Warner Bros. and HBO Max: a blow for cinema

The latest announcement from WarnerMedia, a company controlled by AT&T, in a official-release sounds very much like a thumbing of the nose at North American exhibitors: in 2021, all films from Warner Bros. films will also be added to the HBO Max catalogue on the day of their theatrical release.

All.

This means that from the day of their theatrical release and for 31 days, HBO Max subscribers will also be able to enjoy the latest films while they are still showing in cinemas. After that, the films will disappear from the streaming catalogue until the end of the first exhibition window of around three months, with media chronology then allowing exploitation for private release.

Three questions arise.

Why is Warner Bros. doing this?

Firstly, it's bound to hurt cinemas, especially in the US. Especially as the next twelve months will see the release of blockbusters for which they will no longer have exclusive rights. Wonder Woman 1984, ring any bells? Or Matrix 4, Dune, Godzilla vs. Kong and James Gunn's The Suicide Squad 2.

And somewhere in the East, cinema exhibitors are rubbing their hands.

Warner Bros. justifies its decision by its desire to serve its customers. A survey conducted last month by Yahoo Finance effectively showed that 81% of US moviegoers have not set foot in a cinema since March 2020. For 56% of them, the reason cited was Covid-19.

This raises a question for Warner Bros.: what's the point of showing its films in cinemas if audiences don't travel to see them? No point. At least, not as much as the release of these films on its own HBO Max streaming service, which has just launched in the United States in May 2020 and is sure to welcome many new subscribers following this campaign.

Won't Warner Bros. trigger the ire of cinema exhibitors?

Effectively, Warner Bros. is not making any friends in the cinema world with this decision. This is shown by the example of the Universal Pictures film studio, which earlier this year had a dispute lasting several weeks with AMC, one of the world's biggest cinema chains.

At the root of the dispute was the film The Trolls 2: World Tour. While cinemas around the world were closed in the spring, Universal put its animated film online on rental platforms for $15 to $20. The price of a cinema ticket. And it paid off: in just three weeks, the studio earned almost 100 million dollars on the US market alone. That's more than the previous film, The Trolls, had earned in the coffers of American cinemas in five months.

Jeff Shell, CEO of NBCUniversal, went on to say that in future, films would be released simultaneously on digital platforms and in cinemas. Warner Bros. is therefore planning what is known as a "day-and-date release" in English. AMC, fearful of losing potential viewers forever, angrily announced that it would no longer show Universal films if Jeff Shell stuck to his plans.

Warner Bros. is likely to face similar boycott problems. Whether the studio will be impressed remains to be seen. Because it's not as if cinema exhibitors like AMC or Cinemark are in charge. For Warner Bros. it's a bit like exhibitors threatening them that "almost no one at all" was going to see the film, instead of just "almost no one."

However, we can't rule out a lasting agreement after the pandemic. With cinema exhibitors, hopefully. A breakdown in relations between cinemas and studios would serve no one. Warner Bros. could, for example, give cinema exhibitors a share of future revenues from video-on-demand services. Or some other financial compensation.

What about us Europeans?

The HBO Max service is only available in the United States and not in Europe. Over here, HBO films and series are generally distributed via Sky-App (in English), an app available on most connected TVs or on the Android TV operating system, via an NVIDIA Shield for example.

You can still use a VPN, like Play-Suisse project manager Pierre-Adrian Irlé.

It is not known whether this agreement will be extended to future Warner Bros. films. I think this little experiment by Warner Bros. will only be tried in the United States, at least initially. If the experiment is a success, discussions with Sky's representatives should resume in earnest. It's a no-brainer for me.

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