Patty Jenkins says the movies released on streaming services “look like fake movies”
Good luck telling that to Martin Scorsese, Alfonso Cuarón, and David Fincher
Film News Patty Jenkins
Patty Jenkins is still very unhappy about how the release of Wonder Woman 1984 played out. Her second Wonder Woman movie came out in theaters and HBO Max simultaneously as part of Warner Bros.’ pandemic release deal with the streaming platform, and it failed to get as much attention as the first flick. We previously reported that the director had referred to the hybrid rollout as “heartbreaking” and “the best choice of a bunch of very bad choices” at CinemaCon. But another comment by Jenkins from the same panel is now making the rounds online and has provoked ire.
According to The LA Times, who published the transcript of the panel, Jenkins said, “All of the films that streaming services are putting out, I’m sorry, they look like fake movies to me. I don’t hear about them, I don’t read about them. It’s not working as a model for establishing legendary greatness.” People are understandably pissed because it’s factually incorrect. Netflix has released three Oscar-nominated films: Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, Marin Scorsese’s The Irishman, and David Fincher’s Mank. Try telling some of the world’s most prolific directors that their films look like “fake movies” because they were released by Netflix. As for other movies released on HBO Max under the hybrid model like Wonder Woman 1984, well, Mortal Kombat was huge for the streaming service.
Small screens may not be the best platform to watch superhero movies, but that doesn’t mean that all films released by streaming services are of low quality. We get it; all options for releasing Wonder Woman 1984 absolutely sucked. If it hadn’t been available to stream, it would have likely had to wait over a year for a theaters-only release—maybe even longer, since we still don’t know when it’ll be completely safe for everyone to return to movie theaters.
380 Comments
Gee, sorry Patty.
On the one hand, her comments are easy to snark on as many movies which were all made with projection in a cinema as the ultimate intention end up distributed by streamers, including her own movie.On the other hand, I bet you’d believe me if I said netflix has released seven Christmas Prince movies in the last four years.
I don’t even know what those are.
“On the other hand, I bet you’d believe me if I said netflix has released seven Christmas Prince movies in the last four years.”
And that presumably has SOMETHING to do with SOMETHING, but for the life of me I can’t figure it out.
Are you under some sort of misapprehension “straight to video” was something that didn’t exist until Netflix rolled around?
Easy to snark on-The AV Club
There have been 11 Halloween movies in theaters.
In 5 decades….
WW84 was such a disappointing follow up to WW. It was so clunky, with a super questionable body swap plot device, and logical leaps beyond forgiveness. It was just about the worst movie i have watched all year, and I sat through Army of the Dead.
Wonder Woman 1984 was so bad it did indeed seem like a fake movie, so I can’t wait for the theatrical release of the real thing.I get that WB and later Disney royally fucked a lot of creatives and actors with the way they’ve pushed films to streaming, but I wish some of them wouldn’t stoop to saying bullshit. You can criticize greedy, lying executives without sounding like a boomer who had to burn all their devices because those Nigerian Princes kept being so persuasive.
Well, we can’t all make timeless pieces of cinematic artwork like Wonder Woman 1984.
…Wonder Woman 1984 absolutely sucked.There’s your answer, Patty.
The screenwriters making Steve possess the body of a helpless random guy was extremely necessary and non-disturbing.
…all options for releasing Wonder Woman 1984 absolutely sucked
Well, there was one option they didn’t explore: Not releasing it.
We’re still waiting for the most recent James Bond movie, which was supposed to have come out a year ago.
Yes, you make one bad movie and you can’t speak about film for the rest of your life. Makes sense.Snarky lazy bullshit is snarky lazy bullshit.
For a substantial segment of the population, the drawbacks of seeing a movie in the theater outweighed the advantages, pre-pandemic. First of all about 10 years ago I stopped going to any theater at all where I couldn’t reserve seats. Then there’s travel, cost, the random chance that someone sitting near me is some kind of obnoxious asshole… The main impetus for seeing a movie in the theater was that it was the only place you could see it. Full stop. Given the choice of seeing it in the theater or seeing it at home, a lot of people would have selected watching it at home. Yes, there are exceptions – movies that excel with a big screen experience, movies that invite the group energy of a late night or opening day showing, and cinephiles who value the in-theater experience more than your average movie-goer. But most people did not dedicate their lives, personal and professional, to making movies. Their values and priorities are not the same as those who chose to become movie directors. If directors want to have a conversation about how they got screwed out of box office points in 2020/2021, that is a fair conversation between themselves and the studios. Totally fair. I get being upset about that. I also get why studios did what they did, and they (hopefully) calculated paying a bunch of settlements for breaking contacts as part of the cost of doing business in a pandemic. And moving forward contracts and agreements will have to change to reflect fair compensation that can’t depend on butts-in-seats. But I don’t see winning the general public over to the argument that we must go to a movie theater to properly enjoy a movie and that otherwise it isn’t a “real” experience or that we haven’t enjoyed the movie “properly”. Let me watch my shit at home, where I’m comfortable and happy, on my time and my own terms. Also WW was overrated and WW84 flat out sucked.
Totally, absolutely correct. The only time I’m still excited to see a movie in the theaters is if it’s at a screening where I can guarantee the audience will be respectful and quiet, or if I can drop a couple of hundred to reserve the theater for myself. Even with a captive audience, the chances of AV fuckups or having to sit through 30 minutes of commercials prior to the movie actually starting…it’s just not worth it most of the time.Particularly with the advances in home theater technology — I mean, even just watching a movie on an iPad with some noise cancelling headphones— I basically would never prefer to see a film in theaters anymore. I can get a much more intimate and engaged experience at home.
“First of all about 10 years ago I stopped going to any theater at all where I couldn’t reserve seats.”
