HBO Max and Disney Plus make a case for a permanent paradigm shift

This genie's not going back in the bottle, folks

It’s Friday, December 11, and here’s where we are…

Strap in. I’ve got plenty to say today, and I still have more Star Wars to get to for you guys.

Right now, somewhere in the world, George Miller is making a new movie and it’s not based on anything and it’s not a sequel and it stars Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton and holy shit that’s all so incredibly exciting.

Yes, he’s going to make Furiosa after this, but based on Fury Road, I think it’s clear that whatever we think Miller’s going to do when he returns to the world of Mad Max, he’s going to do something different. And before he does that, he’s making something new, and we should celebrate every time a filmmaker uses their clout to do that right now. We are positively drowning in IP, so I am more eager than ever to encourage the big swing.

I’ve been talking to more and more people about their experiences returning to work on film and television production during the pandemic, and it sounds like, as with anything, there are good sets and there are bad sets. I’m excited to see what Miller’s cooking up with that cast, and I’m glad to hear that they’re well underway, about a third of the way into their shoot. Anyone who is working right now is facing a radically different work environment, and that’s got to impact the work itself. We haven’t really seen any COVID-era cinema yet (if you’re smart, you’ll avoid Songbird like the plague) and I’m fascinated to see if there’s any trace of it in the films themselves, which I presume will mostly not feature any onscreen indicators of COVID. If I were making a big blockbustery film right now, I wouldn’t have any masked characters because I would presume that there will come a point where we are past this and that would tie the film down to a particular moment. Even so, there’s no way we look back at this era of film in the future without seeing distinct fingerprints on the movies themselves.

For much of the week, the only story in town has been HBO Max and the fallout from their seismic announcement about their 2021 film slate. There are many facets to the story, sure, and we’ll see it play out for a while, but it’s really all one big story. That’s part of the problem with this super-integrated corporate landscape, where there are fewer and fewer companies owning larger and larger pieces of the marketplace. One company goes rogue and suddenly nothing makes sense. It’s much easier for this kind of chain reaction of panic and fear to happen when everything’s so closely connected.

It’s also what happens when corporations like AT&T buy a company like WarnerMedia and then expect it to behave like a company that manufactures hardware. Movies are not hardware. Movies are this bizarre magic trick we’ve taught ourselves where we take people and we make up things for them to say and we build fake environments, either digitally or for real, and we do this stuff all out of order and then we stick it all together and use music to massage emotion and somehow when we do it right, it can blow a hole in us, emotionally and intellectually. These fundamentally phony things can speak such truth to us, and they can move us, and they matter to us, and that’s amazing. It’s the magic trick I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure out and examine and celebrate, and a company like AT&T buys WarnerMedia because they love the allure and the romance of “the movie business,” but their absolute inability to understand the industry they were buying into may have just burned this nearly 100-year-old studio to the ground in a few weeks.

If you want to understand why their attitudes are what they are, yesterday’s Disney Investor Call answers the question conclusively. Everyone’s chasing two companies right now, Netflix and Disney, and it’s clear that one of those companies is gunning for the other in a major way. Disney is pushing all of their chips onto the streaming table, and while they used the word “theatrical” many times during the presentation, it was obvious where their primary interests are right now. After all, they didn’t say a single word about any of the 21st Century Studios or Searchlight films that they own, and it feels like they have some real monsters that got left out of the conversation today.

First and foremost, there was not a single word yesterday about Avatar.

Considering the size of the investment they have at stake, that is truly amazing to me. I mean, if I had Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story ready to go, I might yell that from the rooftops, too, but clearly they made a decision to treat what used to be Fox and anything that fell under that brand as non-existent. It’s a bizarre choice, and their one quick mention they made of using Hulu as a way to offload 21st Century and Searchlight films was as close as they came to even admitting they own that studio.

