No Theatre for Christmas this year...
and Wonder Woman 1984 filmmakers will likely suffer financially. But it seems, for Warner Bros., it was the best option to simply release this year's hottest anticipated blockbuster solely on HBO Max.
"Though the film is forgoing substantial box office returns and will likely end up losing money — “Wonder Woman” cost $200 million to make and many millions more to market globally — leaning into the HBO Max of things became the best option because it allowed them to get the movie out in a timely manner while promoting a streaming service that’s struggled to make waves." source (Variety.com)
November 19, 2020
Rebecca Rubin writes:
Warner Bros. didn’t have a lot of good options.
After the studio released Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” in September to lackluster ticket sales, it was hesitant to unveil another $200 million-budgeted movie in the middle of a pandemic. And yet, just three months after “Tenet” tried and largely failed to reignite moviegoing, Warner Bros. had to make a decision about the fate of “Wonder Woman 1984,” the last blockbuster scheduled for 2020 after other major films such as “No Time to Die” and “Soul” had been postponed or opted for streaming debuts.
With “Wonder Woman 1984’s” Christmas Day release date looming, the studio had found itself in between a rock and a hard place.
On one hand, it had a superstar director in Patty Jenkins, who wanted the follow-up to her 2017 superhero adventure “Wonder Woman” to have a splashy big-screen debut. The original DC Comics adaptation — spotlighting Gal Gadot’s female heroine — was a critical and commercial smash, generating $820 million in ticket sales globally. The sequel was expected to surpass the billion-dollar mark.
Yet the studio was painfully aware that cases of coronavirus were going up, not down, and seeing the virus continue to surge would affect those plans. Rising cases also meant that New York City and Los Angeles would likely double down on their decision to keep theaters closed — in the case of “Tenet,” Warners estimated that the loss of those markets cost them tens of millions of dollars in revenue.
But the studio couldn’t delay the release of “Wonder Woman 1984” indefinitely. The movie was filmed and completed in 2018, which seems like an eternity ago given everything that’s happened in the last few months. There was a sense that the sequel would get stale by waiting until summer or next fall — four years after “Wonder Woman” premiered. Even with several promising vaccines, there’s no guarantee that the world will return to some kind of normal in a matter of months.
So Warner Bros. found itself weighing options that would have been unthinkable when the studio first greenlit “Wonder Woman 1984.” Up until the 11th hour, higher-ups at Warner Bros. were debating the best release strategy — a combination that would allow the movie to play in theaters on Christmas Day while also making a splash on HBO Max, the subscription streaming service owned by its parent company WarnerMedia. The studio heavily considered giving “Wonder Woman 1984” a shortened exclusive theatrical run. But instead, Warners made the surprising decision to release the movie day and date — meaning it would land in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously on Dec. 25.
Comments
Post a Comment