It’s funny. You say that, yet until last year the box office takes were record-breaking almost every year.
I haven’t been a teenager for a few decades, but you can’t forget this reason for going to the movies, at least for young people- a good place to make-out.
Young people don’t even do that anymore, that’s what Netflix and chill is for.-source, a young that was a teenager within the decade.
The teenagers whose parents let them make out in front of the TV aren’t the people who would go to the movies so they could make out.Netflix and chill isn’t anything new. It just used to be TV and chill, or DVD and chill. Or VHS and chill if you want to go further back. Before that it was probably listen to records and chill.
But there’s plenty of better places to make-out without wasting money on a movie ticket, and modern teens know this.
“Forsooth, my noble paramour, perhaps if it pleaseth you we might partake in a pleasant evening’s pursuit of victrola and chill?”~ A conversation in 1901, I presume
yeah…any of those. probably how most of us are here today. lol
Exactly. It’s not 1959 anymore.
It just goes to show how out-of-touch that commenter really is.
Theatre makeouts have, for generations, been a byproduct of not the moviegoing experience, but a lack of privacy at home. Netflix and Chill doesn’t help when both parties live in apartments, or multigenerational homes.
Guarantee you young people with less permissive parents absolutely still do. It’s not like we olds who had less invested parents weren’t VHS and chilling.
Right, but what’s old is new and you can bet my generation, the Netflix and chill generation, thinks they came up with that concept. But ultimately, teens/young adults are better at circumventing their parents rules now because there’s more avenues to do so.I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it’s not nearly as prevalent as it used to be.
We had in-home couch make-out sessions too, but those usually came after a few dates held in neutral territory.
With the invention of dating apps, it’s mostly just hookups on the first date. Traditional dating hardly exists anymore.
Ah, the Finger Stalls. Good times. Good times.
The only reason the first Wonder Woman was so well received was because it was the only bright spot in a disaster of a franchise, a lonely lifeboat in a vast sea of poop. If it were a Marvel flick, it would have been placed among the Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 tier of movies.
Frankly I think a lot of the praise/energy around it was because it was woman-led and woman-directed. And that does make it important, and I’ve listened to people I respect tell me how moving it was to see an iconic woman character who is powerful, who is strong, and who hasn’t been overly sexualized and whose appearance is meant to convey strength more than it’s meant to appeal to the male gaze. And I get all that, and understand what it means to them. But the movie, for me, was just… eh. And it upsets me to have that opinion because it makes me sound like some MRA neckbeard. But even more so it upsets me because Wonder Woman, the character, deserved more, and the fans and people she’s meant to inspire deserved more too.
i’m a lady and i agree with you, so there. i couldn’t finish watching the first one because it’s so terrible. and i’m not a fan of kristen wiig, so i didn’t even bother with 84.
I love Kristen Wiig and Pedro Pascal and I still thought 84 was terrible.
What bothered me most about Wonder Woman is that they were afraid of looking like they were copying Captain America, so they switched out the WWII origin for WWI. Which, fine, but instead of taking the opportunity to depict a much murkier, more morally ambiguous conflict they end up telling a straightforward “good guys versus bad guys” WWII-type story, with Diana happily slaughtering random Germans without a second thought and running into a bunch of stock eeeeeviiill Nazi types. They kind of half-heartedly go “oh, wait, war is futile” with the Ares reveal in the final act, but that doesn’t change the fact that Diana spends most of the movie murdering faceless foot soldiers because a guy she liked told her it was a good idea.
So you totally ignored the poor woman telling her that the Germans were slaughtering children? And the Germans concentrating ALL their fire on her?
Right? I was very excited to see a WWI origin story because it really was a different kind of war and could have told a story very different from anything we’d seen in a comic book movie.
People confuse “morally grey” for “there were no evil people” all too often. Diana wasn’t murdering faceless foot soldiers (for one thing people on the Internet misuse that word all too often), she was killing people who, against what their countrymen wanted, were trying to prolong the war. We see German leaders arguing for a surrender and getting killed by Ares’s primary minion because of that. If you look up Erich Ludendorff, you’ll see this guy was a huge promoter of the stab-in-the-back myth which saw Hitler rise to power. If the soldiers Diana was fighting seemed like Nazis, its because they were the precursors to what came later.
Don’t forget that both films ended with an actor named Chris playing a guy named Steve who winds up sacrificing himself in a German superweapon in the form of a plane that had super bombs set to destroy major cities.They kinda forgot to edit that part when using cut and paste with the plot for Wonder Woman.
It’s fine if you don’t like it…but that doesn’t mean it
was overrated. I loved that movie to death and watched it multiple
times, and I know I’m not alone.I don’t love it simply because I’m
blinded by the fact that it was the first female superhero movie in
forever, or because the DC landscape up until that point was terrible,
and that’s an incredibly unfair take to have about other fans. I love it because I
genuinely believe that it’s a well-put together and enormously
gratifying movie to watch.
The action in the first one (specifically the No Man’s Land sequence) was also well-choreographed. Marvel movies and other tentpole franchises still struggle with this, so that was a breath of fresh air at the time. Jenkins’ complete failure to repeat that success was one of the biggest disappointments of WW84 for me. The action sequences were just repetitive and boring.
third act definitely dragged it down, though it doesn’t bug me the way it does other folks.
dont feel bad. i havent seen WW84 so cant speak to it, by all the DC movies I have seen suck except for Shazam and the new Suicide Squad.
The people who enjoyed it, which are the majority, liked it just fine. Why is that not enough?
Truth. It was mediocre at best, and the “let’s set it during WWI instead of WWII so we can seem different and avoid comparisons to the first Captain America movie, but let’s make the villains basically Nazis anyway” thing irritated me. And then WW 1984 came out and everyone was so upset because it sucks, and I’m like, “It really isn’t that much worse than the first one.”