Remember… yesterday wasn’t Comic-Con, even though online nerds and clickbait farms desperate for content treated it like it was. It was an annual investors call, and the primary point was to paint a glowing picture of the year ahead for anyone who has a financial stake in Disney. The most confusing part of the call was the opening, where they talked about Star, the brand that will co-exist with Disney+ in much of the world and where they’ll house all the stuff that doesn’t fit under the broader family banner of the Disney brand. Basically, what you use to stream their products will change based on what part of the world you’re in, and Star looks to be a hugely important part of their strategy around the world.

And, honestly? I don’t care. I don’t care about brand management. I don’t care about corporate security. I don’t care how healthy and strong Disney is, and neither should you. One of the creepiest tricks of the 21st century has been the way people have stopped caring about the filmmakers and started caring more about the larger corporate brands. Loving the Walt Disney Corporation is not a personality or an identity, and buying all of the things they make will not make them love you any more than they do right now.

It honestly feels to me, watching the response to yesterday, like the thing people are really missing is not movies or the theaterical experience, but the Hype Machine. There were so many announcements yesterday, and every one of them got separate articles and breathless threads and immediate breakdowns about what this means and I’ve already seen people weaving elaborate theories about behind-the-scenes skullduggery at Marvel and Lucasfilm, none of which seem grounded in any real understanding of how this industry works. Reality doesn’t seem to matter much to anyone these days. If you don’t like the actual news, you can always find an outlet that reports the news you want, and the world of movie news is no different. I think that’s why Hype is the primary currency in the world of film fandom. It turns every movie into Schroedinger’s Film, where each movie is simultaneously The Best Thing Ever and The Worst Thing Ever and people can pick their sides and dig in and go to war, all without having ever even seen the goddamn thing.

The only real difference between what Disney unveiled and Warner did last week is that Disney notified everyone and has taken the time to prepare all of their production partners for this new streaming world. The truth is that Warner is not really Warner Bros anymore, and it hasn’t been for a little while. It’s easy to be confused about that when the company name stays the same, but AT&T has no business running WarnerMedia and the way they’re doing it so far would seem to indicate that they won’t be doing it for very long. I have heard from plenty of people this work who have made it clear that they won’t be working for Warner as long as this management team is in place, and it sounds like they’re going to be dealing with lawsuits from production partners including Legendary and Village Roadshow as well as fury from the agencies in town, even as they continue to mail out ads featuring Dune front and center.

And there’s the real heart of it. The moment CAA and WME put out their statements, it all became very clear. Both agencies used the term “theatrical experience,” but pardon me if I call horseshit on that. I don’t believe either agency gives a shit where you see something as long as nothing gets in the way of the money they are set to earn on something, and that’s where the HBO Max deal really wasn’t carefully considered at all. The two things I keep coming back to are the way they carefully handled the move regarding Wonder Woman 1984 and the way they manhandled an ongoing negotiation between Legendary and Netflix over Godzilla Vs Kong. With Wonder Woman, negotiating a new back-end deal with Gal Godot and making sure everyone’s getting paid in a way that basically treats the film’s theatrical release and success like a given, paying everyone like they had a hit, is certainly the safest way of keeping everyone happy. That’s obviously important because Warner has an ongoing investment in Wonder Woman as a franchise and a character.

Why Warner felt like they had the right to stop Legendary from selling off their part of Godzilla Vs Kong or Dune is something that I suspect will eventually be a matter of court record, but it is startlingly wrongheaded, and it’s going to cost them their entire relationship with Legendary as a result. More than that, it sent a message to everyone else in town that you can be a major financial partner with Warner and they do not think they owe you the courtesy of even a phone call when making a decision that impacts you entire business year. To AT&T, you’re all just the anonymous no ones who make the doughnuts, and none of you are worth respect. As Brian Duffield pointed out on Twitter, the real scandal here is that every director working for Warner just got treated like screenwriters, and man, they did not care for it.

