Dont Tell NetflixDont Tell Netflix

By George Robbins

Box office numbers this year have pretty much been off the charts in the sense that they are so low that they are no longer on the charts and this has been a running theme almost all year. To be entirely honest, and to no surprise to the general public, no one really knew that this year would have turned out the way it did when it first started. After all, who would have really expected there to be a pandemic which would essentially shut down the world as a whole since there haven’t been any truly prevalent pandemics in human history. A pandemic is a time where a disease which has spread to numerous nations is out there in the world and this is truly one of the worst to be seen in any generation prior. There are many people out there saying that there are much bigger threats out there in the world right now and that this is being blown out of proportion, making the world’s economies falter for no reason.

In truth, this pandemic is far different from any other pandemic seen in history and will easily go down in history despite how non-lethal it is to the vast majority of the population. While the Covid-19 virus and its variant strands are easily dangerous in their own rights, there are many other things out there like alcoholism, car accidents, and suicides which can outclass that. However, the main thing that people are failing to incorporate into their conversations with theses examples is the fact that they cannot be compared in the same way which is where the Flu comes into play in the remainder of conversations. These two diseases kind of go hand in hand but their overall treatment is wildly different, the main reason for this is because one has been recognized by world governments as a threat to mankind while the other is the Flu. The Flu has claimed many lives each and every year as, the same with Covid, it is a disease which causes complications resulting in death.

Even though the Flu is still very dangerous, there has been a huge decline in cases as of late because people are taking it more seriously this year as opposed to previous years. This mainly stems from the fact that the Flu and Covid share similar symptoms so it is in most peoples’ best interest to get the Flu vaccine this year because it could help prevent the disease. If they prevent the Flu and still get symptoms, then they have a good idea that it could be Covid and they can immediately seek treatment. While the Flu is certainly deadly in its own rights, Covid has recently been noticed to have mutated a couple of different ways and this means that it could end up becoming even more dangerous than the Flu. While people are thinking about why things are stricter with the Covid rules and regulations, they need to remember that this is still a novel virus whose capacity to mutate is still relatively unknown to us whereas the Flu has been around for years and we have a better idea of what it is capable of.

The capabilities of the Covid virus is still relatively unknown to humans as a species which is another reason why the introduction of a vaccine is not to be seen as an instant cure for the virus. Even if the vaccine did end up working in trials and in the lab, there are so many external factors that cannot be accounted for or made up for while in the lab and this makes it dangerous to trust every result seen thus far. They are now slowly rolling out said vaccine across the world and this means that they are hoping to get it into as many people as possible to start the herd immunity affect where not everyone will need the vaccine, and it will provide a fair amount of immunity for those who cannot get the vaccine themselves. The various problems that are set to start with this are not going to be pretty and will inevitably result in countless criticisms against the companies who produced them. Needless to say, things will not be getting any easier from this point forward.

In fact, from now on, this is where things will be getting even more difficult going into the next year and we will be seeing just how long this pandemic will be going on for. When the vaccine rolls out worldwide, we will get the perfect opportunity to witness just what the side effects of said vaccine are and whether the vaccine will really work at all. Results during trials may have been promising, but everyone’s body is different and the effect the vaccine could have on them could vary wildly based on this very simple fact. Unfortunately, this is really the only way for them to find out for sure just how effective, if at all, this vaccine will be and if it will be enough to allow the world to go back to how it was before. At worst, the vaccine causes a lot more health problems than not having would cause in a fair number of people who got it whereas the best case sees it working as intended in every person who receives it. Considering this doesn’t even happen with the Flu vaccine, we should just be hopegful for something close to the best option where it works for the vast majority of people who get it with no side effects.

In reality, we will probably end up with something somewhere between those two extremes with it being somewhere in the middle or closer to the positive end of things. Regardless of what we end up with though, we will be getting something which will help in once again reshaping the way that the world works which will change the world yet again. This pandemic has already made a huge impact on the world and changed a vast majority of how the world works in general so it would make sense that the vaccine for said virus should have just as much of an affect. It will take a few months before we really start seeing the results of this whole experiment to fix the world, but that is better than waiting years. Even if things don’t work, they will quickly be able to adjust and start up once again instead of wasting years just to discover it is useless and this is the most incredible part about living in a time like this.

While we live in an age where science fiction isn’t exactly real to us in the way that we imagine on a regular basis, we live in a time where a novel virus can have a workable vaccine available to the public after less than a year. This on its own is a feat of innovation that we should most certainly not take for granted because it is something that will end up saving the lives of so many people. While this first iteration of the vaccine could end up causing a lot of damage upon its release, this is a process that was inevitably going to happen regardless and having it sooner rather than later will save more people than it will harm in the end. It just goes to show just how impressive all of this is and how important it is that we have things like this in the modern age as it goes to show just how much can be accomplished by the medical industry in the future. Unfortunately, not every industry out there can say the same and have actually taken something of a step back ever since this pandemic first began.

The vast world economy, as well as the vast number of industries which comprise the whole thing, has been in a unique and troublesome situation over this previous year to the surprise of no one at this point. When the pandemic first began, we saw the mass shutdowns of various businesses to the point where the only remaining ones to be open were the ones eventually deemed by governments everywhere to be “essential.” What this meant was that all businesses which were necessary to the continued survival of humanity such as grocery stores and stores which provided commonplace household items were able to remain open. These stores were the first and only stores to open up immediately after the pandemic began to both keep people supplied and to keep them somewhat placated. Though it did not end up taking a long time before people started going stir-crazy and the number of new cases, which was going down, started skyrocketing again.