Innocent bystander bodily autonomy issues aside, I thought WW84 was better than the first one. If nothing else, it actually felt a lot more like a comic book movie, and Pascal and Wiig were huge upgrades, villain-wise.
WW84 actually felt (visuals aside) like it was made in 1984. The plot and characterizations fit right in with the Christopher Reeve Superman film universe.
right. i see most of the these superhero movies as just expensive adaptations of what could’ve been a 3-5 book comic series (per movie). DC tends to feel like that the most. if most people just see the DCU & MCU as comic books set to film, then they’d probably enjoy them more without so much critical judgement.
I didn’t like the first one and still thought 84 was so much worse
Yeah, they did that, but then they gave her a shield just like Cap. If only Wonder Woman had some well-known, unique means of deflecting bullets!
Not to mention they gave her an off-brand Howling Commandos as well.
Captain America isn’t the only guy with a shield.Also, those guys have little in common with the Howling Commandos.
It had a fun moment or too, but geezy Pete, that second half needed a trim, a big old trim with a chainsaw. Halfway through that cringe-worthy monologue I was screaming
Look up what World War 1 Germany was like. The Nazi Regime didn’t come out of nowhere.
“it would have been placed among the Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 tier of movies.”That’s a huge tier bookmarked by one of their best and one of their weakest.
Completely agree. Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 is one of my favorite MCU movies. Thor 2 is like, second from the bottom of my list.
Iron Man 2 on the other hand…
Eh, I fat fingered it. I meant 2 – but who needs to edit a post beyond 15 min, right?
“So, how was it?”“It was somewhere between a blowjob and rectal cancer.”“…”
It was good until the third act. Then it fell apart.
Come on, Iron Man 3 is legitimately good. Did you mean Iron Man 2?
Yeah, typo. I meant 2 – and now I have to live with my eternal shame, because who ever needs to edit posts or anything!
Nah it’s in my top 4 sh movies
Iron man 3 is top tier mcu, legitimately funny with by far the most visceral and well shot fight scenes in any marvel film
I think Godot herself has a lot to do with the appeal of the franchise. She was the only thing that made WW84 remotely tolerable for me, and she certainly elevated the first one substantially.
“Waiting for Gal Gadot”.
Justice League: Sea Of Poop made it further in the title selection process than you’d think
Agreed. It just wasn’t nearly as good as the first one. Now, I also have no idea what was rushed through production and what was held back on production. Either way, Patty, if this is the movie you wanted to put out, it just more on par with the rest of the DCCU.
It was well received because it was a good movie period. Everytime something people dislike gets successful, they come up with all kinds of theories for why it did instead of the obvious reason that the majority of people liked it.
Having just re-watched both films, I have to say that Iron Man 3 is a considerably better film than, and a tier above, Thor: The Dark World. Whatever your opinion is on the whole Mandarin bait-and-switch and Guy Pearce as villain, IM3 is ultimately a competently executed film with good action set pieces and assured direction from Shane Black.
Thor: The Dark World is an absolute mess of a film. It was very obviously tinkered with to death in post-production. The pacing is completely off. There’s a long stretch early on in the film that follows Jane Foster and Darcy during which Thor is totally absent for damn near 15 minutes. The villain is so non-existent that at a certain point it becomes laughable.
I would rather watch a movie at home on my comfy couch in my underwear than going to a theater with a floor that is sticky from peoples snakes and stuff over the years. Plus, I have arthritis in my knees, so them being bent for a long time and not being able to stretch them out is a non-starter now. I went and saw Blade Runner 2049 in the theater and my knees hurt for a while after that.
Wait, the theater floor is sticky because of snakes??????? Holy shit! I’m wearing boots from now on.
Have you not seen the carpet patterns on LSD? it was supposed to be “snacks” but I can’t type for shit anymore. Example but using hotel lobby carpet. Can be malls as well.
LSD + retro arcade carpet design must be pretty fucking crazy.
A lot of theaters have adjustable recliners.
Strance place to keep a couch!
Yes I flat out refused to see any movies in my town unless I can order my tickets ahead of time and have a reserved seating, and more than likely, in its 21 and up section. My time is too valuable now to have to worry about getting good seats or if screaming kids are going to ruin the movie. Now I have a newborn son at home and most of the time, I will gladly wait the 6 weeks or so to watch it on Disney+ or even pay the 30 bucks to watch it at home. Really want to see the new Marvel movie this weekend, but for how hard it is to find a baby sitter and going out right now, im not going to even consider it at this point
Here’s my thing like 90% of movies that come out in theaters are dog trash that should have never been in theaters. There are a few bright spots, so how is that any different than the way streaming is? There is a lot of trash and a few bright spots. Only now each streaming platform has their own A list movies. I do find it funny that a director who made one good movie than was mainly a tv show/movie director is complaining and putting down a medium she thrived in because she got a more clout.
I know that the whole move to “opening weekend is everything! If you don’t line up and watch with the loudest, most crammed in, obnoxious audience this movie will ever have, you’re stabbing its chances of success right in the dick!” thing I’d been hearing in the years just before the pandemic had me deliberately waiting a couple of weeks after release to see absolutely anything. If it doesn’t last that long, then it’s home video, for which the studio marketing people who made opening weekend the only part of the release to matter are the only people to blame.If the current situation helps to de-emphasize opening weekend and let a film’s box-office success be more drawn out over its release period, well that’s one positive side effect, at least.
“Then there’s travel, cost…”Well, there’s your problem right there, going to the movies in another city.