I remember when I moved to Los Angeles in 1990. Every screenwriter that moved here was drawn by the same thing, the crazy Gold Rush mentality where every spec was selling for $1 million and the high concept was god, and I was no different. That business model was unsustainable, though, and really never existed beyond the outliers. Yes, Shane Black and Joe Eszterhas and a few other guys got filthy rich in that era, but there were plenty of those films that never got made and plenty of the ones that did weren’t great and the economics didn’t make sense and pretty soon, that spec Gold Rush was over and there were a lot of screenwriters standing around holding what they thought were lottery tickets. Right now, I suspect everyone who has been living high on studio economics for the last decade is starting to feel the cold hand of doom on the back of their neck, and they’re right to worry. Things are changing again. That’s Hollywood, though, especially since we started selling it off to corporations who don’t give a shit about what we make. Jack Nicholson talked about this in the ‘80s when Coca-Cola bought Columbia. He knew then that having those kinds of people in charge meant that the films were going to be less important, less daring, and he leaned in. He took the money and he ran and he did very well in the process.

Sometimes, these moments lead to remarkable artistic movements, like in the late ’60s when every corporate studio hit the wall and they all threw their hands up at the success of Easy Rider and just handed the reins to the lunatics for a while. That lasted right up to the moment Heaven’s Gate almost derailed a studio, at which point they put the suits back in charge, and since then, it’s just been a constant race to see who could normalize words like “brand” and “product” and “IP” and “content” first. And they won. While nerds thought they were getting everything they asked for with a world where comic book characters were suddenly valuable, part of that shift was about consolidating ownership and control, not about making dreams come true. I didn’t hear any writers mentioned during the entire Disney call, and that’s by design. Writers do not matter now. The IP is the thing. Anyone can write it. I mean, I don’t believe that, but that’s the attitude. If you get it wrong the first time, just wait six months and reboot it again. Gender flip it. Race flip it. Age flip it. Make the meta textual version. Go back to the roots. There are so many variations you can run on any IP and when you run out, all you have to do is mash it up with something else. Boom. Everything old is new again.

I’m not immune to hype, of course. I am glad to see shows like Atlanta, Dave, What We Do In The Shadows, Better Things and Archer all have an ongoing home at FX, and it’s amazing to see the announcement for four more seasons of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, a comedy institution at this point. John Landgraf is one of the few executives in town who I truly believe is ideally suited not only for his job, but also for his moment in history. Landgraf runs his network smart, he has taste, and he takes chances. What more can you ask? More than that, he’s constantly working to make sure FX operates in a way that keeps it at the forefront of the conversation. He’s building his company for the future even as he makes programs that he wants to watch right now, and I’m looking forward to seeing the new shows they’re developing with Taika Waititi and Jeff Bridges and Nick Hornby. I want Y The Last Man to work. I hope Shogun is cool. I’m not sure what to make of the notion of Noah Hawley doing an Alien show set on Earth. I didn’t think Fargo could possibly work, and yet here we are.

I’m not surprised to see Denis Villeneuve expressing hurt feelings in the press. As I’ve said throughout this piece so far, for many of the filmmakers, there was a sudden perspective shift that had to hurt. These event filmmakers operate in a bubble in which they are treated a very particular way, and their feelings about their work are absolutely part of that equation. You don’t think there’s a certain degree of ego involved when you believe that the world truly needs your version of a story that’s already been filmed twice, once by a genuine cinematic master who failed at it, made for a budget that could fund entire school systems and shown on the biggest screens possible so that people can be charged a stiff upcharge for the experience? You have to have a nearly unflappable faith in yourself and you have to be willing to win fight after fight after fight to protect your version of the thing, and you have to be able to accept the fights you don’t win as part of that version, like it or not. In order to accept those losses, you have to at least believe the other side gives a shit about the movies. Warner Bros built a reputation for itself, especially from the ‘70s on, as a filmmaker-driven studio, a place where art and commerce could co-exist. Steve Ross, Bob Daly, Terry Semel… these men understood how to make that balance something that worked, something they could genuinely sustain. I would argue that ended when Daly and Semel left. Alan Horn and Barry Meyer led the studio into the new century, laying groundwork that has led to the current company structure.

