Dont Tell NetflixDont Tell Netflix

By George Robbins

Movie releases over this past year have been something that a lot of people in the movie industry have been obsessing over because they aren’t really possible now. More specifically, they cannot be done in the same way that they would normally be able to be done because the pandemic has essentially shut down the regular release routes. The film industry has seen some of the largest changes possible over this previous year that will no doubt have some kind of lasting effect on the industry for some time. The effect that this has on the industry is actually one that may just end up changing the industry as a whole moving forward and some people aren’t exactly happy about this. After all, many people were content with the way that things were before the pandemic began and they don’t want to have to deal with something new.

When this whole pandemic began, we knew that things were not going to be the same way that they always used to be but there was no way of really knowing for sure what the effect would be. For most businesses, they knew that they would not be able to reopen in the same way once they were given the go-ahead by the government. They knew that they would have new health and safety regulations which would also limit their overall capacity to a degree where it is much harder to make any kind of revenue now. Obviously this is something that not many people were happy about, but they knew that this was necessary if they wanted to open up at all. At the very least, they could reopen and know that people were going to end up coming back to them after a short amount of time had passed.

Movie theaters and the movie industry as a whole are in an entirely different boat from most other forms of entertainment because of the rules they must follow. The rules between the two mediums aren’t all that different or really different from any of the other ones for that matter since they all involved the same ways for keeping the number of new cases down. However, most other places of business can still continue on their own without necessarily relying on the number of customers they have. Obviously they would rather get as many people as they can to enter their businesses but what can they really do given the current situation. They are making the best of the situation they have, upselling whatever they can to make up for the lost revenue and their customers are definitely willing to pay just so they don’t have to go home.

On the other hand, movie theaters have an entirely different issue to deal with and that is that they are not really getting any business at all which is what is affecting them. At least other forms of entertainment and dining have some kind of business flowing in and out of their doors which have made them capable of continuing business. Movie theaters have been trying their best just to try and keep up with many theaters now shut down for the foreseeable future and others edging closer to bankruptcy as the year reaches the end. Movie theaters were able to reopen some time in August with some even opening up before then, but this was just the start of a whole new problem unfortunately. After theaters reopened to the public, it became impossible for them to get business because they had no new movies to show to the public.

Before the big theaters started opening on a national scale, the smaller privately owned or franchised theaters started reopening; showing older movies since they had no new movies. This led to theaters on the national scale deciding that they were going to open regardless of having any new releases or not in August. This was a catalyst that was used in an attempt to get studios to hand over some new movies to theaters so that they could start showing them to make money again. Despite opening to the public, movie theaters were still a dangerous choice for studios to try and work around because no one knew how the general public would take to them being open. The studio which ended up biting the bullet, so to speak, was Warner Bros. who had a blockbuster up their sleeves that they had been trying to get out all summer. The movie that they had been hyping up for awhile already, ‘Tenet,’ was the movie that they would end up releasing at the end of August.

Warner was very close to just pushing back the release date again, but in an effort to both gauge the market, and appease Christopher Nolan who directed the movie, they released the movie. Originally the movie was meant to release in the middle of July and they pushed it back by a couple of weeks a few times until theaters announced that they would be opening in August. This was the opportunity they were asking for to release their newest blockbuster film and they were not going to go and throw the chance away to be the ones that could have saved the movie theater market. Unfortunately, they did not gauge theater-goers properly and after just a few weeks ‘Tenet’ was not making anywhere near the money they needed just to try and break even. This was the signal for other studios to give up on big releases this year and instead just wait until next year to release.

It was discussed for a long time by both the studio and those awaiting the movie’s release that the movie could possibly release on a digital format or, at the very least, it could release much later on. However, Nolan was advocating very hard for the studio to keep their summer release schedule and was even willing to put up with the delayed summer release. In order to appease Nolan who is easily one of the biggest director under their belt they decided to just release the movie in theaters and kill multiple birds with one stone. Needless to say, they pretty much discovered that this was probably a mistake and now they have gone a completely different direction for the next year. They will actually be releasing movies on both their streaming service, HBO Max, and in theaters simultaneously on the days of their releases and it isn’t a decision that Nolan is taking lightly.

Nolan is known for advocating for the premiere movie-going experience when it comes to how movies should be premiered to the public rather than any other method of release. He believes that movies can only really be experience properly in movie theaters and that should be the way that all movie releases are handled. Unfortunately the studio is a business, and to them the best way for them to make money would be to go with their current plan rather than trying to fix the theater situation which is what Nolan is trying to get studios to do. As a direct result, Nolan started bashing Warner Bros. for their plan to release their 17-picture 2021 slate on HBO Max by saying that their actions are helping to effectively dismantle the industry as a whole. Whether or not this is true remains to be seen, but it is most certainly true that this will have some kind of affect on the industry as a whole moving forward.