It was no doubt inevitable, but this week’s WW84 machinations still add up to a moment that a year ago would’ve been entirely unfathomable.
If you’re a movie studio, the math from ancient times dictates that one or two big hits a year will pay for all your flops, and those hits are the difference between the glory that was Rome and life on the bread line.
And now Warner has taken one of their hits and pulled it off the market.
So some thoughts on that, in no particular order:
• You never know for certain what will be a hit and what will flop, but to the extent that anything can be called a guaranteed hit in this world of ours, it is the sequel to a hit superhero movie.
• Currently, Warners has three hit superhero movie sequels in various states of development (WW84, Aqua2, Joker 2.) WW84 is the only one of them anywhere close to release. Now, it’s gone.
• Besides those, the Warners slate doesn’t have a lot of Can’t-Miss flicks in the hopper. (Still waiting for the Star is Born Cinematic Universe to break ground.)
• So if you take away your hits, how does a movie studio work?
• As for the supposed simultaneous release and Tsar Kilar’s assurances that “We remain committed to the theatrical experience and we believe giving exhibitors a movie of this nature is important right now.” That’s right, it’s going to be released theatrically . . . the only catch being that there won’t be any theaters open a month from now. But in spirit, it’s a theatrical release.
• If you want a sense of how committed Warner is to a theatrical release of WW84, generally when you have the most important release of your year, you have a marketing team in place for that. The Warner studio, however, just fired most of the leadership of that team in the past few weeks.
• You can chalk this up as another win for Christopher Nolan’s brave mission to save movie theaters. Having gone down that road, one can understand why Warners is in no hurry to repeat the experience.
• When Tenet came out, I speculated that Warners was willing to release it as a test case because they already knew that it wasn’t destined to be a smash under any circumstances. Will be interesting to see what the final product on WW looks like and if there’s a similar dynamic at play here.
• But getting past that, really, at this moment, what choice did Warners have? It has a hitless service they are desperately trying to get off the ground, and here’s a hit just sitting there on the company’s shelf, waiting out a year and counting that its division has been shut down.
• With the Amazon distribution deal done—and, I hear, Roku very close behind—having this movie could make a difference. A couple more big attention grabbers and The Max could genuinely be in business. This proves Ankler Rule #6 yet again: While you’re alive you can always produce a hit. And one hit can change everything. Three hits will change everything.
• Speaking of that, whatever happened to that JJ Abrams fellow whom AT&T gave a few hundred million to launch its service behind? Is he thinking about getting in the game one of these days?
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