Apropos of nothing, I went to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight showing exactly once as a teenager.I fell asleep a quarter of the way through because the movie was boring and the audience participation stuff was too much insider baseball for me.All of my friends got on my case about it, saying, “Man, you just don’t get it.” They were right. I didn’t “get it.” I suspect a lot of other people didn’t “get it,” either, but back in the ‘80s if you were in high school and wanted to be transgressive or cool, you went to Rocky Horror at midnight. I felt like you didn’t go because you necessarily liked it – you went because you were supposed to like it, because it was a thing.I guess I mention this because it seems like Patty Jenkins is voicing the same concept – movies are supposed to look and be marketed and consumed in a certain way, according to the industry and its members. The idea that people have grown out of those habits and don’t subscribe to those philosophies anymore seems to be anathema to the old guard.
Plus, a lot of people have home theater setups that, quite frankly, are basically on par with many theaters. If you’ve got a large, high-end TV with a good sound system, I feel like very little is lost from the viewing experience. In some ways, the experience at home is definitely better. I’ve frequently had to use earplugs at movie theaters because the sound is just way too loud. Most of the theaters by me keep the temperature somewhere around subarctic levels. At home, I control all of those factors. Plus, my couch is way more comfortable than the movie theater seating (even the fancy ones with recliners). My snacks are cheaper. And I can booze it up ‘til my heart’s content. The new James Bond movie will be about 2 hrs. 50 minutes long. Where do you think most people want to watch that? In a theater or at home where they can pause the movie and stretch their legs? Or stop and use the restroom midway through?
2 hours 43 minutes. Yikes. 20 minutes longer than Skyfall.
I prefer watching movies in the theater because I can’t pause them or check my phone and it forces me to engage them more. It’s just easier in general for me to focus. And that’s for any indie drama just as much as any big spectacle movie. But I get what you’re saying. For the first time ever I watched every movie nominated for an Oscar last year and a big reason why was they were all available to watch at home.
The last movie I saw in a theater was The Dark Knight
Pandemic or not I still don’t want to see a movie in a theater. There really isn’t anything I can wait to see plus it’s expensive. I much rather use what one ticket would cost to pay for a month of Netflix and Hulu.
Disagree with the last part. Agree with the rest. Don’t see what that has to do with anything.
Last point is the only one you needed. WW84 was bad, really really bad. No matter where it was watched or how it looked. Story was a clichéd care bares episode almost.
Totally agree. Like you said I went to the movies because I HAD to. And I am also not saying they should release movies at home on same day as theaters. I get it , they need their money. But I wouldn’t have paid to see WW, and the only reason I saw it , was because it was in HBO Max, so maybe she should realize a lot of people saw that dumb movie because they were home and it was “free”.
Everything you said. I miss live sports. A lot (Part of that is I am now a 3 hour drive from the closest of the 4 major pro sports and 10 hours from the actual teams I root for). But I don’t miss going to a theater. I like my couch, I like beer, I like seeing my dog react when a loud noise happens on screen. I don’t need to be at theaters.
In fact, I’d suggest that the roles of cinema and TV feel kind of… the wrong way around. Logically, we should be checking out the new releases at home on TV, where we can turn them off if we don’t like them. The films we should be going to see in cinemas are the classics – films we know we want to see, that we know actually merit the big screen, and where we know that the other people who have chosen to go there will also be invested in the film (and not in making a scene) – and where we can take friends to show them something we love and they haven’t seen yet. I know that does happen… but it’s to a tiny extent, and instead we have it backwards – cinemas are built around first-night crowds who may or may not like what they see, and films that may or may not be worth the effort. It doesn’t seem sustainable.
Speak for yourself. I rarely watch a movie in a theater with an audience anymore because the audiences are obnoxious, and the movies often aren’t worth the price of a ticket. But, please- the main reason to see a movie in a dark theater is to be fully immersed in the experience with a big screen! Your “full stop” may not be quite as “full” as you’re imagining it is. At least a handful of apparently crazy people still enjoy a movie more in a theater. (I also don’t think you’ve watched a movie when you see it on your fucking phone while riding on the subway, even though lots of people cheat themselves out of a great experience that way.)
I’d think studios would be thrilled to move to streaming.They can spy on their audiences and sell the information they get for way more than they’d ever recoup at a box office. They can “tier” their pricing to earn even more from special features, “access” (interviews, chats, etc.), and the like. It seems like there are a thousand ways they can subdivide their content into revenue channels. And all at a fraction of the usual marketing costs (press tours, promo materials, etc.).There is way more money to be made selling convenience to the American public.Why let aesthetic complaints kill a cash cow in its infancy? It’s all just entertainment for tired businessmen.
You’re right I didn’t go to the movies, even pre-pandemic as much as I used to in the pre-streaming era. But “it was the only place you could see it” wasn’t ever the thing that got me into a movie theater when I’d go. Quite to the contrary, every movie in the streaming era has come with the awareness that I’d be able to see it at home in a few months—that’s a big part of the reason I went to the theaters less. For me, pandemics aside, there hasn’t ben much of a difference between a 45-day exclusive window, a 90-day window, or damn near six months. Most movies I’m fine with the idea I’ll see them eventually.
When I went to the movies, I was usually looking for experiences that wouldn’t translate well to my television at home, which basically limited my cinematic must-sees to big effects spectacles and “big cinematography movies”—the kind of movies that get cinematography nominations at the end of year awards. It usually wasn’t worth the inconsistent theatrical experience to see a movie that was shot as basically a TV movie with better production values. Judging from the box office dominance of the big spectacle movies and the death of mid-range dramas and comedies, I think there’s a fair number of people with similar attitudes.Even with that, there is a loss. Most comedies don’t fit my criteria for going to the theater, but watching a comedy with a crowd is a completely different experience from watching it at home alone, and I wonder how much my changing viewing habits have affected the fact that the last decade hasn’t featured more than a handful of comedies I really care for.
