Late last year, before the release of Warner Bros.’ “Wonder Woman 1984,” WarnerMedia announced that all of WB’s 2021 films would have a day-and-date release in theaters and on HBO Max. The news sent shockwaves through the film industry, including the filmmakers that were directly affected, as the studio failed to tell them beforehand. Well, according to the CEO of WarnerMedia, hindsight is 20/20 and perhaps the announcement should have been handled differently.
Speaking at the Code Conference (via THR), Jason Kilar, the current CEO of WarnerMedia (who is expected to lose his job when Discovery merges with the studio in 2022), said that he wishes the announcement of the HBO Max release strategy would have been less rushed. That would have given him the opportunity to have those phone calls with filmmakers to let them know what was happening before the world found out.
“I will be the first one to say, and the responsibility rests on my shoulders, that, in hindsight, we should have taken the better part of a month to have over 170 conversations — which is the number of participants that are in our 2021 film slate,” Kilar said. “We tried to do that in a compressed period of time, less than a week, because of course there was going to be leaks there was going to be everybody opining on whether we should do this or not do this.”
As we know, the way WarnerMedia announced the plans rubbed a lot of filmmakers the wrong way. Folks like James Gunn, Denis Villeneuve, and Christopher Nolan all were reportedly upset with the news, with Villeneuve writing an entire op-ed against it and Nolan seemingly leaving WB forever to go with Universal for his next film because of the move. That said, as we approach the end of 2021 and the end of the release experiment, Kilar thinks it all played out well overall.
“We said from the start that we were going to treat every single film as a blockbuster, from an economic perspective, for participants, that we were going to be fair and generous, we were going to do the right thing,” the executive said. “The good news is we did, and we worked our tail ends off to do that. And we’re now in a very good situation.”
Of course, in 2022, WarnerMedia is backpedaling a bit with how it releases films, instead opting for a 45-day exclusive theatrical window on projects before they hit streaming. This is in line with what most studios plan on doing in the years to come.
