Tarssauce wrote: ↑

December 3rd, 2020, 8:34 pm

It's kinda ironic that this move came from the studio that stood beside theaters all summer with Tenet (thanks to Nolan).

Well they probably took that experience as a lesson.


Hope the remaining theaters manage to renegotiate this once we start vaccinating next year.

Ruth wrote: ↑

December 3rd, 2020, 9:21 pm

Well they probably took that experience as a lesson.


Hope the remaining theaters manage to renegotiate this once we start vaccinating next year.

Definitely.

And WW84 will be the next test. I'm surprised they didn't wait until after its release to announce this. I really don't think they'll stick to this approach forever.

This move doesn’t depress me as much as some. The positive is there are some movies that I would prob skip theaters that I’d watch right away now. I really want to see Dune and Suicide Squad in theaters regardless. Dune more so for the imagery where as Suicide Squad will be much enhanced with a crowd. By the time those movies come out a vaccine should be long here which is why this move was fairly shocking.

Rip cinemas.

Make no mistake, this will become a new standard as big studios push for a Netflix like model first.

Time to invest in proper sound I guess.

If anyone's forgotten:



https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal- ... nt-decrees

Will movie ticket prices go down, or up?

Demoph wrote: ↑

December 3rd, 2020, 8:58 pm

This decision makes no sense. I understand that pandemic and evolution of consumer's habit push to a reduction of the theatrical window. But to not even have a three weeks period of exclusivity? And for the entire year, when we have no idea what the situation will be like next summer? That's even worse than the deal Netflix offered cinemas for Irishman, Marriage story and The two popes last year, a deal that many cinemas refused.
I understand that at the moment, cinemas have a very limited power to negociate, since Disney doesn't release anything, they need WB's content whatever the conditions. Hopefully, after the vaccine, they'll be able to negociate again.

It makes sense for WB because of their terrible sub number for HBO Max compared to Disney+. They have much better content than Disney and still continue to lose. Of course their biggest issues are confusing branding and lack of compatibility with smart boxes but this is such a big splash of new original content that it will definitely help drive new subscribers. WW alone would help because it's bigger than either Mulan or Soul. But with Dune, Godzilla and Kong, Mortal Kombat, Space Jam 2 and Matrix 4? That's a super offer for potential subscribers.

This is catastrophic for cinema chains and lets make it clear, they haven't been consoluted about this decision. The source that broke the news in fact has said so. But what can they do now? They cannot boycott and not show anything.

Even though I understand such a decision from WB and I even proposed it before, but only until a significant part of the population is vaccinated, because cinemas right now cannot function normally regardless of this deal due to the pandemic. But that will happen when? Maybe already in March? In April? Let's even say that in June. It is only half of 2021. And the rest of the year is already a huge loss caused by WB, while cinemas should be recovering at that point as much as possible.

The only hope is that someone will eventually take over these big cinema chains when the current owners go bankrupt, and they will provide jobs to previous employees, but will the cinema landscape look like before the pandemic? If the HBO Max model pays off for Warner (and that's another story - there's really no way we can compare it with the traditional release model because they will not see direct income for a given movie on the platform), then we can look forward to such a system of releasing films in the future. And that means the release of smaller films in cinemas will not make any sense. Someone will probably go to the theater for some big budget blockbuster, but even those will not earn as much as they used to ...

And just how do we now know if a movie will earn enough for a sequel? We already know that WW1984 has no chance of a billion in theaters. But now it's the same for Dune (ok, this movie never had a chance for a billion) or Matrix 4. What box office will be satisfactory for the studio now? 300 million worldwide? Because, I cannot see them making more, even after the pandemic, with this model. That doesn't even cover the cost of the production and marketing of most of these large blockbusters, let alone allowing them to break even after sharing box office with theater owners. Will WB only look at the viewership results on HBO Max, which are secret to us? As a result, they can cancel many great film franchises, when the budget of their potential sequels gets too big on the pretext of low viewership.

This would just suck in the long term. Especially if we consider that Disney+ has a shit offer of new content and is such a big hit. They basically rely on their library and their only new original content so far has been... the Mandalorian. That's it. That's literally it. Sure, they have some shows that cost zero dollars that nobody watches. They will release a couple of MCU and Star Wars shows and that will drive their subs enough. I fear this will be the lesson these streaming platforms will learn from all of this.

So, is WB going to bring all their produced content to HBO Max and make it exclusive? Like Disney has done/is doing with their content on Disney+?

Again, theatres will never recover from this. Blockbusters as we know it are dead.