“Wonder Woman 1984” was supposed to be released *months* ago. But that was before China sprang a pandemic on the world and utterly borked the whole concept of going into a confined space with a whole lot of strangers for a few hours. The few attempts that have been made to release a movie into theaters in the last few months have been pretty disastrous, and there’s no obvious end in sight. so what’s a major movie studio supposed to do when they’ve already thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at a movie that that might not be able to properly release to movie theaters for perhaps another year? Well, they could just sit on the movie for that extra year and hope beyond the grasp of reason that movie theaters will actually still be a profitable thing in the future, rather than just empty shells sold off to condo developers. Or they could do what Warner Brothers/DC is doing and just say “Ta hell wit it” and release it onto a streaming service. In this case, HBO Max on December 20. They’re also releasing it in theaters on the same day, but I have a suspicion that box office returns are gonna be pretty damn meager.
So, what’s everyone think? Moviegoing now a thing of the past? Streaming the way of the future?
Bonus round: pretty much everyone either hates or has forgotten “Justice League” That there movie was a mess. But Warner/DC are releasing the “Snyder cut” in 2021, again on HBO Max. My understanding is that this will be a fundamentally different movie:
- Warner only used something like 15% of what Snyder shot (director Zack Snyder had to leave the production due to a family tragedy; the movie was taken over by Joss Whedon who decided to do something completely different with it)
- Something like 75% of the Snyder cut is stuff he shot but which was cut from the original release. And around 5% of it will be all new stuff shot specifically for the Snyder cut.
- The Snyder cut is supposed to be four one-hour episodes, so a whole lot more of a movie.
So it *could* end up being a wholly different movie. Of course, some of that “stuff shot but not used” could simply be Take 14 of a shot, when Whedon used Take 15. Or it could be from a completely different script. I have doubts that this will truly fix Justice League. The Marvel movies worked as well as they did, for as long as they did, because they set up most of the important characters before dumping them into a single bloated ensemble flick. Warner brothers, though, said “forget that character development nonsense, let’s get straight to the lame CGI eyecandy.” So… we’ll see, I suppose.
The Snyder cut will likely come out after the inauguration, so it’s not a sure thing that it will actually come out at all. The ChiComs might just march straight into Taiwan and pop off a few tactical nukes over CONUS to make sure we sit down and shut up.