By George Robbins
This has certainly been an interesting year thus far, whether that be judged as a good or bad thing is within the eye of the beholder, but it is still not over just yet with much left in the limited time until it ends completely. Like any other year prior, many hoped that this year would be something different because many people were not having a great year before, but for many, this turned out to be the exact opposite of what happened. This past year has been one that many people will never really end up forgetting but for all of the wrong reasons because people will mostly just have bad memories. For the first time in the somewhat modern age we were forced to adhere to the rules put in place for a pandemic involving a novel virus previously unknown to the world. Although the virus is one that is based heavily upon an older virus, this one was much more troublesome than its predecessor which has forever changed the way things are going to be handled.
To say that things will never be the same again from this point forward is just a bit of an understatement in the long run because things won’t change all that much. While many things have inevitably changed due to the pandemic, they have only really been affected by actions that will ultimately be taken out of practice after a short amount of time has passed. Mainly, after the pandemic ends, we will be seeing many things go back to how they were before the pandemic ever really began and this is what many are hoping for. Once the pandemic began back in March, we were immediately given new rules that we had to follow for safety reasons which immediately started getting people upset. This is why many people over the past months have been doing their best to avoid actually listening to the rules they have been given.
People inherently don’t like being told what to do, but the vast majority listen anyway because it is in their best self-interest for them to listen to these rules. That aside, the most common thing for people to do nowadays is to avoid actually listening to the rules in place because they want to go out and do something other than sitting indoors for the day. Without something to keep them busy indoors, people have been losing their minds trying to figure out what it is they want to do day-in and day-out. This is why the companies that are succeeding during this period in time are the ones like entertainment companies that can function from home as opposed to being an in-person only location. This is why streaming services are pretty much exploding right now because they can broadcast whatever properties they own to the public and people will pay to watch those things.
Places like restaurants, malls, stores in general, etc.; they’re all unique locations that people love going to because they offer opportunities that people have been looking for. There are a lot of different opportunities given to people for them to be able to do something productive over these past few months, but they all have had severe limitations imposed on them by the pandemic. Many businesses immediately started shutting down after the pandemic began because they had to in order to follow the rules put in place by the government. After everything began, the pandemic forced businesses to shut down because they needed to prevent the further spread of the virus among the populace by any means necessary. The best way of doing this in the beginning of it all was to get people to simply stop going near one another until the number of new cases could be reduced to a safe point where it couldn’t rebound.
Unfortunately for just about every set of plans in place, there was no way that this was going to end up working out because from the beginning people already weren’t listening to the rules. This is how we managed to both get the numbers down and also immediately get them to jump back up again. The virus has a two week incubation period and a two week isolation/quarantine period and this means that one full month of quarantine should have been enough to week out a vast majority of the infected populace because the virus should have died out by then. Unfortunately, this did not end up being the case due to a few complications that we all did not really foresee all too well in the end due to businesses staying open. To be fair, those businesses were essential businesses which had to stay open so that people could get their essential everyday supplies in case of an emergency, but they were not regulated as well as they should have been.
From the very start, people were supposed to wear their masks and gloves as well as keep their distance from others in a bid to prevent the virus from spreading between people as time went on. On top of this, they were supposed to avoid going to places any longer than they needed to be on top of washing their hands every chance they got. This didn’t end up happening as people hoped it would and we still ended up with new cases cropping up everywhere, but the number of cases did end up going down and proper rules were able to be put into place. Unsurprisingly those rules were pretty much the same as the ones that we started off with initially with the only real difference being that people definitely had to listen to those rules from that point forward. Businesses were not allowed to open or stay open if people that frequented did not listen to those new rules that were put into place.
After a few months had passed, local governments made the “tough” decision to start reopening businesses all over the nation in an effort to get people to go back out and spend money. The economy started tanking the moment that everything started shutting down and the essential businesses being open was not enough to keep economies from failing. This is how we ended up with many businesses reopening around the same time and the number of new cases spiked almost overnight. While the amount of places which reopened varied wildly from location to location, there were many places that opened around the same time which allowed us to get a good view into just how much businesses being reopened was affecting both the economy and pandemic as a whole. Without a doubt, from that point forward, things started changing wildly which didn’t surprise anyone in the slightest.
Truth be told, once businesses as a whole were once again given the greenlight to resume business as usual, it immediately became an issue that people would start off by not listening to any of the new rules in place to prevent the spread of Covid. The rules put into place once everything started back up again were pretty much the same rules which had been put in place the moment the pandemic began. This is why a group of people within the populace immediately started complaining because they did not want to listen to these rules anymore which resulted in them not following them. This has stayed a huge point of contention among the populace since the pandemic began and it will stay that way until it ends because people don’t like the idea of having to adjust to new rules when the already established ones annoy them enough already. Businesses have been trying to make due with the fact that people are not listening to them and the rules they have in place by trying to enforce the rules to the best of their abilities.
While all businesses essentially have the same rules that must be followed, they are not all followed in the same way due to the variety of businesses out there in the world. When some businesses have people come in, those people can then sit down and relax with little regard for the rules in place, but others simply don’t allow for this sort of thing to happen. Some businesses cannot function properly unless they follow all of the rules put into place for them after the pandemic began and these businesses have been suffering. It is not the fault of the businesses or the governments at all but rather the fact that those businesses are not meant to function properly in a society where a pandemic is currently ongoing. This is just something that cannot be rectified properly because we don’t want to take the unnecessary risks involved with this action which would end up causing more harm than good.
Most businesses that reopened that suffered were ones that often involved a number of people going out to the same location where they would be within the same area for a fair amount of time together. Obviously, the industry to be affected the hardest by all of this was the film industry which immediately began suffering like other companies the moment theaters shut their doors. Like many other types of business, studios and movie theaters were forced to shut down for health and safety reasons once the pandemic began and they had no way of dealing with it. Some studios, namely Universal, had the radical idea to actually start just releasing their movies straight to digital in a bid to try and continue making money after the pandemic began and they couldn’t show their movies in theaters. This ended up, unsurprisingly, not working out with many studios who instead wanted to wait to release their films once theaters could reopen their doors.
On top of not being popular with studios, movie theaters were even more against the idea because they would just straight-up be missing out on revenue, period. This meant that the theaters would not be able to bring in customers because they would have no new movies to show and this terrified them in the end. Then, Universal made the announcement that they planned on releasing movies in theaters and on digital at the same time on their scheduled release dates and all hell broke loose as a result. Theaters like AMC started flatly refusing to show any future titles from Universal because they were going to go along with a plan like this which would obviously take away a massive amount of revenue from the industry as a whole, though mostly from theaters. What would then follow would be a couple of months of radio silence where it is safely assumed that the studio and theater companies held a meaningful discussion about how they would handle things from that point forward.
Luckily for just about everyone involved, an agreement was reached that, on its own, would easily reshape the entire industry at its fundamental levels even after the pandemic finally comes to an end. This agreement which we saw unfold was one that would allow new movies to release on digital and DVD formats long before they would normally end up releasing. Under the previous contracts that we have seen from theaters, movies would only be able to release after a couple of months had passed and theaters were essentially done with said movie. Truth be told, movie theaters thrive entirely on the fact that they get movie exclusivity which is how they make their money to begin with because then people are forced to go spend money in theaters. With movie exclusivity, movie theaters are able to open to large crowds that want to go out and see new movies that they can’t go see somewhere else.