The Patty Jenkins goodwill train just continues to careen down steeper and increasingly lava-filled chasms. In the great words of Ed Robertson, “Lady, you’re an idiot!”
It’s incredibly funny to me how a pretty innocuous comment is somehow seen as something that is destroying her reputation (as opposed to the fact that she makes mediocre superhero movies for grown-up children). There are millions of people who get mad online like it’s their full-time job.
I’m not mad, I just think she’s saying a lot of dumb stuff and I felt I should contribute by adding my own dumb comments alongside 🙂
It is appreciated!
If that’s incredibly funny to you, I think you need to have your funny bone checked.
Thank you for showing me what real comedy is.
Again, you’re in need of a re-calibration. I wasn’t being that funny.
I think he meant funny weird, not funny haha.
“It’s incredibly funny to me how a pretty innocuous comment”
It’s incredibly disingenuous to say this is an innocuous comment.
It’s not that she’s “destroying her reputation”, but that there’s a hedge of goodwill from Monster and the first WW that makes us all willing to think that WW84 was a fluke. It’s just that her recent remarks about the state of streaming cinema are starting to eat away at that because they’re coming across as “My art wasn’t bad, it was the release medium!”
Yeah, but if she had played it safe, we’d be complaining about the formula. I don’t like a lot of the decisions she made, but I appreciate she took the chances.
It’s not that she’s destroying her reputation as much as it is she doesn’t have a leg to stand on after WW ‘84. People in glass houses and all that.
They don’t have an article
They milked two whole articles out of one speech she gave in an industry forum! And all the commenters are responding as though she slipped into their DMs and personally insulted them for having a Netflix subscription.
I cant wait for her to run headlong into the Star Wars fans. They are going to savage her without mercy.
To be fair though, the only part of WW84 I really liked was Chris Pine geeking out about pilot stuff. If Jenkins could bring that energy to an X-wing movie, it might turn out okay.
Her take on Star Wars is going to set the internet commentariat ablaze.
WELL FOR CHRIST’S SAKE.
A good film is better on the big screen. That doesn’t seem objectionable or even something to get upset about. I don’t go to a movie because I’m lazy and don’t want to die but that doesn’t mean the film looks better at home.
I don’t hear about them, I don’t read about them. It’s not working as a model for establishing legendary greatnessSorry other people have different understand of movies than you! It’s just a way for me to pass 2 hours, it’s not life or death for me. Movies aren’t as important to everyone as they are to someone who decided to devote their life to being a movie director. People are insanely self-centered and solipsistic, other people have different priorities and values than you, Patty!
On the other hand… not dying!
Obligatory https://www.indiewire.com/2021/08/james-gunn-movies-last-tv-movie-theaters-1234656675/
My theory on why Night of the Living Dead had such a massive cultural impact (well, aside from being a fucking great movie) is that the movie went Public Domain straight away, allowing TV stations hungry for content to run it late night Fridays and Saturdays forever and ever, imprinting on the public.It might have sucked for Romero’s pocketbook, but it enshrined the movie in the halls of history forever. All thanks to television.
Same thing with Its a Wonderful Life. It would not be what it is today without TV rebroadcasts when the copyright lapsed. The key to a work’s longevity is availability. If you guard how a film can be accessed, you will just kill off the interest in seeing it. Availability is key, not WHERE it is available.
I was thinking about NOTLD, though using it as an example is complicated by the fact that the public domain issue led to a massive theatrical distribution of pirate copies at drive-ins and low-rent independent theaters. So it wound up having a massive theatrical release, too, that helped cement its status.(The irony, of course, is that the movie would’ve had less distribution and probably faded into obscurity if it had been properly released in a way that had made Romero and the investors more money. Further irony being that the pirate distribution of the film cost Romero money in the short run but probably led to him making more money in the long term since the fame and attention he got from NOTLD is surely the main reason he got to do bigger projects in later decades.)
This is really what it comes down to. Regardless of whether or not WW84 got a theatrical release or not in 2020, the only way to see it now, a year later, is on TV either way. It would not, in September of 2021, be running in any theaters, it would be out on home video and streaming, and if someone wanted to watch it now then TV would be their only option regardless of how it came out initially.If the movie sucks on TV, then it was going to suck right now no matter what.
And if the theatrical experience really *does* elevate your boring-on-TV movie, you get Avatar – a movie that smashed box office records but made practically no mark on pop culture
I’ll counter that point a little by observing that the difference between a pan and scan version of 2001 (which is how I first saw it as a kid) and a proper widescreen version is boggling. What was boring and confusing on a little screen becomes breathtaking.I’ll also undermine my own point and maybe reinforce yours by adding that this is true whether the widescreen version is being watched in a theater or at home on a decent TV or monitor, and that it’s kinda nice to pee in your own bathroom during the intermission.
I don’t blame her for being upset. Wonder Woman 1984 wasn’t a great movie, but I got to see it both streaming on my TV and in one of those cheaper private screening things the theater chains were doing – and let me tell you, it made a huge difference. The movie was vastly better on the big screen than on the small screen.
lol the ugly, poorly writen, poorly acted, awful cgi movie in which the hero is a selfish cunt AND a rapist was better on a big screen?
Ok brett.
I’m so fucking tired of this complaint though. The issue isn’t the size of the screen, it’s that directors put so much visually confusing CGI jump-cut orgies in the final cut that unless you’re seeing it on a screen 20 feet tall, you’re never going to be able to keep track of what is going on. It’s like everyone looked at The Transformers and decided it was the pinnacle of modern editing.
I can count on 2 hands the number of movies that have come out in the last decade that legitimately *needed* a big screen to enjoy. I’m talking stuff like Gravity or the Hateful 8 wide-format screenings, where the experience is fundamentally different when you see it in large-format.
