Warner Bros. Has Delayed Four DC Films
By George Robbins
Warner Bros. is easily one of the biggest names in the entertainment industry since they hold so many different intellectual properties under their wing. They have plenty of content and licenses to make said content on top of the fact that they are multi-faceted as a company. This means that they have their hands in a number of different aspects of the entertainment and even the tech industry. They own HBO and by extension, HBO Max, they own many different aforementioned TV and movie titles, and they have their hands dipped heavily into the TV and internet connection industry. So it can be said that they are not very hard-pressed to find a way to make some kind of revenue during these times.
For the Warner Bros. studio, they are having nothing but trouble when it comes to film releases at the moment due to the pandemic. While everything else they are doing may not be suffering all that much, it is clear that film releases are on the list of things that are. This is because, at least domestically, they have had nothing but a commercial failure with their movie ‘Tenet.’ While on the worldwide market the movie may actually be doing pretty well, the fact remains that the domestic market doesn’t look like it will generate a good amount of income for them. This stems heavily from the fact that people in the U.S. are very wary of movie theaters nowadays.
The wariness being expressed by people in the United States towards movie theaters is due, heavily in part, to people being worried after a strong wave of the virus hit. Without any kind of vaccine in sight, there is no way that most people would be willing to risk their own health and safety to go and see a movie. Instead, people would rather just wait now to see movies available on digital because it would simply work out better for them in the long run. With that in mind, it is not much of a surprise to anyone that people don’t want to go out to theaters and that theaters are now suffering as a result. ‘Tenet’ is been the film to suffer the worst after it had its full release in theaters worldwide.
For those unaware, ‘Tenet’ is director Christopher Nolan’s newest film which focuses on the main character maneuvering some time-bending concept to try and prevent World War 3 from happening. Overall, the concept of the film and the mystery of it all sold the film to people and built up hype for it whenever it would release. It ended up releasing near the end of August; first to international markets and then to the domestic market. Within those first two weekends, the movie actually did fairly well and it brought in close to $150 million for the worldwide box office. Unfortunately this did not last all too long as the next few weekends in the domestic market did not turn out well for the movie and it has only been making a few million per weekend.
A few million dollars here and there doesn’t sound too terrible to any ordinary person, but it is definitely not what the studio was hoping for. ‘Tenet’ has to bring in somewhere around $500 million to break even before marketing costs and, although the international market is still doing well, they are still a long ways off from reaching that point. This has shown the entire film industry that it just isn’t the time for any of them to release their movies to the public and they pushed back their movie’s release dates. As such, there are now plenty of movies and movie line-ups which have had their entire release schedules shifted around. This is what studios like Warner, who experienced it all first-hand, are now dealing with.
Warner Bros. has taken a lot of information from this recent series of events and decided to follow in the footsteps of other similar companies by pushing release dates. Among the movies that they are pushing back the release dates on are a total of four of their DC titles and it has something to do with a delay for their other film ‘Dune.’ ‘The Batman,’ ‘The Flash,’ ‘Black Adam,’ and ‘Shazam 2’ have all been pushed back after Dune was moved to ‘The Batman’s’ original release date of October 1st, 2021. This, along with the fact many other studios are majorly shifting their line-ups similarly, has resulted in all of the upcoming movie line-ups being affected in some way shape or form. On the somewhat bright side of things though, ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ is still set for a December 2020 release.