Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Netflix WarnerMedia’s announcement last week that it plans to stream every movie from its 2021 Warner Bros. Pictures slate on HBO Max the same day they open in theaters has left much of Hollywood in stunned disbelief, setting off what will be a very long and heated debate over the Future of Film.
➽ Netflix has been making just shy of 60 features every year since 2018, with plans to release roughly as many next year. Not all are tentpole-level films on par with what would play in theaters, but the percentage of them that are — think Mank or Jingle Jangle or Over the Moon — has been increasing and now easily matches the output of most legacy studios.
If WarnerMedia had the luxury of time, it might have simply spent a few years building its own movie slate, the way Stuber and Salke have been doing the past few years. But Jason Kilar, the former Hulu exec who now runs WarnerMedia, clearly believes he can’t wait, and I think he is right to be impatient.
The movie theater side of things: I also think those outraged over Kilar’s gamble should redirect some of their skepticism toward the big theater chains. AMC and Regal are not mom-and-pop operations bravely battling to keep the bijou hopping and bopping. They are monopolistic enterprises that have put the moviegoing experience out of reach for millions of Americans through their failure to figure out ways to keep the cost of a theater trip affordable.