Kevin Tsujihara, a theme park executive, spent much of the last decade pretending to still be the same studio but making choice after choice that made it clear that there was no real respect for storytelling or storytellers behind the decision making. Tsujihara is cut from the same cloth as so many of these execs, driven by fear and by a belief that imitation is the only way to have a hit. Ann Sarnoff has spent her entire career in the “corporate development” world, and she is certainly efficient, if nothing else. Nothing in her entire history suggests that she’s going to bring Warner back to the kind of bold identity that once distinguished it. Instead, expect more brand management, more emphasis on IP, and more of the kind of impersonal decision making that will accelerate Warner’s descent into being one more anonymous content farm. And who knows how strong an impression she’s even making on the studio considering everything you here right now is about the decision-making at HBO Max and AT&T. The film division increasingly seems like a vestigial limb, no longer serving any real purpose and with no real power.

I feel bad for any filmmaker who got ambushed last week, but as I said… only up to a point. I think the disrespect is breathtaking, but I also think there are plenty of us in this industry who have had to suck up that level of disrespect our entire careers. Sucks, doesn’t it, guys? Christopher Nolan’s squealing has been the loudest this week, and I think he’s the one guy who should probably shut up about it since he’s the guy Warner worked hardest to please this year, even when they should have been telling him no.

I know the overwhelming party line is that I’m supposed to think Nolan is one of our very best filmmakers, but I don’t. I like some of his work, but I think he’s a preening weenie a lot of the time, and I am really not a fan of much of what he says in the press. I think he’s a technically-adept filmmaker who is increasingly less interested in human beings and who has some pretty glaring weaknesses as a storyteller. I also think he’s been wildly pampered and protected by this studio for the last 12 years, and his tantrum this week was all about his disappointment over Tenet’s box-office. Tenet is a full-court bad film, though, and I think it would have done disappointing business even if every theater in the world had been open.

The larger points Nolan made (and which Judd Apatow echoed in a much less self-serving conversation with the press) about how disrespectful it was for Warner to simply tell filmmakers their entire slate was moving to HBO Max through a public press release are entirely valid and true. If you’d like to hear the way people in the business are thinking about streaming in general, I’d advise you to listen to Todd Garner’s podcast The Producer’s Guide, where he had Todd Black as a guest this week. They talk about Black’s whole career, and it’s a loose, informed conversation. Remember… both of these guys have been responsible for whole slates of films. Garner has run a few different studios. They’re not the typical movie podcast host or guest, talking about the industry from the periphery or from the outside, and in this particular case, I’d say they’re well worth your attention. Their reaction to the news is nowhere near the hyperbole that we’ve heard from Christopher Nolan, and I think it’s worth pointing out that Nolan doesn’t have any skin in this particular game while Todd Garner does.

After all, Nolan got everything he wanted from Warner Bros. He wanted Tenet to be a theatrical release, no matter what, and it was. He wanted Warner to give it the same full court press they would have if there was no global pandemic and they did. HBO Max still hasn’t added Tenet to their service, when any other studio would have made that move already as a simple gesture to the audiences who weren’t able to see the film in a theater even if they wanted to do so. Instead, they’re pushing ahead with the Blu-ray/digital/DVD release, and HBO Max will be at some point in the future, after plenty of other films have already been added to the service, films which will never get the support that Tenet got. One of the films that was announced as part of the big HBO Max 2021 slate was Mortal Kombat, which Garner produced. So he’s definitely got a point of view about what’s happening, and yet he’s not trashing the studio on his podcast.

Far from it. Instead, Black and Garner spent time talking about the economic realities of the way things are evolving and the way deals are going to have to continue to evolve as well. And when you look at the sheer avalanche of announcements Disney made yesterday, that reality isn’t going away when COVID-19 does.

I look at that Disney slate, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

They are going to own American pop culture for the next few years. That’s just a fact. Other companies will have hits, but Disney is going to own a sustained and overwhelming portion of the conversation every single month, and it’s not an accident. They’ve got enough divisions and companies and peripheral partners all churning out content at such a rate now that there is always something new just around the corner, always something to tease, always something they can use to keep their customers on the hook.

