WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar admitted he mishandled the way the company announced its plans to release its 2021 Warner Bros. films day-and-date in theaters and on HBO Max.
“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,” said Kilar, speaking at Vox Media's Code Conference (per The Hollywood Reporter). “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.”
Kilar and WarnerMedia's announcement quickly drew criticism, with filmmakers Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve publicly slamming the company's decision. This also led to Nolan parting ways with Warner Bros. on his next project, a movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer. What's more, Legendary reportedly considered taking legal action over WarnerMedia's release plans for Godzilla vs. Kong and Dune (both of which Legendary co-financed) before working out a deal with the company.
“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,” said Kilar. “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.”
Day-and-date releases remain controversial among filmmakers. Although Wonder Woman 1984 director Patty Jenkins acknowledged it was necessary to debut the film this way due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, she called it a "heartbreaking experience [that was] detrimental to the movie" while discussing the subject at CinemaCon in August. Others, like Freaky screenwriter Michael Kennedy, have defended the practice, arguing, "Streaming isn't the enemy."
WarnerMedia will release its remaining 2021 films -- including Dune and The Matrix Resurrections -- using the same hybrid approach. However, Warner Bros. has already agreed to screen its 2022 movies in theaters for an exclusive 45-day period before premiering them on the home market.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter