both, for different reasons, going on the record to trash your studio. That’s not winning the narrative war.
Not to mention the oceans of litigation ahead, the threat that Legendary can undo their deal, and the prospect of having to pay a year’s worth of participants as though Warner had a year’s run of massive hits to buy happiness here.
AT&T for its part, cannot be happy how this is playing out. For all this—incurring the wrath of the entire community—the stock has moved up a third of a percent.
• There are a couple big buckets of thoughts: This is an absolutely brilliant move that barrels through the complacency of old Hollywood, and this is an absolutely terrible move, horribly planned and amateurishly thought through.
Amazingly, both of those can be true.
• First of all, the thing about changing everything forever. There’s got to be an element of, if one move by one company spells the end of the world, then “everything” was probably dead inside already and it was just a matter of time before the tree trunk came tumbling down.
Ten years ago, one studio putting one year of its films on an app wouldn’t have disrupted anything other than that studio’s P&L.
The secret of creative destruction is it works best on things that are ripe to be destroyed: sectors that are bloated, out of date, not responsive to changes in the market. The movie business certainly has got tons of all that.
Whether the theatrical experience is worth preserving, both from a cultural and business standpoint, are other questions. But the point is, preserving them was going to be an increasingly uphill fight, and with the tech incursion, more and more people were going to see that as an anthill ready to be kicked over.
• But debacle-o-rama. There was no way to make a move like wiping out an entire year’s slate in consultation with everyone involved and their agents. You might as well have convened a constitutional convention of the entire entertainment industry live on C-SPAN.
However, we’re seeing the fallout of doing this without consulting all your partners—the partners who paid for much of this slate, who have made their decision to be here because of Warners’ connection to the artists, whose entire companies are on the line here. As one can see from the press clippings, to say that these folks feel betrayed by this move and the way it was done is the Hollywood understatement of the decade.
Newcomers to the movie business generally fail to grasp how much it’s a business built on relationships, how much putting together any movie project requires mountains of trust and hopefully a bit of goodwill to keep it together. And how beneath the surface of people trying to make movies and do well for each other, there’s the real Hollywood, which is a business of fleecing the arrivistes for every penny they’ve got while they still have stars in their eyes.
Knowing which of those two businesses you’re dealing with, if you don’t have experience, requires, as I say, relationships—and Warners just dropped a hydrogen bomb on every film relationship its got.
• To take the Christopher Nolan example here. There’s a director who has made billions for this studio, this year’s outing notwithstanding. He never had a contract or a deal. Just came back to Warners for every damn film of his career because of his relationship with The Studio. Even after the execs who brought him in were ousted (and the execs after them), he kept coming back. The things he created under the Warners banner weren’t just moneymakers, they were the seed corn of future generations.
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