Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins doesn’t think the streaming expansion brought on by the pandemic is going to last. She touched upon the future of exclusive theatrical exhibition in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter during a recent press preview of the revamped Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood.
“Streaming is great, but everybody is chasing it for financial reasons,” she said, in-between showing off the props and costumes used by Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, and Kristen Wiig in the DC Extended Universe films. “I don’t think the financial support is there to hold up the industry the way that it is.”
Studios continue to launch new platforms, such as Paramount+ and Peacock competing with Disney+ and HBO Max. “It’s one thing if it was only Netflix, but now every company has streaming. People are not going to subscribe to that many,” Jenkins observed.
“Are studios really going to give up billion-dollar movies just to support their streaming service?” she asked. “Financially, I don’t think it makes sense. I see theatrical coming back, and both should exist and will exist. People like to go to the movies.”
Late last year, Warner Bros. announced that, due to the pandemic, they would be releasing their entire 2021 slate to HBO Max at the same time the films debuted in theaters. Jenkins’s December 2020 release, Wonder Woman 1984, was the first mainstream Warner Bros. title to test out this strategy. The box office returns were considerably muted, though, in a pre-vaccine society, many factors could have influenced how audiences turned out.
Jenkins’s comments are delicate compared to those made by one of her colleagues, Christopher Nolan. When Warner Bros. made its streaming decision, Nolan, arguably the studio’s most revered in-house auteur, was uncensored in his response, calling the move a “bait and switch.” He also called HBO Max “the worst” of the streaming platforms and said the announcement left him in “disbelief.”
While a third Wonder Woman at Warner Bros. is in the works, Jenkins’s next project, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, will be at Disney. At present, theatrically-released Disney films are also available to Disney+ subscribers for a $30 premium, but it is unclear if this will be a permanent scenario.
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