Wonder Woman Dumped on HBOmax
The studios are now making strategic business decisions on the basis of a projected Biden bailout.
Wonder Woman 1984 is going to begin streaming on Warner Media’s HBOmax on Christmas Day. This will be in conjunction with a simultaneous release to whatever theaters are open to show it.
If you take the No Time to Die asking price tag of 600 million as a benchmark for what a modern tent pole film has to make at the box office to turn a profit. There is no way it will be in the Black, it’s going to be a big loss for Warner Media. It is obvious that AT&T has decided to put Wonder Woman 1984 in the liabilities column for this tax year.
I rather suspect it was going to end up there anyway.
Three years ago, Wonder Woman was a rather pleasant surprise for the deeply troubled DCU film brand. After the disaster of Joss Whedon’s Justice League, Wonder Woman provided both very positive reviews, a decent box office take, and a heroine who wasn’t a feminist Mary Sue harpy.
Setting the story in World War One was a rather nice touch. When I was a little boy it was the old man’s war but to Zoomers it’s as long ago and far away as the battle of the Thermopylae. And I can’t be the only one who is bored to tears with The Nazis being the villain in every movie that takes place before 1950.
Wonder Woman 1984 on the other hand looks fundamentally uninteresting.
Judging from the trailer, Wonder Woman comes across some magic MacGuffin that allows her to resurrect Steve Trevor. The antagonist is a stand-in for Orange Man Bad. And in order to maintain continuity with the present DCU, all events in this movie will have to reset to zero by the time the credits roll. Steve Trevor has been nowhere to be seen in the Zack Snyder/Joss Whedon movies, which guarantees he’s gonna be dead again. Seeing him sacrifice himself once was very touching, seeing him do it again is going to be boring as hell. And while I am personally nostalgic about the 80s but I am done with 80s nostalgia.
I don’t think it was ever going to do that well because Wonder Woman 1984 is just going to be filler material.
See you Monday