Under the new deal made between theaters and the remainder of the industry, studios would be able to release their new films after just seventeen days in the movie theater scene. After the initial 17 days is up, studios are allowed to release their films digitally which is a massive change from how things used to be done. Obviously this is a much shorter period of time than before and would completely change the landscape of the industry as a whole long before anything else would do so. The pandemic most certainly shook some things up, but this was perhaps the biggest change to end up being made by the industry as a whole. With this ability to play their films with much shorter theatrical runs, studios could make the bulk of their theatrical run money and then start banking in on those that have been wanting the film to release before they would watch it.
With the new plans in place, the only thing that theaters and studios had to wait for at that point was an opportunity for theaters to finally reopen to the public. Unfortunately for the movie industry, there wasn’t much that they could do before the time was right as it was entirely up to the government whether theaters would be able to once again resume their business as usual. What this meant was that theaters would have to wait for a little while before they would finally be able to reopen to the public as the general consensus was that theaters were too dangerous for places to reopen too early once again. Movie theaters were given new rules to follow in or to keep people from getting infected or spreading the virus but they were unfortunately backed into a corner. Although they had the same rules in place that every other business had, the layout of the business itself was what made things so difficult in the end.
Movie theaters fundamentally function differently from other forms of business for the most part because they have large groups of people seated in them for hours at a time where people don’t really move at all. This last fact ensures that their germs and the like spread and emanate from them simply as they are sitting in their seats which further emphasizes the danger they put people in by being open. Like other major businesses that have high capacities or similar functions, they were among the last to receive the green light to resume normal operation. They didn’t really get to resume normal operation though because they had all of the new rules that they had to follow in order to properly resume operations. This meant that people had to wear masks whenever they weren’t eating or drinking and the overall number of people that could be there was severely limited as well to prevent people from overcrowding. These new rules made it difficult to continue on regardless, but what happened over the summer made it almost impossible for theaters to continue onward.
Over the summer, namely late July and early August, movie theaters were given the ability to once again open up to the public but things did not go as they anticipated in the slightest. Movie theaters were finally given the opportunity to once again allow customers the opportunity to come in once again to have the movie theater experience they always had before. Unfortunately for movie theaters, this didn’t mean anything to anyone as the vast majority of people did not care about movie theaters opening up once again because they had no new films to show to the public at large. This was not the fault of movie theaters though as studios were pretty much refusing to release any of their films until they knew for a fact that there was a market for them. If movies were given to theaters then theaters would have opened as soon as possible and if theaters opened then studios would have sent their films out to be shown ASAP.
What ended up happening was a dance where nothing ended up being accomplished in the industry because neither side would give first due to the new wave of the virus which was hitting at the time. Therefore, nothing was happening and the delay of both theatrical reopenings and movie releases were happening which caused even more trouble in the long run. Without either side acting first, we were left with nothing happening whatsoever and the movie industry stayed at a standstill until AMC basically said they had enough and decided to open up to the public once again. Around the middle of August, AMC reopened their doors to the public to once again allow movies to start showing to the public to begin the process of hopefully making money once again. Unfortunately, things did not turn out in any way how they originally wanted them to and this drove everyone to doing things no one would have ever imagined for the industry.
First of all, what is it that every single movie theater needs in order to resume functioning and to make money? The very simple answer to this is in the name and that is that they need movies in order to be a movie theater and to get people through their doors to make revenue. Before most theaters reopened, there were some that reopened with the idea to get old movies playing to try and draw people in which was able to generate some kind of revenue from the people that genuinely enjoy the movie-going experience. However, the vast majority of people did not care about this and did not want to take a major risk going out to the movies over something like this in the end. This goes back to the fact that movie theaters need new movies in order to capture the interest of those involved because they only really function based on this fact. The movie-going experience is just an ideal made up by film-makers that think that movie theaters are the only premiere way to watch their movies.
So if movie theaters did not have any new movies, then wouldn’t they immediately start losing revenue as soon as they reopened to the public? The very quick answer to this is yes and they did, in fact, stop getting enough revenue to properly continue business once again because nobody really cared about the movie-going experience as a whole. Instead, people had grown far too accustomed to the fact that they could watch any new movies they wanted from home without the need, or fear, of going out to a theater just to see a new film. This resulted in no one wanting to go out to theaters unless they had an incentive to do so and this is where movie theaters had to race against the clock over the summer to try and get new movies to show to the general public to keep them entertained. Despite a couple of films releasing the moment theaters reopened, none of them were captivating enough to get audiences involved and this is where the movie ‘Tenet‘ came into play at the end of August.
For those who are completely unaware, and most people pretty much are unaware according to the numbers, ‘Tenet’ was the newest blockbuster film from acclaimed director Christopher Nolan. Nolan has become a household name over the years and therefore, any new movie that he comes up with is known for the incredible attention to detail that it usually has within and the fact that it will blow people’s minds in some way, shape or form. Nolan is known for coming up with various plots and visuals which have stimulated peoples’ minds for years and this movie was definitely shaping up to be one that would be in that same vein. The movie was originally meant to premiere back in the middle of July, but delays with theater reopenings and the resurgence of new Covid cases resulted in the movie’s release date being pushed back until further notice. To be honest, it was just pushed back a couple of weeks at a time until such a moment where Warner Bros., the studio responsible for producing the film, would finally release it in theaters. That time would eventually come by the moment the end of August hit and the movie released in the international and domestic markets.
Interestingly enough, ‘Tenet’ was going to release the way that it normally would in the domestic market first and then the international, but the spread of the virus was worse domestically which resulted in the movie being pushed. In response, they decided that regardless of what happened, ‘Tenet’ would hit international markets first and this led to the last Friday in August being the day that the movie hit the international theatrical marketplace. The following Friday, the first one in September, saw the release of the film in the domestic marketplace and regardless of which market it was released on, the movie ended up bringing in a lot of money overall. It was nowhere near what they needed to be able to break even before including marketing costs, but given everything that had happened this year, it was most definitely a start and one that would not be forgotten considering what happened next. While the amount of money being earned dropped a lot the following week internationally, this was to be expected, but no one expected the massive decline in revenue that was seen in the domestic market.
First of all, the international market which continued playing ‘Tenet’ was actually managing to bring some money in because things were going much better in the pandemic for other countries. The domestic market was a far cry from this however because it immediately started tanking and after just a few weeks the amount of revenue being brought in nationwide ended up being just a few million dollars. While this may not sound all that bad in the long run, the truth is that this is pretty bad because this is the amount that was brought in nation wide, not just in one state or one theater. Theaters and studios usually split the profit from ticket sales 50/50 in order to keep things fair and profitable for both institutions, but this time around was different, Warner changed that amount to 60/40 because they were desperate to make as much as they could off the movie, knowing full-well that it wasn’t going to do as well because of the pandemic. They just never would have predicted that things would end up as badly as they did and that they would end up losing so much money in the end because of pure lack of ticket sales.
