We Have Glimpsed Our Streaming Future, and It Sucks

In the streaming video era, movie theaters have increasingly been framed as an archaic institution, a vestigial remnant of the days when industrial restrictions and the laws of physics determined when and how you could consume content. The major studios have largely dodged the issue by punting their big-ticket blockbusters—your James Bonds, your Black Widows, and so forth—to 2021, but with the clock ticking down on 2020, Warner Bros. has announced that it’s sticking with its planned Christmas release for Wonder Woman 1984, even though in the U.S. that will largely mean a streaming debut on HBO Max. 2020’s case studies have shown that it’s possible to make a sizable chunk of change renting new releases at first-run prices, but also that it’s nothing compared with the amount they could have made in theaters: Universal’s Trolls World Tour took in an estimated $95 million, but that’s almost $60 million short of the original Trolls’ domestic haul, and while the studio’s profit was roughly the same, the experiment clearly wasn’t enough of a success for it to rethink its decision to kick the next Fast and Furious sequel to 2021. With its theme park earnings obliterated by COVID closures, Disney has, like Warner Bros., stuck to the Christmas release date for another of its heavy hitters, Pixar’s Soul, and unlike with Mulan, it’s not even charging extra: It’s just a $150 million investment in the future of Disney’s streaming service, which, in a year that has seen many other launch attempts falter or fail outright, seems to be the only one poised to rival Netflix’s dominance. Even with the studios and major art house distributors pulling many of their major releases, 2020 has seen the releases of a ton of great movies—American Utopia, Dick Johnson Is Dead, First Cow, Wolfwalkers, and Da 5 Bloods, to name only a few—but it’s been a terrible year for movie-watching, as people have fallen back on comfort-viewing favorites or just letting the algorithm pick whatever low-stakes series is next in the queue.