I can count on 2 hands the number of movies that have come out in the
last decade that I legitimately *needed* a big screen to enjoy.FTFY. Your experience is not the same as everyone else’s.
FTFY. Your experience is not the same as everyone else’s.I know someone who really enjoys stale movie theater popcorn. Like, their experience is negatively impacted if they don’t have a bucked of day-old styrofoam.
Sometimes it’s safe to ignore the outliers.
How are you harmed by someone else eating stale day-old popcorn?
Huh. I always had a hell of a lot more trouble following those rapid-fire vaguely-coherently edited Michael-Bay style action scenes (or even ones in Marvel movies) on a screen where I had to look from side to side to even see the entire picture than I did on a screen where I could see the whole thing at once. I remember more than once seeing a movie in a theater, thinking “what the hell was that all about” during action scenes, and then later at home when I could see the whole screen from a straight-ahead perspective going “OHHHHHH.”
God… you watched it twice? On purpose?
Second time was with a group of people, and my expectations were pretty low after seeing it on the small screen first. It genuinely was a much better experience on the big screen – much easier to just roll with it as an action movie, etc. The pacing issues that made it such a tedious movie on the small screen didn’t seem as bad.
So then it sounds more like the movie theater is a good way to draw attention away from flaws more obvious on a closer viewing.
I would probably argue you liked it more the second time because your expectations were precise, versus the first time when you had both expectations and hope.
We watched it at home on HBOMAX and my sister at the theater. I was sorely disappointed in the movie; my sister thought it wonderful. I really do think there’s a difference in watching this movie in your home versus the theater. Think of all the times you saw a movie in the theater and got caught up in the experience then watch it later on TV and realize it doesn’t quite hold up as well.
So the solution isn’t to whine about streaming services, it’s to make movies that work equally well on big and small screens. 3 months after it’s left theaters there will be entire generations of people who never see any movie on the big screen, so why make a movie that sucks on the small screen?Movie theater screenings are fleeting, when millions upon millions of people will never have that experience for 99% of the movies they watch in their lifetimes.
The larger screen magically re-wrote the awful plot and ridiculously stupid ending?
“The larger screen magically re-wrote the awful plot and ridiculously stupid ending?”Which superhero movie are you talking about? Because this is like 70% of them. These movies are by and large… turkeys. Whoever expected different from a Wonder Woman movie needs to grow up.
A clearer picture and state of the art sound system can make a picture seem better.
Especially with modern CGI, movie theaters have always been able to hide a lot of flaws inside movies by making their action sequences look better. It was a better experience in the movie theater because at home, it doesnt get to gloss over the terrible parts with great looking action. WW84 is what it is, a paint by number action movie that had some decent sequences that completely fell apart in the 3rd act and really ruined the overall experience
The opening sequence was shot for IMAX.
How is a mess of a movie better on a cinema screen than on a big TV?
Pretty much the same way sitcom comedies are “better” with laugh tracks.
That makes zero sense at all.
This dumb bitch as seen WW1984, right?
I don’t hear about them, I don’t read about them.Well, maybe if you did, you would see that some of them are good.Plenty of movies in theaters throughout the history of movies have sucked. But they are still real movies. I’m not sure what makes a movie “fake”.
Maybe she needs to go back to making films like Monster that don’t rely on CGI spectacle to gain some perspective.
“All of the films that streaming services are putting out, I’m sorry,
they look like fake movies to me. I don’t hear about them, I don’t read
about them. It’s not working as a model for establishing legendary
greatness.”Legendary greatness! She’s directed three films and one of those was Wonder Woman 1984 so I feel Patty Jenkins is more than qualified to make such a statement…
Oscar-nominated films: Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, Marin Scorsese’s The Irishman, and David Fincher’s Mank. Try telling some of the world’s most prolific directors that their films look like “fake movies” because they were released by Netflix. I would add Cary Fukunaga’s “Beast of No Nation” from 2015 to that list. Hands down, the best movie I saw that year and prep-andemic, I used to go the movie theatre a lot.
Poor, rich directors subjected to mass distribution of wildly popular works on wildly popular platforms making wild amounts of money. If only someone had considered how it would affect their “legendary greatness”!
Meanwhile, many of us wish that WW84 had been a fake movie.
The AV Club’s Top 25 Fake Movies Streaming Right Now (slideshow, of course)
We get it; all options for releasing Wonder Woman 1984 absolutely sucked.Including actually watching it!
Oh come on, have you seen Black Widow? There’s only so many things you can do with these stupid superhero movies. They’re like Taco Bell recipes: all the same shit in different combinations. You get a sweeping opening and/or origin story, a villain is created, the hero lives Act 1 in everyday, then Act 2 in finding the villain, and Act 3 in killing the bad guy(s)/girl(s) in some hyper-scaled CGI shit. Maybe you can super-size the meal and stretch this across 2 or 3 movies. Beans, rice, tortilla, meat and shredded lettuce. Want hot sauce with that? WW84 was as interesting as any other one of these movies. It had the bad fortune to be released as the genre is eating itself. When the world turns into a post-Covid splintered thing, we will look back on superhero movies as the last thing we all shared.