This failure in cinema showed every other studio that this was not the right time to release their films and as a result, most studios pushed all of their films out of this year’s line-up and into some time next year. Thus, we were left with something that we never would have really imagine before which was that most new movies would be delayed for upwards of a year or maybe even more given the precise studio. Christopher Nolan had a lot to say about this move from studios as he felt that this decision was the wrong way to go about dealing with the situation both ‘Tenet’ release. Nolan felt that studios should instead try to help fix the market in some way instead of simply trying to outlast the pandemic because it might be the only way to keep theaters from going under. Truth be told, many theaters once again closed up shop or they are going to be bankrupt by the end of the year because they have nothing that can help them make back their revenue that has been lost.
If they have no new revenue, then theaters have no true methods of staying open, so Nolan wanted studios to try and find alternatives which could help drive traffic back to theaters to fix the situation rather than trying to wait it out. One issue with theaters reopening with so few blockbusters is the fact that there is no variety and therefore no reason for some people to be incentivized to go out to movie theaters. This isn’t helped along by the fact that studios have all but removed new blockbusters from this year’s line-up and therefore there is nothing to help theaters as this year comes to an end. This is all pretty terrible for theaters in the long run, but this is far from the only thing that is currently harming them as there is even more that could threaten to ruin them as time goes on. Going back a bit though, there are some studios heeding the call who wish to help theaters in some way as long as it is also convenient to them as well.
There are some movies that have since released since ‘Tenet’ came out back in late August and while they may not have really brought any revenue into theaters, they did bring something in. Considering the fact that some kind of revenue is better than none, this is a step in the right direction, but these movies really aren’t enough to draw people in. This is why we have now reached the point where movie theaters are pretty much just desperate at this point and they are all following the same release deal that AMC initially proposed which allows movies to release after just 17 days in theaters. Therefore, it is a win-win for studios because they can make some extra cash from people wanting to see their films in theaters and they don’t have to wait too long afterward to release the films to the public on digital where they are bound to make most of their money. On top of this, studios that do this can get some good faith from theaters because, while they may not be getting their money the way they used to be, theaters are actually getting something rather than nothing.
Not everyone is trying to stay on the same playing field these days however, because as we reach the end of this year, it would appear that some, namely one, studio(s) is trying to cheat the system in some way to make their money. That studio would be Warner Bros. who are now taking the initiative to try and mess with as many people as they possibly can before the year is over it would seem. As mentioned previously, Warner Bros. were the studio responsible for putting out Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet’ to theaters and therefore they took the hit for the movie’s theatrical failure. Considering the fact that this hit was one straight to the wallet, they did not take it well and thus we ended up in the situation we are currently in where they are doing something no one would have thought doable before. They are going to go with Universal’s original attack plan for releasing movies both during and after the pandemic.
Basically, this means that they plan on releasing their films on both a digital platform as well as in theaters on the same day for the remainder of this year and for all of next year. Warner themselves have had a pretty rough year this far and they don’t seem like they will be lying down any longer, but the way they are going about it just seems more like scorched earth tactics at this point. Other than the failure of the ‘Tenet’ launch in theaters, they have had a rough year in general because of the launch of their premiere streaming service HBO Max. Unlike everything that came before it, HBO Max is a service which takes pretty much all of Warner’s library and essentially puts it all into one place where people can watch whatever is in the HBO library any time they want. On top of this, they have been boasting that they are adding new movies and shows on a regular basis from all forms of content which is their way of trying to convince people to subscribe to the service as soon as possible. Unfortunately, none of these tactics worked so they went with one that always does, that would be exclusive content.
Streaming services are nothing new nowadays and new ones releasing for big companies is not really all that surprising because it is more of a rebranding tactic these days for companies to do so. This means that it is actually pretty common these days for companies to do this sort of thing because it allows them to keep up with other companies. Other studios need to stream nowadays because it is the only way possible for them to keep up with the current market where being able to release new content and people be able to watch it any time they want is considered the new norm. This is the only way for the market as a whole to keep up anymore because people have grown very much accustomed to being able to watch whatever content they want whenever they want it anymore. Warner Bros. recognized this fact after enough time had passed and they made the decision to consolidate their content across all mediums by putting all of it out on their HBO Max service where people could watch whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it.
Jut because they now had a premiere streaming service though, did not mean that they would have the immediate fan base that they were hoping for and they were left twiddling their thumbs after everything was said and done. They were not able to get a lot of people interested and/or subscribed to their website in the end and thus they immediately ran into trouble which they are still trying to deal with now more than ever. Streaming sites of all kinds usually run into this issue with only one recent example actually working out from the get-go and this was the Disney+ streaming service. The only reason that things ended up working out for this service was because they had a lot of good faith built up in their brand for many years prior to their launch and this helped in launch tremendously. They were actually under the impression that they would not do as well as they did when they first launched Disney+ which just goes to show how volatile that whole market really is right now.
Thus, Warner Bros. just like every other company with a streaming service, is just trying to expand their subscriber base and this is very necessary at the moment because of their overall lack of revenue they suffer from at the moment. It is due to this lack in subscribers that they are now taking measures that other people would now consider ridiculously unfair to the industry as a whole and this is because of their new plans for exclusive content. Streaming services tend to have the hardest time attracting new subs because they need to incentivize people to come to their platform and exclusive content is what allows for that incentivization to happen in the first place. So exclusive content easily becomes the best way for streaming services to draw people in which is what Warner is now hoping for going into next year. They plan on bringing in as many people as they can with their new content even if it means ruining the plans of so many others in the industry.
This wasn’t originally going to be their plan of attack though as they were just going to continue releasing their content as it was available with some unique content being spread in there in some way. One of the biggest releases they have coming up is actually the Zack Snyder Cut for ‘Justice League’ which was an announcement that many fans were waiting a long time for and when news of this broke, people immediately became excited. This, plus the fact that the movie is meant to premiere in four parts exclusively on HBO Max made it an event that people everywhere were going to have to sub for. Unfortunately, the release is in some time early-2021 and people would only really have to sub for about a month or so and then they could stop anytime they wanted which would ruin their plan to try and keep recurring subs on their site. So what could they do to continually keep people subbed to their site all-year round and maybe longer than that?
The apparent answer to that question is to release all of their new films pretty much straight to HBO Max while simultaneously releasing their new content in theaters. This means that they will be splitting their revenue streams over the course of the next year between both release methods in a bid to more so drive people to their streaming service instead of the theaters. Of course, there are many people and institutions out there that are not taking too kindly to all of this though and want Warner to back down and change their minds about everything that they plan on doing over the following year. Of course, they don’t actually plan on doing this and it is now leading to a point of no return where people are just straight up deciding not to be involved with Warner anymore. This is all dangerous to the industry as a whole and it can easily result in everything going downhill from this point forward even as things seem to be coming to a close.
What is happening with the pandemic right now is that their is a vaccine which apparently has a very real shot of working on the vast majority of the public that can stop this pandemic in its tracks. This is not a guarantee in the slightest though because they have to see what side effects are as well as whether the vaccine will actually end up working once people have actually been injected with it. So then, how will things be handled once the pandemic reaches its end? Well, we can pretty much expect most everything to start going back to how it was before the pandemic began in March and even if the pandemic doesn’t end in the next couple of months, it is likely to end within the year to some degree. So if this is the case and it is now knowledge to just about everyone, then why is Warner still going along with their new release plan. To quote a very greedy crab, “Money.”
I’m not trying to say that it is wrong for a company to try and make money, but the way they are currently going about it may not be viewed as the best way possible given how it affects their own paid actors, directors, and production crews. More specific to the actors and directors is the fact that they mainly make their money based upon how much money gets brought in by the box office. When a movie is released, we have already discussed that studios get a portion of the money from tickets sales which is how their deals with theaters work to begin with. Beyond that deal is the one that studios have with their directors and actors as well, where they make a percentage on every single ticket that gets sold as well. Even now, those types of deals are in place, even if theaters wouldn’t bring in as much as they would have pre-pandemic which is something no one is really all that surprised about.
Warner Bros. new plan would take money immediately away from directors and actors who would otherwise make most of their money from the contracts where they have to get paid based on percentage of ticket sales. In response, they immediately started complaining to the studio that they should be compensated for the sudden change in release structure, which is further cemented by the fact that the studio already made the decision to do this with their upcoming ‘Wonder-Woman 1984.’ They made a new contract deal with Gal Gadot and director Patty Jenkins that said that they would receive $10 million each in compensation for the move to HBO Max. It turns out that no one else from the 17 other releases Warner has coming out next year have been given a similar type of compensation thus far and this is leading to some major future changes for the studio. It turns out that chief among those new changes for the studio is the fact that many directors are discussing boycotting Warner for any future films.
Not only does Warner have this on their hands, but if they go through with this for every film in the upcoming year, then they are going to have a very hard time if the pandemic ends. Movies release in theaters before they release digitally primarily because it means that they will end up making more money in the end off of the movie. If they release movies at the same time when things go back to normal, then people will have no reason to go out to theaters which will result in a huge loss in overall revenue at the box office. It has already been projected that the total loss in funds at the box office with this move could be somewhere around $1.2 billion because Warner mainly only puts out blockbuster films. It remains to be seen how much of that can be compensated though with many people then subscribing to HBO Max to watch new films.
Beyond this though is another issue which prevented Universal from trying something similar to this earlier in the year and that is the hatred from theaters. Movie theaters rely very heavily upon the exclusivity period granted by studios for them to have movies granted to them before their official releases on digital or other formats. If movies are immediately given releases that take away from their releases on other formats then they will end up losing money for someone along the line and maybe everyone for that matter that is involved. This is the current state of the film industry at the moment and things don’t seem to be getting better any time soon, though there are some things that can take our attention away from the incredible crapshoot that is movie releases right now and that is new movies that are coming out even as we speak about everything else. While many movies had their release dates pushed back some time into next year, some of them have release dates set for this year.
Among the movies to release this year is yet another video game based movie ‘Monster Hunter‘ which was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and stars Milla Jovavich. Of all of the games for there to now exist a movie for, we have a movie based upon a complicated monster hunting video game from a director who is widely considered the worst at adapting video game movies. To be at least somewhat fair to the man, video game movies are notorious pieces of media because it is extremely difficult to encapsulate what makes a video game into a movie version of said game. Video games as a medium should remain relatively separate from the movie making sphere of influence unless people know they can make it right. There are very few video game movies which could be considered good by any stretch of the imagination with only one so far managing to beat out pretty much most other films in a given year, though this was a year where we had a pandemic.
Video games as a medium are different from most other forms of entertainment and maintain a special stance in the digital entertainment medium as a whole. No one within the digital entertainment spectrum can ever say that a video game movie could possibly beat out the game that it is emulated off of, just like there are very few cases where a movie is better than its book counterpart. The level of interactivity seen with movies is vastly different from the level of interactivity from video games because we as the players influence parts of the game itself. A movie is something which is completely on the rails for the entirety of its run time and no matter how we look at it, the way it plays out is the same every time. They have tried to combine the two mediums with choose your own adventure movies, but the results are still the same with every character essentially having the same actions and dialog no matter what happens.
In a video game, things are entirely different almost every single time because the player has control directly over the characters which allows them to play however they want. Even if it is a game where every piece of story and dialog is the same for every person, the gameplay itself where players control the characters can vary wildly in some cases. To be fair to some movies and video games, there are some things that can actually translate to the big screen, especially when you have a strong story-based game where most everything is laid out for you in the end. It is fair to say that those types of games are definitely allowed to be turned into films because they are the best designed for that sort of thing, but they need to be done well in the end otherwise it is pointless to work on them at all. When you take another game that is a lot less linear and turn that into a movie, then you have a very long and winding road ahead of you to get it to work out properly.
A series among the video game movie populace which has become known for being notorious in its own right for both following, yet ignoring the story of the original games is the Resident Evil series of games/movies. Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, those movies were loosely based upon the video games of the same name, but he created entirely new characters to fit his new narrative and as a result, it did not pay off. While those movies may have been huge cash cows, they were widely regarded as horrible adaptations of the Resident Evil franchise of games. This is something that appears to be continuing even to this day as Paul W.S. Anderson has apparently made yet another big budget video game movie which has bad reviews. While it may certainly be hard to make a proper video game movie, he doesn’t even seem like he tries to do it well because the reviews for the new ‘Monster Hunter’ film.
The ‘Monster Hunter’ movie is one that is apparently filled to the brim with the action one would expect from a movie about fighting giant monsters on another world. However, it would appear that this cannot really make up for the fact that the movie lacks any kind of apparent character development which is about what most people expected at this point. We didn’t really expect all that much from this movie given the director and the source content that this movie was adapted from, but we were hopeful that we would get at least a decent video game movie adaptation. Unfortunately, the source content is just too weird to riff off of so it felt like it was set up to fail from the moment it was announced. Hopefully, whatever other movies are set for release are not going to be disappointments because at this point we really need something to distract us all from the frailty of the industry at the moment.
By George Robbins
Soon, we may just end up having the opportunity to see the pandemic end and things can begin sliding back into normality in some way, shape, or form. There is almost no guarantee that this will end up being the case though as the world is pretty much reeling at the fact that things are still ongoing right now, though nothing can be done about this. Many people just want this pandemic to be over, but there is no way of just making a pandemic end all of a sudden. If this were a pandemic in the past, it would be on-going for countless years, but we are now in a an age in the world where scientists can work day-in and day-out for a “cure” to a brand new (novel) virus. This means that the way that this pandemic situation can be handled is completely different from how it would be years ago and this is something that can overall be appreciated by the general public.
Unfortunately, the general public does not care about the fact that an almost magical improvement in the medical field has been seen within recent history and they just want things back the way they were. They want this so much in fact, that they are willing to completely disregard health and safety rules so that they can try and live they way they always have been. In the meantime, scientists have actually been fighting the ever-present clock to produce the miraculous vaccine that will allow people to go back to their lives the way they were living them before the pandemic began. They are already trying to do that anyway, but with a vaccine out there, the risks are much more likely to decrease over time and things can go back to how they were without any added tension or fears arising.
