Christopher Nolan Slams Warner Bros Over HBO Max Film Release Plans: ‘Makes No Economic Sense… The Worst Streaming Service’
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Warner Bros sent shockwaves across Hollywood with its surprise announcement last week that basically their entire 2021 slate would get simultaneous releases in theaters and on HBO Max. This was already their plan for Wonder Woman 1984 coming out this month, but that decision has extended into the next year, citing the ongoing global pandemic.
Even with vaccines on the horizon, the pandemic is likely to last well into next year.
But the move from the studio has been the source of some concern, and now at least one prominent director has spoken out against the move.
Christopher Nolan — whose most recent film Tenet was released by Warner Bros (and was one of the only big-budget films released to theaters this year) — provided a statement to The Hollywood Reporter that was very unsparing in what he thinks of the move:
“Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service… Warner Bros. had an incredible machine for getting a filmmaker’s work out everywhere, both in theaters and in the home, and they are dismantling it as we speak. They don’t even understand what they’re losing. Their decision makes no economic sense and even the most casual Wall Street investor can see the difference between disruption and dysfunction.”
The Hollywood Reporter piece is a deep dive into the stunned responses to WarnerMedia’s decision and the scrambling the studio had to do in order to deal with the implications of this move.
Among the internal frustrations reported include The Suicide Squad director James Gunn apparently being “not pleased when the studio followed its shocking announcement by floating a lackluster formula for compensating him and other profit participants in the film,” while In the Heights director Jon Chu was “shell shocked” by the announcement.
