Warner Bros. delays ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ by nearly 3 months, highlighting the difficulty of reopening
The news was widely read within Hollywood as a hoisting of a white flag, at least temporarily.
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The great movie-theater reopening experiment hit pause Friday just as it was pressing play, with Warner Bros. announcing it will delay its much-anticipated release of “Wonder Woman 1984” from Oct. 2 to Christmas Day – another sign that it may be fruitless to try to kick-start the entertainment economy before consumer fears about the coronavirus have been resolved.
While theaters in many cities have reopened, moviegoers have shown only a limited interest in returning to them. That was made clear by the mediocre performance of Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet,” which was released in the U.S. over the Labor Day weekend and pulled in just $20.2 million, a fraction of what it would have achieved in typical times.
Warner Bros. had intended “Wonder Woman” to be the back half of a one-two punch that Hollywood hoped would jolt the filmgoing business back to life after six dormant months. Patty Jenkins’ sequel to her 2017 smash was to arrive in theaters a month after “Tenet” was released.
But the reluctance of theatergoers to attend showings of “Tenet” was an indication that the time has not yet arrived for a return to normal business, at least for the film industry.
The current coronavirus death toll in the U.S. is 189,000, with nearly 6.4 million documented cases.
WB Motion Picture Group chairman Toby Emmerich sought to put a positive spin on the “Wonder Woman” news. He called the sequel, in which Gal Gadot’s Diana Prince is dropped into a 1980′s-era Cold War conflict, “an incredibly dynamic film that moviegoers of all ages around the world will absolutely love” without offering an explanation for the delay.
But the news was widely read within Hollywood as a hoisting of a white flag, at least temporarily. Warner Bros. had been more bullish on theaters than many of its rivals, even the theater-focused Disney, which opted to retail “Mulan” as a premium offering on its Disney Plus streaming service instead of putting it in U.S. theaters.
“Tenet” has been bedeviled by ongoing bans on indoor theaters in New York and Los Angeles, the country’s two largest moviegoing markets. Officials in neither place have given an indication of when that ban will be lifted, let alone in the next three weeks.
Executives at Warner Bros. had urged patience in interpreting last weekend’s “Tenet” results, saying they couldn’t be judged for a few more weeks, and certainly not until New York and Los Angeles were open.
But even reopening theaters in America’s largest coastal cities may only solve part of the issue. The Midwest, with its large movie market in Chicago, has generally allowed theaters to reopen. But cases there have been surging in recent weeks, and not all theaters are comfortable opening; regional chains, such as Classic Cinemas, which operates 121 screens in Illinois and Wisconsin, remain closed.
The “Wonder Woman” postponement also amplified a larger point: as other industries have discovered, simply reopening does not mean people will come. From restaurants that have struggled thanks to few diners to universities that have seen inconsistent on-campus attendance to Disney World shortening its hours with lower-than-expected traffic, reopenings have not meant a resurgence.
Plans are further complicated by emerging reports of reinfection, which would keep even previously infected people home.
The “Wonder Woman” postponement does clear a little more room for “Tenet,” which Warner Bros. and theater owners can play strongly for several months, now without competition. The next major scheduled release is now Disney’s Marvel movie “Black Widow” on Nov. 6.
Friday’s announcement was the latest frustration for U.S. theater owners, who crave new product to sell to consumers and generate revenue after a half-year of being closed. A spokesman for the National Association of Theatre Owners declined to comment on the move.
The news is also discouraging to theater owners overseas, where the coronavirus has been corralled in some territories and “Tenet” has in fact done well. Mooky Greidinger, chief executive of Cineworld, the world’s second-largest chain, told The Post earlier this week he was hopeful that studios would see the potential in the U.S. and up their pace of movie releasing, aiding theaters everywhere. Cineworld, which operates Regal in the U.S, also has many theaters in the United Kingdom, Canada, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
Greidinger said that while U.S. theaters remain under capacity restrictions, countries such as Hungary and the Czech Republic are at 100 percent, which he hopes will increase the incentive for studios. China, too, has seen a major theatrical resurgence since reopening, as both “Tenet” and homegrown war epic “The Eight Hundred” have done big business; the latter has taken in an eye-popping $336 million in the country since coming out three weeks ago.
Greidinger said he remained optimistic that studios would keep pushing. “We need product and they need us open,” he said. He said he saw theaters undergoing a rebound, slow but sure, in the manner of bars and restaurants.
But individual restaurants can succeed in ways movies can’t, insiders say. A film distribution executive who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized by their company to talk to the press said that Friday’s news highlights the issue faced by studios: movies as designed in 2020, with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars and large-scale marketing campaigns, need to be able to play from coast to coast to succeed.
“You’re trying to open a movie nationally with no national consistency,” the distributor said. “And that’s not a recipe for success.”
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