The unfortunate fact remains that there is just no idea of knowing how things will turn out until enough time has passed to allow us the opportunity to see a change in the vast world as a whole. On top of the issue with the pandemic, or rather adding to the whole pandemic issue, are the usual world and economic politics that must be dealt with going into the next year. Getting into world politics is pretty much pointless because things have not really changed all that much in that regard and the pandemic really had no affect on the world politics level, at least not to the same degree as everything else that happens on that level. What really ended up being affected by the whole pandemic was the world economy and more specifically, the individual economies of each worldwide country. Nothing can really be done to help these economies, at least on an individual person level, except to contribute in some way but this is obviously an issue as well.
In the end, a vast majority of businesses were forced to shut down for the following months until new safety rules and regulations were put in place which would keep people safe while they were out. Therefore, only businesses that provided things like food, toiletries, everyday household objects, and other maintenance items to keep homes and vehicles from falling to pieces were able to remain open. This ended up being a surprising number of businesses in the end and it would only really be things like restaurant, malls, theaters, etc. that would remain shut down for the following months. To no one’s real surprise, those businesses started losing a lot of money because they still had to try and maintain some semblance of actually existing in the world therefore they had to put themselves out there with building maintenance or advertising.
Further unsurprising, those non-essential businesses which were forced to stay closed soon started complaining when they could not open to the public. Therefore, some places started allowing them to reopen to the public in waves based upon what their overall danger to society would be if they opened up again. This basically meant how dangerous it would be to the public at large if they allowed people to go back to those businesses and how likely people were to spread the virus in that environment. In the end, places that were overall less populated could reopen first and those that could house larger populations were allowed to reopen later. Among those that had to wait to reopen until a much later date were places like theaters which are enclosed spaces that sit a lot of people for hours on end. This ended up angering theater owners because they felt like they were not being given a fair chance in the economy.
What would then follow the reopening of theaters was a series of events that no one should ever really forget because it proved that there was really no point to reopening them at all. Most theaters opened, not just nationwide, but worldwide some time in August earlier this year and they were having a difficult time before they even got into full swing. This had to do with the fact that they had no new content to show off to anyone when they first reopened their doors to the public at large and therefore they had no way of drawing in customers. Without any real way of drawing in customers, they were pretty much doomed from the start, but they persisted and that is all that really matters. They stayed open and this gave them an opportunity that they had not seen in months which eventually allowed on studio in particular, Warner Bros., to release a new Christopher Nolan blockbuster which would reshape the way the theater industry would work from that moment on.
The movie pretty much ended up failing in theaters and the studio pretty much took a huge hit in the end because they lost a lot of money that they are still trying to get back in some way. When they released the new movie, things started off strong for both Warner and theaters in general, until things immediately started going downhill and we saw a very quick decline in attendance to movie theaters. In truth, the unthinkable, happened; though it was actually very thinkable because of the way a pandemic works, people were afraid to go out to the movies. They took a shot in the dark by releasing their film in both the domestic and international markets, and it failed in the domestic where most of the money is usually made anyway. When you have a blockbuster where you need to bring in $500 million before marketing costs to break even and you don’t touch that mark in a theatrical run, things usually don’t look so hot moving forward.
Following that failure at the box office, another issue became apparent and that was that this was probably going to be the case with any movies that tried releasing from that point onward. It was at that moment that pretty much every production studio turned around and said that they were going to try and outlast the pandemic by pushing back all of their upcoming release dates for films. This was an action which would pretty much end up clearing out the entire calendar year of any new blockbusters that people were looking forward to. What would follow would essentially be news that some theaters were going to once again shut down until such time where they had a reason to reopen, such as actually having new films to show that people want to want i.e. blockbusters. Without these blockbuster releases, movie theaters which actually decided to remain open would begin losing money hand-over-fist until they inevitably reach the point where bankruptcy is the best option available to them.
Unfortunately for movie theaters, things appear to only really be getting worse for them as time goes on because it seems that studios are really just intent on messing with them at this point. Not that it is necessarily the studios’ fault at this point since it is their job to make money on new movie releases, but they are mostly reneging on their prior deals with movie theaters which is gutting theaters. Movie theaters rely heavily on having new movies to show to the public, but this is sort of an issue when those studios are holding out for people to feel comfortable to return to theaters. Theaters are just desperate for revenue at this point and this is none more apparent than when they actually agreed to a n unheard of plan to allow movies to release digitally after just 17 days in theaters because they are pretty much in a situation where they no longer have any say. Though it now seems that one studio is going that extra step forward to mess with theaters and that studio is Warner Bros. who, as previously mentioned, have already incurred huge losses this year.
Warner’s plan is to release every single one of their films for the next year in theaters and on their HBO Max streaming service simultaneously rather than an exclusivity period with just theaters then a digital release. This is something that has driven a huge rift in-between the movie-making community at the moment because of the implications this has had on it. It is actually so bad at this point, that directors working under Warner are threatening to boycott the studio, though this is only because their money is being tampered with. Directors and actors working with the studio on their upcoming films were not informed of this release plans ahead of time and therefore were not able to negotiate for compensation for the move ahead of time which resulted in a lot of annoyed actors and directors. On top of this, it would now appear that movie theaters aren’t just going to take this lying down either.
Movie theaters are desperate to try and get as much business as possible and new movie releases are the only thing they are hopeful for, but they hate being messed with even more. Movie theaters rely on getting an even split on the movie tickets they sell to patrons where they will then give the rest to the studio, but with Warner’s plan, they would be taking customers directly away from theaters which would only further ruin their attempts at getting back on their feet. Because of Warner Brothers’ plan to release all 2021 films on HBO Max the same day as their theatrical premieres, theaters may cut ticket prices to get back at them. Of course this will really end up hurting theaters in the end as well, this is about sending a message at this point and they are going into bankruptcy anyway at this point, so why would they care how much they are losing. It is certainly going to be an interesting year ahead of us and definitely an interesting one for Warner since it was already predicted that they could end up losing over $1.2 billion next year even without the new retaliation plan from theaters.
By George Robbins
While most businesses this past year have been negatively affected in some way by this pandemic, but not every business out there has been dealing with the same issue. Some companies are better off now than they were at the start of the year and this is something that sets them apart from other companies which have been forced to deal with this year as a whole. Not every opportunity that is available is one that can be obtained by just any company, but it can be obtained by companies which have put in that little bit of extra effort which allows them to go through with these deals. Many businesses this past year have dealt with the pandemic in varying ways which would allow them to continue thriving, or at the very least surviving, going into the next year. We will be seeing those businesses and their plans going forward becoming a bigger forefront as time goes on in the next few months and the businesses which survived will really be showing off what they’ve done.
When this year began, no one was aware of just what would really end up happening just a few months into the start of the year and this resulted in a lot of unprepared folks after the pandemic began. This, in the end, resulted in a nosedive in the economy which would end up driving a lot of businesses to try and fix the broken system that was immediately put into place. The new economy created by the pandemic caused countless businesses in all aspects of the economy to have to find a way to keep themselves alive moving forward. Just because the pandemic was a catalyst for a lot of what was happening in the economy does not mean that there was not some kind of effort being put in by the various business owners over the months. This is why we will be seeing companies, small and large, continue to actually thrive going into the new year based upon how they handled the situation.
