As Hunter S. Thompson foretold, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Which just about sums up where we are right now in this industry.
The times have gotten very strange, the path forward cloaked in shadows, and the powers that be are getting into the spirit of things, making moves that on their face make no sense at all . . . but perhaps, in some kingdom of fun house mirrors, it all fits perfectly.
Here’s a stab at making sense out of the news that’s come so far this week:
Max On, Max Off
So this is what success looks like?
Or more to the point, in the twelve-figure, revolving-debt shadowlands of AT&T, with hostile investors breathing down your neck and suddenly mired and outgunned in the streaming killing fields, does success look like whatever the thing you did yesterday, no matter what the results?
Viewed from 40,000 feet to my ignorant, untrained eyes, the world of AT&T’s Hollywood adventure this week looks like an epic failure destined to be a business school negative case study for decades to come. When you wrap together the first great bellyflop launch of the streaming wars (or maybe the second, after Apple) and pack with it the ritual human sacrifice that was the release of Tenet, just from that perspective you’ve got a lot of disarray to wrap your arms around.
But that’s just me. If you’re the CEO who presided over this in his first days on the job, you “couldn’t be more pleased” with how it’s all going, or so he reported to an investors’ conference this week.
“I know it sometimes gets lost within the context of, there’s a company called Netflix that’s done a remarkable job of building a franchise over many years,” he said. “You sometimes get laid up against what they’ve done over the course of a decade. . . . I understand that that standard is a high standard and it’s one that we aspire to get to. But we’re not going to get there overnight. Nor are we trying to build the exact same product that Netflix has.”
So there you have it. Netflix wasn’t built in a quarter, you guys!
Problem is, that Netflix was built and now stands as a competitor—one of a few!—to what Max is, and that a few months into this jaunt, while AT&T might not be “trying to build the exact same product that Netflix has,” Stankey and co. haven’t made it clear what it is they are trying to build, beyond a place to house all the stuff that the Telephone People own, whom it would be for, and why they should subscribe in a world where most people are already choking on the amount of shows and films they are getting.
I stand by The Ankler’s rule that this is a business of hits. There’s certainly enough talent under the Max umbrella to produce, in theory, any number of hits. Problem is, as the market is more flooded, the bar of what it takes to become a hit gets ever higher. And the bar of what it takes to make people subscribe to your service that this point—I don’t think we have any idea where that is.
If you haven’t noticed during the past few months, while the world has been locked up in front of their TV sets, I can’t even count how many new shows have appeared and sunk beneath the waves without a trace. Raised by Wolves anyone? Debuted way back two weeks ago? It just got picked up for another season so I guess it’s a wild success…Away? Transplant? Naughts and Crosses? To name a few from across the spectrum from the last couple weeks alone.
As far as the Tenet of it all goes . . . . One feels a bit of sympathy, and wonders if there might be a brilliant, secret maneuver at the bottom of this debacle.
When your star director, your studio’s one sure thing, is on a crusade publicly and loudly insisting that he wants to save cinema by giving the world this film, COVID be damned, there aren’t a lot of good options.
Anything less than giving him what he wants likely means that he’ll storm off to another studio in a huff.
But on the other hand, perhaps there was a brilliant play here. You give Christopher Nolan what he wants, take a chance, be the cause of an international resurgence of the plague, just to make your little director happy. Anything for you Chris.
Because . . . the press are comparing this to the Inception numbers, as though Warners walked away from a billion dollars (no fault of nerd god Nolan’s, of course). However, even if the fanboy-driven trade press can’t bring themselves to cast aspersions on the film, the public doesn’t hold any such reservations. Does this:
Look like the basis of a long-playing, word-of-mouth hit?
More to the point, Warners knew what they had here, and they knew they weren’t sitting on Inception 2. They may well have known, in fact, that if they stared down their star director and pushed Tenet back for a year, they may well have been saving it to flop another day.
However! Give Nolan what he wants, and you make your director happy, whom maybe will see the light and take a shot at a Krypto the Superdog movie to erase the stain of his first flop.
And you give the theater owners what they want: Be part of Nolan’s rescue mission, get in front of the parade. So when it goes wrong, you can sit right down with them—via Zoom, I guess—and say, we gave it all we got. No one’s sorrier that it didn’t work out than we are. But times are changing, and I guess we all just have to face the facts.
This has been your special preview of this week’s edition of The Ankler, the newsletter that’s got Hollywood whispering.
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OCCAM’S DEATH STAR!
WILL CHRISTOPHER NOLAN BE THE END OF CINEMA?!
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