Dont Tell NetflixDont Tell Netflix

By George Robbins

Warner Bros. has been making waves as of late with the way they are handling things going into next year when it comes to their new movie releases. They have released a statement not too long ago saying that they will be making a move that has them releasing their new movies for the next year on their HBO Max streaming service as well as in theaters. Obviously this news is not what anyone expected to hear with the way that things have been going in the film industry as of late so there has been quite a range of reactions. Chief among those reactions have been the way that people have been reacting to it all within the industry and how they are now completely taken aback by it all. Needless to say, Warner Bros. really managed to kick the hornets nest this time as many people within the industry are now upset by the move they are making.

First of all, the movie industry isn’t exactly in a great position at the moment due to the pandemic and the affect it has had on every type of business out there. The pandemic has resulted in numerous businesses having to be shut down for awhile before being able to once again reopen because new rules needed to be put in place. New health and safety rules became a requirement before businesses were ever really going to be allowed to open back up again which has created a bit of an issue. After a couple of months had passed and the overall number of new cases dropped dramatically, governments decided to start reopening the businesses which closed down in the months prior. They had the standard health and safety rules in place, so they felt that they no longer had anything to worry about going forward.

There has been no doubt in anybody’s mind that the reopening of businesses in the middle of an active pandemic was a bad idea, but it was one many deemed as being a necessary action. The reason why so many people felt it was necessary to reopen businesses once again was because many economies were beginning to fail and this was what was needed to get them back on track. Unfortunately, this ended up being a detriment in some ways while actually being a good idea in other ways and this revolves around the types of businesses which were open. There is not a single type of business out there that doesn’t have some kind of inherent risk associated with it in regards to the pandemic. After all, the virus does not discriminate on where exactly it ends up infecting people so of course there is a risk anywhere we decide to go.

Businesses as a whole did actually have to reopen for the economy to keep itself from crashing and for small businesses to actually survive and make their way out of the pandemic. Unfortunately, small businesses are in a lot of trouble at the moment and there isn’t really all that much that can be done to help them as they are simply lacking overall business. One of the biggest issues at the moment is actually how risk assessment has been working out and what exactly that means to the remainder of businesses and people in general. The way that governments decide whether they should close things down or open them again is by assessing exactly what the rate is for new cases and how often new cases are bound to appear. Based on an overall population they check the density of just how many people are infected which gives them an idea as to what the numbers look like for new infected density.

It depends upon the local government, but the idea is that if a certain threshold is met for the density of an infected population, then stricter rules are put into place. For instance they check a population of one million and 10 people tested positive, they may consider this to be a good thing and allow businesses to open with the same restrictions as usual. However, there are some places where this is not the case and they are actually considering numbers like that to be hints of danger, thus keeping a lot of places shut down. California is a prime example of something like this because they have kept a lot of businesses closed based on an extremely low number of new cases based on population. This has, on its own, led to a lot of backlash among both the populace and many businesses that function out of California.

A perfect example of a place that has been affected by this in some way is Disneyland in Anaheim, California which has not been able to open up to the public at all since this whole pandemic began. They originally had plans to reopen to the public back in July, but a surge in virus cases led to those plans being crushed by the state government. Ever since then California has not laid off on their strict policies which has prevented the theme park from opening at all and this has led to some major issues cropping up. Chief among these issues is the fact that Disney has had to let go of over 28,000 employees with an additional 4,000 being let go early next year for a total of 32,000. This is just one example of how this has caused issues, but there are plenty more examples out there including what is happening with the film industry.

For the most part, the film industry has managed to survive what has been happening but this hasn’t changed the fact that the way movies are being handled now has been changed dramatically. For instance, movie productions have not really changed all that much and many of them are getting back to work the way they have always been done. There are new rules and safety regulations that need to be followed while on set, but this has not been such a huge difference that would end up affecting the industry as a whole. It is what has been happening with the releases of movies that has started to wildly change the industry and its affects are starting to be seen more clearly as time goes on. Starting next year, if things go as planned, we will be seeing an entirely different landscape for movie releases.

When movie theaters were finally able to start opening up once again during the summer, we immediately recognized that there were going to be issues. Among those issues was the fact that theaters were forced to open without any new movie releases or else they wouldn’t be able to show any films at all because studios would not give them films unless they were open. Finally, they were able to open and things immediately took a downward spiral as no one was actually going out to see movies the way they were originally hoping for. This immediately caused studios to panic and most of them pushed many of their remaining releases out of this year and into next year some time. This was a reaction that director Christopher Nolan considered to be a step in the wrong direction and that studios should be trying to help theaters out more rather than move all of their release dates.

One such studio to make moves like this was Warner Bros. which decided to push back their release dates after the failure of ‘Tenet‘ at the box office due to the lack of movie-goers. No one was surprised when Warner made this move as every other studio was doing essentially the same thing which resulted in most movies being moved out of this year’s line-up. What studios were doing with the films that they were releasing this year was that they were releasing them to theaters and waiting 17 days to put them up online as per a new deal with theaters or they were just putting them straight out on digital. Earlier in the year, Universal proposed that they would release films both online and in theaters simultaneously which caused a lot of backlash with theaters which eventually led to the new 17 day deal. They let it be known early on just what they wanted to do and a discussion was opened up in regards to that, but Warner has taken a completely different route now.

Warner, all of a sudden, made the decision to make not only their ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ movie available on their streaming platform HBO Max, but also in theaters simultaneously. Beyond the fact that they were doing exactly what Universal said they would not end up doing in favor of helping theaters, Warner made a completely different choice. They didn’t stop with just ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ as they announced that all 17 of their films next year will be doing the same thing which has angered a lot of people that work in the industry. When a movie is released in theaters, a portion of that revenue goes to theaters and the remainder is sent back to the studio where it is divided between the studio, cast, and crew. Needless to say, if a movie is going to be available digitally and it is more likely to be watched on that platform, theaters won’t be earning as much and everyone but the studio loses money.

This, of course, has a lot of people, primarily directors and lead actors, upset because this change was made suddenly before any contractual issues could be discussed. The only people to have been compensated for this change is ‘Wonder Woman 1984’s’ director Patty Jenkins and star Gal Gadot who were each payed $10 million to make up the difference in some way. No one else has received compensation so far and the change was so sudden that contracts could not even be properly discussed. This has now resulted in some Hollywood directors possibly boycotting the studio in the near future and it could result in a fair number of movies not getting made on time. This issue is one that needs to be resolved internally or else it could have repercussions that could end up spilling out into the rest of the industry and no one wants the industry to suffer even more than it already is.