Among the companies to come out on top over this past year is one Invincible Entertainment Partners, an independent production and distribution company. What they have managed to succeed with this past year is the expansion of various types of content and the merging/acquisition of one Business Rockstars, a producer of video programming featuring CEOs and entrepreneurs. The acquisition was one that saw Invincible acquiring the company for $20 million in stock which was achieved after Thom Beers and Steve Lehman, both longtime media executives and principal partners of Business Rockstars, sold the company to Invincible. With the acquisition in place, they not only sold the company to Invincible, but will also join the company as part of Invincible’s board in an effort to expand on the groundwork already put in place.
Beers is an Emmy-winning producer who was formerly Chairman/CEO for FremantleMedia North America and was founder/CEO of Original Productions which is known for the production of shows like ‘Deadliest Catch,’ ‘Ice Road Truckers,’ and ‘Storage Wars.’ Lehman was the founder/CEO of Premiere Networks which is now owned by iHeartMedia and was, on top of this, a first-round investor in the Mark Cuban-led Broadcast.com. Both men are known for their work in entertainment media and it is only going to further work out for the overall transaction that the two men are still major parts of the company moving forward. Invincible Entertainment founder and CEO Tom Ashley said he wants to grow Business Rockstars’ audience and turn it into a “better entrepreneurial Cheddar.” This move is set to certainly set up both companies, now under one flag, for a better future overall as they will be able to better hold one another up moving forward.
Ashley has said that the content produced by Business Rockstars is not just any kind of business content and it is more like “an entrepreneurial masterclass.” Instead of what people would normally expect from the business and financial news one may see on everyday cable television, Business Rockstars produces content geared more towards giving entrepreneurs ideas as to how they could enter an industry and how to possibly get ahead in that industry. More than just giving people advice about an industry, it gives tips and tricks for all types of entrepreneurs that may want to better themselves or maybe just want to improve themselves in the work they are already doing. It is a type of programming that many people could actually use in their everyday lives especially with the way the economy is now going into this new year. People could most certainly use the tips and tricks given to them within Business Rockstars’ content to help them get ahead now that everything is beginning to go downhill for businesses everywhere.
Whether it be to help businesses along which are now struggling or to help entrepreneurs who want to get their start going into a year where businesses are going to be needed more than ever, Business Rockstars has content to help. Ashley has said that the next goal in mind after the acquisition is to work on the expansion of distribution which would allow more of BR’s content to reach out to further extended communities which may need the content. This is the current plan of action, whereas the next phase of the plan is to “create more original programming to expand on what we already have” which would help keep everything up to date for the most modern form of entrepreneur. Rockstars currently produces 12 shows and its programming airs in 43 million TV households and it has managed to produce interviews with more than 3,000 CEOs, entrepreneurs and other business leaders according to Mr. Lehman. Since its inception in 2012, this is just some of what Rockstars has managed to achieve and this seems to just be the start of things.
When it really first began, Business Rockstars was just a two-hour long radio show where Beers and Lehman would usually use the time to try and find interesting new businesses to invest in. When it comes to the acquisition by Invincible, Lehman has said, “We thought this would be a great strategic alignment for Business Rockstars. I’ve come to have a lot of respect for Invincible. Tom is on the forefront of the change we’ve all been seeing.” Beers further added to this by stating, “I’m really looking forward to working with the Invincible team. They are incredibly well versed in OTT and alternative distribution platforms, and well-positioned to succeed in this new media world.” The Philadelphia-based Invincible Entertainment manages approximately 5000 assets which is makes available through various online avenues like its free, ad-supported streaming TV networks including Galxy TV, FrightFlix, Watch It Kid, Watch It Scream, Cinepride, Dungeon TV, Ski TV, Screen Dreams and El Conflicto.
This is surely a huge change for these two companies, but it is sure to produce huge results especially since the two companies are still maintaining their employees. With the work of all parties involved, this upcoming year is poised to be a transformative year the likes of which could help define how the company turns out over the coming years. Without a doubt in anyone’s minds there is a lot of work to be done in order to make sure that there is more of a presence from this company in the coming year, but it is definitely bound to be interesting. They are just one of the many companies taking a previously terrible year for the world and the economy and turning what comes next into a magnificent chance of a future. They, like every other company out there, is doing what they can to not only survive, but also thrive in a world where much of what is happening is actually harming many businesses out there. This is something that many other companies should take notice of to see if they can’t also find a way to expand and move forward.
By George Robbins
This past year has been a horrific one for a number of reasons because of the pandemic and its affect on the economic marketplace as well as the general population. There has been pain going around in just about every circle that has affected the way that business has been forced to be handled as of late because of the rules and regulations in place. When the pandemic first started, we saw an incredible number of businesses shut down because they had to for the sake of shutting out new virus cases. The rate of new infections at the start of the pandemic was incredible to no one’s surprise because it was allowed to run rampant with no regulation in place. This is why almost all forms of business were shut down for awhile to make up for the time lost where they couldn’t prevent more people from getting infected.
What would end up following all of this is a few months where businesses were just completely shut down and there was very little business transpiring in the world for the most part. Only businesses which were considered essential were actually allowed to have their doors open to the public once they were past the initial quarantine period. These businesses were the ones like grocery stores and other main supply stores which gave people the opportunity to go and get their regular necessities. The main thing to take away from this was the fact that many other businesses were deemed non-essential in the end and therefore could not stay open during the beginning of the pandemic. This ultimately resulted in businesses starting to lose money very quickly as time went on resulting in them nit having any way to keep up with the economy.
The economy took a very quick and deep downward spiral which resulted in a lot of different businesses losing out on potential revenue due to the state of everything. There was no way of people being able to get revenue for their businesses because there were rules and regulations that had to be put into place before things could turn out for them in the end. They needed to have those rules and regulations to keep people from gathering unnecessarily and further spreading the virus in a time where the pandemic was in full swing. Eventually these rules and regs came out and people were finally given an opportunity to reopen and/or go back out to the public places they liked to visit. Unfortunately every business was not really treated equal and this resulted in some losing out on a lot of business even after they managed to reopen to the public.
One of the biggest businesses to be hit by this type of treatment and lack of patrons was the movie theater industry which had been suffering for a large majority of the year. When the pandemic began and theaters were forced to shut down, they immediately started feeling the affects of the shut down because all films that released before the pandemic began immediately left theaters and went to digital. Those films that were meant to have released soon after that period of time were delayed until further notice and this is still very much on-going for many movies that haven’t released yet. Most films that have yet to release onto the market are actually films which were supposed to drop earlier this year, but they unfortunately could not because the studios did not want to take the risk. This is fair, but it is easily resulting in changes that are overtaking the industry as a whole.