I’m not going to go through it all here. Frankly, I don’t work for Disney, and I’m not about to do that work for them. Every site on the planet has already stripped the buffalo for parts, and if you want a breathless beat for beat recounting of the investor’s call, you can find it. There was something for pretty much any audience looking for a hit of nostalgia, with even the most mediocre properties suddenly getting a second wind. Kudos to you, Turner & Hooch! I tip my hat, Three Men and a Baby fans. Today is finally your day.

The bizarre online ecosystem of people who report on the industry even though they don’t have any actual first-hand experience with the industry is how we get this weird corporate fan fiction that somehow becomes accepted as fact because there is no system that imposes any consequence for reporting completely made-up nonsense. Plenty of energy has been spent writing about how Kathy Kennedy was about to get fired from Lucasfilm and how every production was in chaos and how Disney was about to pull the plug or reboot or whatever horseshit they’ve been saying, and it’s all just garbage.

The truth is that Star Wars is a huge part of Disney’s strategy for the next few years, and we’ll dig into some of that in the next part of my Star Wars newsletter. What I found interesting was how there were some non-Star Wars announcements they made, something that until now has not been the case with Lucasfilm. They were waiting until they felt like things were stable and working the way they wanted them to and that must be the case now. They made it clear that they plan to move forward with the “fifth and final” Indiana Jones film, a Willow series for Disney+, and an adaptation of Children of Blood and Bone. That’s a terrific book and very different mythological foundation to play with, an exciting opportunity for them to launch something new. Honestly, Lucasfilm doesn’t have to do anything but Star Wars, but it speaks to their larger ambitions as a company that they are going to continue to expand.

It’s weird that Disney is putting Pixar’s Soul on Disney+ for no extra fee but they’re going back to the Premier Access surcharge for March’s release of Raya and the Last Dragon. My guess is they’re still weighing data from each of these experiments and as the year wears on, we’ll see what happens with titles like Black Widow and Jungle Cruise, which were each re-emphasized as theatrical in yesterday’s call. Much of what they announced yesterday went by in a blur, this homogenized mess of brand-names and IP and prequels, and most of it for stuff I don’t give a shit about at all. Not the point. It doesn’t matter if I think it’s appealing. It’s a slate designed for safety. When they tell their investors that they’re making a Lion King prequel with an Oscar winner or that they hired Andy Samberg and John Mulaney to be Chip’n’Dale or that they’re putting Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis together for Pinnochio, they’re just telling them that they are making safe choices with things Disney already owns. More live-action remakes of animated classics? Sure. Hell, we could do an animated remake of something you did live-action, like Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Is that something?

Pixar looks like a studio in decline more than ever. A spin-off with Dug from Up? Why not? Short films with all the old familiar characters? Fine. I guess. More Cars? Sure. It’s the cinematic equivalent of deciding you’re only going to wear sweatpants from now on. The day’s weirdest announcement had to be Lightyear, “the true story of the real Buzz Lightyear, the man behind the toy,” with Chris Evans announced to star. It sounds like an elaborate inside joke that spun out of control, and it also sounds like the furthest thing from the adventurous storytelling spirit that put Pixar on the map in the first place.

And then there was Marvel. So. Much. Marvel.

Look, at the end of the next two years, either we’re going to be so burned out by the company that they will have to revise their thinking completely or we’re going to be entering a world where the sun never sets on the MCU.

I like some of what they revealed yesterday. I do. I think WandaVision looks fun…

WandaVision @wandavision

"We are an unusual couple." Marvel Studios' #WandaVision, an Original Series, starts streaming Jan. 15 on #DisneyPlus.

And I think The Falcon and the Winter Soldier looks great…

Marvel Studios @MarvelStudios

“The legacy of that shield is complicated.” Marvel Studios’ The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, an Original Series, starts streaming Mar. 19 on #DisneyPlus.

And as good as those two look, Loki looks like it’s just delightful…

Marvel Studios @MarvelStudios

“Glorious.” Loki, an Original Series from Marvel Studios, is coming May 2021 to #DisneyPlus. @LokiOfficial

… and that’s nothing. That’s just the warm-up. They made big announcements about Ms. Marvel, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, What If…?, She-Hulk, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Hawkeye, Eternals, Moon Knight, Secret Invasion, Ironheart, Armor Wars and more. They officially announced Jon Watts as the director of the Fantastic Four reboot. They gave the third Ant-Man film a title and dropped some hints that Kang the Conqueror is coming in a big way.