This is such a weird take I am having difficulty processing it. It seems like she considers movies that are released outside of theaters to be fake because… they never went to theaters? Like, only movies released in theaters are somehow legitimate? Why? I get the communal experience, etc. but is she saying that seeing WW84 alone in a theater is somehow more authentic than watching Roma on a 40″ television? Does the story change somehow? The technical merits (other than aspect ratios perhaps)? What if you watch Roma with other people, but catch her flick when the theater is empty on a Wednesday at 3? Does she also think reading a story on a tablet is less authentic than a book?At the end of the day, I think she was pissed that her film was streamed and the box office was not great, but at least WB made some (shitty) attempt to compensate her for the change in plans. A lot of this caterwauling seems to be her dancing around the issue of her not being compensated properly in her mind and instead of knocking WB, she is blaming streaming services or the pandemic or anything else. If you’re upset at WB but don’t want to poke them, maybe just don’t say anything at all?This goes for Christopher Nolan too who makes movies I largely enjoy, but has some hangup about the sanctity of the theater experience. Without getting into the merits of theater-going (like many things, I find it shitty sometimes and great other times), this idea that being in the theater is the only legitimate way to consume movies and thus only theatrical releases are the only authentic movies is an astoundingly narrow-minded and elitist view.
I don’t hear about them, I don’t read about them. It’s not working as a model for establishing legendary greatness.It’s refreshing to see how much progress has been made in the name of Directorial equality. You used to have to talk to a man to get this level of self-aggrandizing douchery.
Maybe the bigger issue here is that Jenkins wants to believe she’s something more than a Token.
ew what
She did a speed run of tanking goodwill. Get her to GDQ.
Oh shut the hell up already, we’re all tired of the incessant whining. Theaters are dying. Streaming is the future. Get over it.
Oh, fuck off Patty.
What the hell is a Patty Jenkins?
I get it. Directors feel cheated. It’s a hard business to break into, and when they finally do it, they want to get paid. But they’re really only the latest industry to get hurt by streaming services or online distribution. Journalists, authors, musicians… just about anyone in any information or entertainment business have already been cheated about this. Complaining about it to the masses instead of the studios is a bad look, though, and also just misplaced angst. Most of Wonder Woman’s audience would probably rather watch TikTok videos on their phone than a two-and-a-half-hour spectacle in a movie theater. When people have the option to watch at home and do whatever they want instead of paying more for the chore of going out (during a pandemic), they’re going to choose to stay home. The film industry can either (a) get with the times and change their distribution, (b) change how they make movies so they don’t lose a ton of money when people decide not to show up, or (c) fail. I’m sure there are d and e and f choices, but I don’t think any of them involve convincing people that movie theater movies are somehow more “real” and worth the risk and expense of showing up in person.
She’s 100% correct tho. I’ve felt for several years that the original movies streaming services put out feel…. off somehow. They often feel hollow and small. They appear and disappear with little fanfare, getting replaced by the next one that will be gone from memory after 5 seconds.This is independent of whether the movie is any good or not. The structural issues of streaming release make all of movie culture smaller.
That has more to do with the marketing of films that go straight to streaming than it has anything to do with the theater being the optimal viewing option.
Agreed: Amazon had some giant Chris Pratt fights aliens movie a couple of months ago. Exactly 0 of my friends and acquaintances have mentioned they watched it. Several of them may have, but it was just another thing to put on in the background while they scrolled through their phone. Same with the Michael Bay – Ryan Reynolds movie on Netflix last year. Same with Godmothered on Disney+. Three great movies on all of the streamers put together doesn’t mean that it’s a beautiful new oasis of cinema.
But those same movies would STILL have been equally lame in theaters. It has nothing to do with streaming and everything to do with the movies themsleves just not being all that great.An issue which, no offense, also applies to Wonder Woman: 1984.
I mean, I think you can say that offensively. 84 is pretty universally hated. I’ve never heard of someone who enjoyed that film. Except Patty Jenkins obviously.
All Netflix original movies look fake or bargin big. Even though Gal Gadot, Ryan Renoylds and The Rock are in Red Notice it still doesn’t look like a legit movie to me. There’s something so generic about the stuff they produce.
Roma looks bargain bin to you?
Roma and The Irishman got some theatrical releases.
But Roma wasn’t produced by Netflix, they only came on after the fact as distributors. They bought it almost two years after it was filmed. It’s a weird example for the article to try to make.
Part of it is that they save money by only paying the big top-of-the-line actors. A couple of those Netflix movies, I swear the supporting actors are the same glorified extras they get for Lifetime Originals.
Hi, calling that Chris Pratt time travel movie “great” is a real stretch. It was not great. And calling ANYTHING that Michael Bay directs “great” is another troublesome comment (ok sure, The Rock is great, it is also old as sh!t)I’ve never even heard of Godmothered. So it must be “great”…
Mentioning three movies doesn’t really prove a point either way
Every Netflix movie now seems to be an identical “Now the assassin is the target!” movie.
You have been hearing my thoughts!!! Fuck yes!!!
You should get better friends. The Tomorrow War was solid. Not great but definitely good. I have one friend who is completely enamored of the set up from the first 15 minutes of the film and all the backstory it manages and then later calls back to. On the other hand, Ryan Reynolds is the king of underperforming and completely forgettable movies. I don’t even know what Godmothered is.
the tomorrow war was absolute trash.. how anyone can defend this movie is just beyond me…
The Tomorrow War really picked up when the first alien showed up. After that, most of its faults were forgivable.
It runs on the same logic Michael Bay’s Transformers films do. Technical jargon, science fiction, and explosions. When you actually take the time to think about the events of the film, logic, and what the characters do, it really starts to fall apart.
Godmothered was Isla Fisher and Jillian Bell. It was the type of movie that would have been summer counter-programming 5 years ago (like Bad Moms, or Bridesmaids)
The Tomorrow War was okay. 6 Underground was bonkers and I loved it. The Old Guard was another example of a Netflix headliner that was good and overlooked.
Of the three mentioned, I think The Old Guard was the only one that showed some real budget issues that hurt it visually at times. Like some scenes just seemed to have been filmed in a lower quality or not had as much resources put towards touching it up.
Reynolds is in fact, empirically an all star of poor salary:profit films. And of Most Punchable Faces.
