Gal Gadot stars as Wonder Woman in Warner Bros. Wonder Woman 1984.
Warner Bros.
Last weekend was the first real test of how blockbuster movies perform on streaming services when released in cinemas simultaneously.
AT & T’s WarnerMedia premiered “Wonder Woman 1984” on Christmas Day, the first movie in its experiment to release its movies simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max. The result? “Wonder Woman 1984” set a pandemic cinema record with $ 16.7 million in box office sales in the US and Canada.
The streaming figures were a bit more vague.
WarnerMedia did not provide precise figures, only saying that nearly half of its HBO Max subscribers streamed the movie on Christmas Day. That makes it difficult to determine exactly how many people watched “Wonder Woman 1984” at home, since HBO Max’s private subscribers are just a small fraction of those who have subscribed directly to the service rather than through their cable provider. (Many cable providers will give you access to HBO Max if you already have a “regular” HBO subscription.)
So was WarnerMedia’s experiment successful? It is difficult to say definitively. It’s a sample of one movie, and we’re forced to work with limited data from the company. But at the very least, we have good evidence that popcorn movies are in high demand.
Let’s see what all this means:
WarnerMedia was careful not to reveal too much about how “Wonder Woman 1984” performed on streaming.
When the company made its bold announcement earlier this month, directors and producers in the industry immediately went back. Patty Jenkins, who directed both “Wonder Woman” movies, suggested in an interview with The New York Times that she wouldn’t be directing a third part without a guarantee that it will hit theaters. (Jenkins apparently got what she wanted, and WarnerMedia announced on Sunday that she will be writing and directing the third film in the series.)
By keeping the streaming numbers blurry, WarnerMedia was able to simultaneously carry out the power of HBO Max, while boasting that it had the pandemic’s most successful theatrical release. That should make filmmakers somewhat happy that the company isn’t completely giving up on post-pandemic theatrical releases.
Millions of people have probably seen “Wonder Woman 1984” at home than at the cinema.
The last number of “retail subscribers” we have for HBO Max is 3.6 million in October. In total, HBO Max has 12.6 million subscribers at the beginning of December. So while WarnerMedia said that only half of retail subscribers watched on Christmas Day, millions of households are still likely to have streamed the movie.
Rich Greenfield, a media analyst at LightShed, said on Twitter that ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ was likely seen by more people in the US than the first movie, which was released in theaters in 2017. This assumes that in the average household several people look together.
There is pent-up demand to go to the theater.
Even in the midst of the pandemic, the theatrical release “Wonder Woman 1984” proved that there was still a hunger for people to return to the cinema to see a great superhero movie. That should delight theater chains like AMC as they prepare for a post-pandemic schedule later in 2021. The sales figures WarnerMedia released this weekend pale in comparison to what they would have been in normal times, but still proved that people will show up when and where it is safe to do so.
We don’t know how another big Christmas Day release, Disney and Pixar’s “Soul”.
Don’t sleep over the Christmas weekend of the other big movie.
Disney also released its latest Pixar animated film “Soul” on Disney + on Christmas Day. The film was originally set to hit theaters, but has switched to Disney + instead. This is all part of Disney’s hybrid release strategy, as it balances its profitable theatrical releases from franchises like Marvel and Star Wars with the pressure to keep growing its streaming business. (The growth of Disney + and its upcoming content has thrilled investors more than anything else, pushing its stock to record highs.)
Disney has not released any data on how “Soul” performed over the past weekend, and we’ll probably never know. The company tested a direct release with “Mulan” early this year, which Disney + subscribers could watch for a one-time fee of $ 30. It never said how much people paid. So far, Disney has been able to appease filmmakers much better with its targeted release strategy than WarnerMedia.