The main reason for businesses being shut down in the beginning was because they, being the government (both local and country-wide), wanted to reduce the risk that the virus could be passed from one person to another. Obviously, as we have learned by now, the best ways of doing this are to both wear masks and keep a minimum of six feet between yourself and others. If you follow these two rules, then the likelihood of getting infected with the virus begins dropping to near zero numbers. Unfortunately, this started being a problem for people almost immediately after the pandemic began and these rules were put into place. They did not like being told what to do and the rules didn’t really seem like they were doing anything anyway so small groups of people stopped doing anything remotely close to safe. Thus allowing the pandemic to continue growing even though they were getting close to getting rid of it altogether.

This type of behavior wasn’t made any better by the fact that certain state governments started allowing places of business deemed non-essential to begin reopening to the public as a whole after just a couple of months. This meant that places which would end up resulting in more cases being brought to fruition would become more common as time went and they were able to once again open to the public. They didn’t just start opening every single business they could at once though and they actually reopened them slowly based upon which ones were considered to be higher risk locations. This meant that businesses which normally had larger capacities of people where they normally sat or did something near one another were not allowed to reopen first. Basically, they would not be able to reopen until the government felt that those businesses did not pose as much of a risk as they originally thought they did.

Among the rules to be put into place for these businesses to reopen were rules that had already been implemented in numerous businesses which have stayed open as time has gone on. This meant that customers must abide by the six-foot social distancing rules, they must follow the rules about wearing their masks in those places of business at all times, and the business themselves had to limit the overall number of people present in the store/shop/hall, etc. to 25% of actual building capacity. This meant that the overall amount of business they would get would still end up going down tremendously, but they would no longer be losing the money they would have been otherwise while they were not open. For businesses, being able to open up once again was something that they had been hoping for ever since their shut down back in March, even if things had to end up being a bit different now than they were before. This was when things started to really get complicated as time continued on from this point to even now.

We have seen nothing but blatant disregard for the safety standards put into place by the government and health officials ever since businesses started reopening their doors to the general public. Obviously it is not the businesses themselves causing the issue, but it is actually the civilians going out to those businesses causing issues because they don’t want to follow the rules in place for them. This of course creates just a few irreconcilable differences where people who don’t want to listen to the rules end up getting the virus and pass it on to those who are actually listening to the rules due to the tricky incubation period. Although someone can have the virus and give it to others, they won’t start showing symptoms immediately which makes it all the easier for some people to spread it to others. This obviously resulted in many businesses starting to suffer because many people did not want to go out to some places if it meant running into people who would end up doing something like this.

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? This is because of the amount of money they could potentially end up making from the whole ordeal.

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.

This past weekend saw the release of ‘Wonder-Woman 1984’ which is now a huge source of controversy within the industry because of the aforementioned deal and the fact that this same deal was not made for anyone else. Despite what is happening in house and what this is doing to the industry as a whole, we have actually seen something remarkable this past weekend with the box office. That would be the fact that ‘Wonder-Woman 1984’ managed to bring in the best numbers seen all year, during this pandemic, to the box office this past weekend. The odds were pretty much already stacked against them from before they even set to release the film as it was actually meant to have released much sooner than it actually did. Fortunately, they were able to actually release the movie before the year ended and things turned out better than possibly anticipated, though there is still a long way to go before things are back to normal.

The sequel to the beloved film seen by audiences back in 2017 brought in a lot of attention and people wanted to take advantage of this fact by drawing in as many crowds as possible for the last major film release of 2020. This fact alone is enough to reinforce the hatred towards the studio from theaters as it can easily be said that those numbers this past weekend could have been higher if not for their plan which split revenue between HBO Max and theaters as a whole. The movie is said to have made the most money this year at the pandemic box office, so just how much more would it have made if not for the plan that Warner put into place and how would this continue as the weeks go on into the new year. Obviously the opening weekend is the largest, but how will the following weeks end up being affected by everything at the moment. This is something which remains to be seen over the coming weeks.

A couple of different things can actually be inferred from this whole situation and a fair number of questions can be raised by it in the end as we are now not sure how the theater industry can step up after this. Obviously the release of this movie and the surge in ticket sales which followed shows that there are a few different factors which now need to be taken into account from this point forward in order to keep the industry from collapsing. Fist of all, we have the fact that there is most definitely an industry out there for new movies and there are crowds of people willing to go out and watch new movies if given the proper incentive. If there is a new movie out there that people want to watch, then they will take the risk and go out to see said movie especially if it is one they know they will want to watch. This isn’t the only thing the movie theater industry needs to look out for as they also need to take into account the fact that people are getting more confident as of late for a couple of reasons.

People are getting their confidence back to go back out to theaters as of late because they are getting more and more used to the way that industries and businesses are functioning these days. There are a lot of people out there that don’t want theaters to go under, but weren’t feeling safe with the idea of going out to the movies especially when the number of new virus cases is skyrocketing. While the same thing is still true now with the number of cases continually rising, people are much less wary due to the confidence many have in the upcoming vaccine. While this may not be a healthy mentality for them in any way, shape, or form, it works out for theaters which need nothing other than business at the moment. Even if it was only $16.7 million, this is way more than some were expecting them to even come close to and therefore, they have a tricky time ahead for them.

Movie theaters have quite the ordeal ahead of them now that they know they actually have a chance with new movie releases coming out within the next few months. Unfortunately, they also have a lot going against them and it is really going to be an uphill battle for them all moving forward with many of them needing to draw in as much business as possible. While the money brought in is nowhere near enough to keep them going, it is a start and it shows that if they can get through the next couple of months, they could survive the pandemic. Regardless of what happens, these next months are truly going to make a difference for the movie theater industry as a whole. Hopefully it works out for them, or else the movie industry as a whole is going to end up being reshaped in a way that it has never been seen in before now.