The biggest changes currently being made to the industry involve the fact that movie releases seem like they will be handled in a very unique way moving forward that we haven’t really seen before. Many movies are going to be releasing in theaters, but after just a few weeks they will be releasing digitally which is a landmark deal as they usually took months to release after they initially premiered in theaters. Warner Bros. is now taking this a step further because they are doing something which is now considered highly controversial by releasing all of their films over the next year on both HBO Max and in theaters. This has angered a lot of people in the industry, namely the actors and directors who are not being compensated for the change. In doing this, they are also apparently taking a huge risk as they are bound to lose money at the box office in the end, but the overall cost of this loss is projected to be over $1.2 billion at the box office. They are hopeful this will not happen, but we have an entire year to observe and see if this will end up happening in the end but it will take awhile to see these results.
By George Robbins
It is universally acknowledged by this point that this year has been a long one that no one is really ever going to forget in part because of the coronavirus, but because it truly has been an eventful year thus far. While the year is about to end, the events which have made it such a long year are nowhere close to actually being finished just yet and it will be awhile before they are. There are countless events that have been seen happening over this past year which have had people clamoring for the new year to begin in a haste because they simply want this year to be over so we could all move on. Unfortunately, just going into the new year won’t actually do anything in the long run and there isn’t really any hoping that things will get better that easily. We still have a long way to go before things may actually start turning out better than they have been as of late.
The way that this pandemic has been playing out has heavily affected a decent number of industries at this point due to the way the pandemic works. After the initial announcement that the pandemic was beginning, we were given an immediate look into how various forms of business would handle dealing with the pandemic as a whole. They were immediately shut down in order to prevent the spread of the virus among the general populace, but there were a lot of businesses that suffered this way. Obviously, having your doors closed to the public will generate issues with bringing in revenue, but some did not realize just how much of an issue would be presented by this in the end. When businesses shut down, it was the non-essential businesses that saw the most issues as opposed to those that were deemed essential.
After they finally came up with new rules and regulations that could be followed properly by most businesses, some local governments started the process of reopening some businesses. First they reopened the businesses that were the least at risk for spreading the infection before slowly starting to make the move to businesses that were considered to be a higher risk overall. This led to various businesses all over the country, and even the world, eventually being opened up to the public once again in some form or another. However, this did not guarantee that those businesses would actually end up getting their customers back which is what is being dealt with now by various small businesses and companies which are having issues bringing people back. Although those businesses are opened once again, that doesn’t mean that they are able to bring people back because the pandemic was still a very real threat.
Movie theaters started losing out on revenue, like most other businesses, the moment that they were forced to shut their doors to the public which unfortunately meant they were doomed from the start. They immediately started missing out on extremely important revenue that could help them in the long run because they simply weren’t allowed to have customers. After months had passed and other businesses were given the go-ahead to start reopening their doors, they patiently awaited their opportunity to do the same but it didn’t turn out so well. They eventually started getting impatient waiting for their chance to open and it resulted in them not being able to cope with not being open. Eventually they were given the go-ahead and most theaters managed to reopen all over at around the mid-August mark where things were once again getting difficult.
What followed was a period of time for theaters that we can really only refer to as the “dark times” at this point due to the affect that it had on the movie theater industry. Movie releases have been vying for the perfect windows to actually release to the public and movie theaters have become increasingly difficult for movies to release in. When they managed to reopen back in August, they immediately started showing any movies they could that were available to them and among those titles were new movies as well as old movies that have been able to draw people back for years. Unfortunately, these movies were not enough of a drive to actually get people to come back to theaters which resulted in theaters opening with no one coming into them. This led to theaters being open with little to no customers resulting in the loss of a lot of revenue over the past months that is close to causing theaters to go into bankruptcy before the year is actually out.
Needless to say, the state of movie theaters at the moment is truly a sad one, but the way that the rest of the industry is handling the pandemic has been vastly different. Studios have been doing their best to get their films done in an appropriate amount of time in order to get people back on track and films ready for release whenever that may be possible. For instance, despite the fact that the pandemic has made it more difficult, studios have started their productions back up again the best way they possibly could. Every production that had to halt due to the pandemic has since been able to resume and many of them have actually finished by this point in time meaning that they are now just working on post and then they will be ready for release. Some movies have actually gone even further than that and are actually completely ready to go for their release dates which are now set for over the next couple of years.
There are actually plenty of movies that have been worked on pretty heavily over the course of the past few months that will not be able to show any time soon even if they are completely finished and ready to release. This is due to the state of affairs currently surrounding movie theaters these days but there isn’t really anything that can be done about that at this point in time. All they can do is wait for the proper moment to release their content and this seems to be a long way off because there is nothing that will get people to go back out to theaters the way they were before unless the pandemic is over. Thus, most studios are holding out to release their upcoming films until the point where they can release them in theaters where they will get their usual proper treatment. This isn’t necessarily the case with all of their films though as the digital release method has been a huge topic for discussion over these past months.
Among the countless films that we have seen discussed over the course of this past year since the pandemic began, many of them are actually films that are being worked on now or they are going to be worked on soon. Unfortunately, there is not much that can be done at the moment because of the state of the pandemic and the spike in cases as of late, but many are hopeful things will change soon. Once things are able to go back to their original plans we may just end up seeing everything fall back into place the way that they were before. Many are hopeful that this is the case as many of the upcoming titles are films relating to comics that people have been looking forward to seeing for a very long time. Comic book films have exploded over the past years stemming from the creation and perpetuation of the MCU and they aren’t going to be going away any time soon in the same vein.
The comic book movies have been a huge part of the film industry for quite some time now and things are definitely not going to change any time soon. Comic books movies are easily one of the most popular and profitable types of films out there because they take a readable medium and turn them into something that people everywhere will fall in love with regardless of where they are from. On top of this, they are a type of movie that most people can like because they are now formulized in a way that just about anyone can go out and see and therefore enjoy. This past year has managed to maintain a strong presence for comic book movies and it has cemented the fact that they will be around for quite some time still because of how it has managed to play out. Even though no new movies have really released this year, the news surrounding those films have taken precedence over most other films that have been discussed in some way over the year.
In the news, we have seen that many Marvel films will be starting production once again come the start of the new year and many will be releasing over the course of the next few years. The MCU has a lot of films coming its way and, as such, there has been a lot of news surrounding those movies coming out as of late. Included in that list of upcoming content and releases is the fact that many of their upcoming films will be filming from between January to June including films like ‘Thor: Love and Thunder,’ ‘Black Panther 2,’ ‘Ant-Man 3,’ and ‘Doctor Strange 2.’ All of these films, and more, will be worked on just starting early next year and these are just the start of comic book movie news. Some more specific things are also happening within the realm of the MCU and in other circles like the DCEU including some major changes that could affect the way they end up playing out in the future.
One big change that no one really expected to see was the fact that the ‘Doctor Strange 2’ director was changed from Scott Derrickson, who directed the first film, to director Sam Raimi. While not a bad thing, it is certain to affect the way that the new film ends up playing out in the end, but in a good way. Next up on the docket is the fact that it seems like all Spider-Man films, including the non-MCU ones, could end up being a part of the MCU with the upcoming ‘Spider-Man’ film with major characters like Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock and Jamie Foxx’s Electro returning for the film. Next up is the fact that Michael Keaton’s Batman will be returning for ‘The Flash’ which could pull non DCEU films back into the universe in some way giving credence to an insanely detailed multiverse in the DCEU. Of course we also can’t forget to include the fact that the Snyder Cut of ‘Justice League’ will also be releasing in the not too distant future.