All of that is exciting to me as someone who loves these characters and these stories, but on a business level, it feels like there’s a black hole that is swallowing my entire industry.

I mean, look at this…

… and then tell me how it makes sense that this is the same company experiencing an all-time stock high today even as they lay off 32,000 more workers during a global pandemic.

There is a human cost to these things, and it creates a cognitive dissonance I find hard to resolve. These stories and characters obviously speak to something very deep and real in people and I certainly think there are plenty of writers and directors and performers who are doing their best to make work that genuinely speaks to those things. But it’s all in service to a system that is increasingly monolithic and unconcerned with the actual human beings who they employ, and it’s helping usher in even less choice in how and where we get the things we watch.

But, hey, maybe they’ll get the Thing right this time… right?

AND FINALLY…

Okay. Enough of my pessimism and my skepticism. I know many of you were genuinely excited yesterday. I’ll ask as we head into the weekend… what are you most excited about out of all of those announcements?

I think for me, it’s the R2-D2 and C-3PO buddy comedy show A Droid Story that ILM is making. I assume that means it’s animated? Or some kind of hybrid? Whatever it is, a chance to see my favorite robot buddies on some kind of low-stakes adventure that isn’t all about saving the entire galaxy sounds like something nine-year-old me sold his soul to the devil to get.

It’s okay to be excited about the things you love. I just wish we pushed back harder against these orchestrated efforts to weaponize our love of them.

Today’s newsletter is a freebie, which means the comments section is open to everyone, not just to subscribers. If you want to subscribe so you get access to everything I publish here, it’s just $7 a month!

Please feel free to sound off about anything you’d like. The question I asked above is just a jumping-off point. I’d love to know what you’re watching and how you’re feeling about all of this news. Just treat each other with respect, and everything else is fair game.

I’ll leave you today with my media diary for the week. As always, anything in bold was particularly enjoyed.

THIS WEEK’S BOOKS: Ghost Story by Jim Butcher; Eye In The Pyramid by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson; Working On A Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown by Anais Mitchell; The Underwater Welder by Jeff Lemire

THIS WEEK’S COMICS: Sweet Tooth #24 - 40; Star Wars #9; The Rise of Ultraman #4; Cyberpunk 2077 #1 - #3

THIS WEEK’S PODCASTS: High and Mighty with Jon Gabrus - “Local Hero”, “Movie Theater Experiences”; How Did This Get Made? - “Love Labour’s Lost”; Screen Drafts - “1950’s Sci-Fi”, “TV Adaptations”, “Sketch Comedy Anthologies”; Doughboys - “Peet’s Coffee with Chelsea Peretti”, “Dominos 2 with Jamelle Bouie”; Boogie Monster - “Utah Monolith”; The Dollop - “Bloody Williamson”; The Producer’s Guide: Todd Garner & Hollywood’s Elite - “Todd Black”

THIS WEEK’S TV: Night Court S1 E9, E10; Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place S1 E2; The Reagans S1 E2, E3; Big Mouth S4 E1 - E3; Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults S1 E1, E2; The Mandalorian S2 E6; Alien Worlds S1 E1;Teenage Bounty Hunters S1 E9, E10; The Flight Attendant S1 E3, E4; We Are The Champions S1 E1, E3; The Voice S19 E15, E16; Bob’s Burgers S11 E4; 90 Day Fiance S8 E1

THIS WEEK’S GAMING: Cyberpunk 2077; Watch Dogs: Legion

THIS WEEK’S MOVIES: Godmothered; A Christmas Carol (2009); 18 To Party; Red, White and Blue; Happiest Season; Kidnapped (1960); Pinocchio (2019); Let Him Go; $; Star Wars: The Force Awakens; The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone; The Parallax View; Collective; Closer, Driveways; Kentucky Fried Movie; Crooklyn; Alabama Snake; Baby God; Songbird