The Snyder Cut for Justice League is one that people have been looking forward to for some time now as it will premiere as a four-part series on HBO Max where all parts are one hour long. This special cut for the film is very much anticipated and is sure to kick off an interesting year for HBO Max in one way or another. Then, there is the much more tragic side of things where Black Panther lead actor Chadwick Boseman unfortunately passed away due to a battle with cancer that very few knew he was going through. This is of course a massive blow to the community who immediately began mourning his passing and it is a blow to the industry who now have to try and find someone who can fill the void. While this may not really be possible, it is something they are still going to try and fix when they start filming once again and it is sure to affect the way that the movies come out from now on. It has been a rough year and things just aren’t done yet with many more issues to resolve by both the beginning of next year and the end of this one.
There have been countless issues cropping up this year and there has been even more news bound to shake things up going into next year. There just isn’t really anything that can be done to fix these issues anytime soon, but the film industry as a whole is trying their best to adapt to the situation at hand. This pandemic could possibly end some time in the very near future, but we are still a ways off before we reach a point where things are stable again. There has been countless good and bad news as of late, but we have to try and focus on the better side of things moving forward because this is the only way we will be able to properly cope with everything. Focusing on what is happening with comic book movies is just one way of trying to understand and cope with what is happening but it is just one such way of doing so. This upcoming year is bound to be an even more transformative one for everyone so it will be interesting to see how things go once the new year rolls around.
By George Robbins
The Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU, is easily one of the most recognizable franchises out there at the moment due to the fact that it is so well recognized by the general public. For the public at large, the MCU is a franchise where the world of comic books has finally managed to make it to the big screen in a way that a lot of people have fallen in love with. Taking the comic book medium, which has been known for being a niche for a certain group of people for a long time, and turning it into a video medium for everyone has been a trip. There has been a number of years that these films have been worked on and it should be no surprise that no one really thought it would turn out at first. When everything first began, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was not going as well as people may have originally believed it would due to the issues involved with the production of the first film, ‘Iron Man.’
‘Iron Man’ is known by just about everyone at this point as the film that kicked off the MCU and made it known that it was possible for the MCU to even exist in the first place. No one was quite sure about whether a successful shared comic book universe could be made but the ‘Iron Man’ film was a good start and it showed that there was a general crowd who were out there willing to watch the films. If there was actually a crowd who wanted to watch the film then they would definitely have a reason to keep making their films and this gave them the confidence to continue working on future films. It would not be until the first ‘Avengers’ film that we finally got to see the first act pay off and the idea of creating a shared universe for films became cemented as a possibility. This would end up being a template that many different studios have since tried to replicate in some way, shape or form, but many have not really managed to succeed.
Over the years since the initial success of the first act of MCU films, there have been a lot of studios which have been trying to capture the same success seen by the MCU, but this hasn’t been so simple. Legendary’s Monster-Verse is actually one of the few other shared universes to be relatively successful, but they do not have anywhere near as many films as the MCU has. The fact that Marvel Studios has managed to take countless films over the years and put them into the same universe successfully while each one maintains its own story just goes to show how impressive it all is. That aside, it has been a long road since and it is one that is not meant to end anytime soon as they are still working on getting a massive number of films started filming going into this next year. Needless to say, these next couple of years in general are going to be huge for the MCU and will change a lot of what happens moving forward.
So what exactly is being changed moving forward and why would this change what will end up happening in the future with the MCU as a whole? The answer to this lies squarely in the fact that the pandemic has fundamentally changed the way that things are going to be handled moving forward because dates for filming and releases have changed constantly recently. When the pandemic first began, the first thing that was affected was that all active productions in the industry ended up being shut down and while they may have resumed and mostly finished already, this pushed back the productions of many other movies. Going into 2021 many new MCU films are actually going to be starting production to release over the course of the next couple of years with ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ starting first in January. Things have already been heavily affected by the pandemic as well as other issues that have been dealt with in the past couple of years by the industry.
One of the biggest questions on the minds of a lot of fans is just how they are going to handle things going forward and how this is going to affect the overall story of future films. Obviously, they are still trying to release certain films before they finally release others, but it is now a matter of just what films now have to be released in what order for them to make sense. For instance, it has been made known that in order for things to continue in the proper manner, ‘Black Widow’ must release before the ‘Falcon and Winter Soldier’ show can premiere. This means that many storylines matter and the order by which they play out is affected by the order of release. On top of the films that are being discussed, there is also the fact that there are many others that people are trying to focus on that aren’t getting the attention people have been hoping for as of late.
Among those movies are the ones that Marvel Studios and Disney now have all of the rights to and that is the X-Men and Fantastic Four titles. These titles have been some of the most sought after by Disney because they are some of the most popular IP’s that FOX held before they were bought out by Disney. The fact remains that they are easily among some of the most popular titles for the MCU to now have their hands on and this has led to many now speculating how they will add those new additions to the already established MCU. This is something that many people have worried about with some of the upcoming titles because of the addition of ‘Blade’ and other characters who would have a huge impact on the universe. How exactly would they be able to handle the inclusion of mutants into the MCU with the X-Men and how would this play out in the future.
This same thing can be said about the Fantastic Four, but the X-Men is a much more complicated premise to try and establish as it would completely change the world order in-universe. With the X-Men being a part of the universe, a certain percentage of the population would actually be considered mutants which would mean that it would be difficult for them to incorporate this idea into future films. During the big Investors Day for Disney recently, it was announced that the Fantastic Four would be joining the MCU faster than people imagined they would. Kevin Feige, head for Marvel Studios, announced that Spider-Man director Jon Watts would actually be working on a ‘Fantastic Four’ film which would introduce them to the now established MCU. This is something that no one would have expected this soon, but it is a welcome surprise as people were thinking that their introduction would still be a ways off.
So why are they choosing this as the chance for the introductions of the characters to the MCU while they are shafting the X-Men for the moment. This can very easily be drawn back to the fact that they are not sure of how to properly introduce the characters and mutants as a whole to the universe any time soon especially with so many other films still in the works. While nothing other than the director has been announced for the Fantastic Four movie, we already know that introducing them in-universe would end up being a much easier task by comparison. There have been three Fantastic Four based films made by Fox in the past and none of them have really done all that well and, on top of that, those movies mostly stood on their own. This means that a proper MCU reboot for the characters would not be as difficult as people anticipated it to be as the characters would not need to go through much to make them viable for the universe.
On top of it not being too difficult to make the characters viable for the new universe they would be in, they could even use this as a set up for the future X-Men introductions. While not mutants in the same way as the X-Men or other mutants in-universe, the Fantastic Four are one way for those characters to introduce the idea of mutants to the MCU. Even if this isn’t the case, they are still an easier set of characters to introduce overall, therefore they are a good choice for characters to add now. Needless to say, all of this information is very exciting and even though we may not be getting the X-Men anytime soon, we know that we are bound to get them eventually. The introduction of the Fantastic Four is a step forward which shows that they are ready to introduce more previously Fox-owned heroes to the MCU. Therefore, these characters are a good stepping stone for bringing many other heroes into the MCU eventually, giving us an even more expansive MCU.
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