It’s a Chris Pratt movie that’s not part of Marvel or has cute dinosaurs so who cares.
Yeah… Chris Pratt as a serious action guy outside of Jurassic/Marvel is extremely bland. It took me 3 attempts to even get through Passengers and I still haven’t managed to watch The Tomorrow War in a single sitting.
Don’t know about the other two, but the Bay movie was fucking terrible.
Those movies all sucked. They would have sucked in the cinema. They would have been here today and forgotten this evening if they had been released in theaters. The Michael Bay Ryan Reynolds one was borderline a crime against humanity.
Right, and there’s a reason for that. Those streaming services didn’t invest massively in their own properties, unlike actual movie studios. Streaming services are now finally starting to catch up to the bigger studios.
Well, but even when a streaming release was a movie that otherwise would have been a big theater blockbuster (except the pandemic forced it to streaming) they feel off and smaller.
I think it feeling of being “off and smaller” is probably just you being used to seeing a movie like that in theaters.
What is the last movie you saw in a theater that impressed you?
I believe there’s just so much fucking content out right now, there is no way to be blown away by one thing because your mind has already started thinking about the next thing.Theaters have always been the worst way to watch a movie.
Yah but she’s talking in the context of the hybrid release. A lot of the streaming services original movies are, imo, roughly equivalent to TV movies. But then you get these hybrid releases and I think one is being a bit disingenuous to say that the only way a movie feels like a movie is if you watch it in the movie theater.
But then you get these hybrid releases and I think one is being a bit
disingenuous to say that the only way a movie feels like a movie is if
you watch it in the movie theater
It’s more than that. I’m not even a “theater person”. I was never seeing all the real blockbusters in theaters even pre-pandemic. But they still felt different. The average B MCU solo film like Ant Man 2 had more fanfare pre-pandemic than Shang Chi, or WW84, or Suicide Squad, etc.
Then your basing your enjoyment solely on how the films are marketed? Like you’re saying you’re not a theater person but clearly you enjoy the collective experience of the pop culture machine. I grant you that streaming movies lose THAT aspect but your issue then is not with the films themselves but the fan and marketing fervor that sounds them.
I think what you might be referring to is more the experiences of watching a movie in a theater vs. at home. A theater is a communal experience where the audience begins to act in unison. You’re more likely to laugh out loud, scream in fright, or awe in surprise when you’re in a room filled with other people doing it. I do think that it can be a worthwhile experience to view a film in a theater with other people for that reason. Still, there are some films I want to see in the comfort of my own home. I’m more apt to give a bad film a pass if I watched it for ‘free’ (as in it’s already included in my subscription) than I am if I paid almost $10 for it.
To be fair, that has more to do with the times rather than the streaming. The studios can’t seem to decide on whether they want to fully embrace streaming or not. Even Shang Chi is going theater only for about a month despite Black Widow having a split release (After 2+ years of delays and needing to have been made sometime before Endgame to even be relevant in the storyline but yay Yelena).
It seems the ones complaining about this are big blockbuster movies. As someone who used to go to Blockbuster every weekend and rent a couple indy movies, not every movie needs to feel like an epic action movie.I honestly never even cared about seeing a movie on the “big screen” or the “movie theater experience.” I mostly went to the movies to get out of the house, relax, eat some popcorn with disgustingly delicious fake butter, and see a movie that looks cool. It was just something to do, but the merits of the movie had nothing to do with that experience.
Yeah I don’t really care about seeing films in theaters vs the TV (or even… computer or ipad) screen and tend to watch any movie for the writing more than the spectacle. Different people prioritize different things though. It’s like how you can’t get in an argument with someone who’s really into how music sounds about why airpods are fine for what I listen to, or why my 2008 Honda Fit is all I need and until it goes I don’t need a newer faster prettier car…I’m genuinely glad theater lovers have something that makes them happy, but I don’t really care about that experience and don’t really want to hear why I’m wrong for not feeling the way they do.
Hey, Honda Fit buddies!
I have a 60 inch TV with surround sound and I don’t have to listen to people talk, fart, cough, or shovel pickles or nachos down their gullet. It’s totally a win. I can even have my buddies over and we can crack a few beers and watch a big action film. Its kind of fantastic.I think people are concerned that the dirty little secret of movie going has been exposed. Since there are barely any more film projectors, fewer people who know how to run them, and most movies are filmed digitally, there is functionally no difference between what is being shown on the movie screen and what you can get on a blu-ray. There is nothing truly special about movie theaters anymore, except that people still think they are. (IMAX and art houses excluded)
Some people pay extra to listen to people fart.
One problem is those digital projectors are so expensive your home 4K system can be clearer if you’ve got the right source.But there’s a future if theaters can keep up with HDR and Dolby Vision and Atmos.
They have no quality control. Filmmakers are given a truckload of cash with little oversight. There’s no Robert Evans, there’s no established studio that’s been doing this for years looking over their shoulder.It’s just one more turd dropping to the infinity sea of streaming shit.
She isn’t correct at all. Streaming has movies of varying production quality just like the DVD market did before streaming. I really, really don’t understand this line of thinking
There is nothing special about sitting on your sofa to watch them. Little anticipation and, with streaming, no particular planning. It’s the same sound system in the same locations as for the evening news. The loss is of a novel experience in a somewhat novel location. The other factor is missing out on the draw of a crowd. People buy tickets to watch sporting events from the bleachers, even though they could just as well watch them on their own tvs, even ones previously recorded. Having a crowd can reinforce the feelings. At home … not so much.
I think some of it is focus-related, at least for me. When I go to the theaters, I set aside everything. The movie is the only thing I consume during those two hours. Love it or hate it, I gave that movie all of my attention.But when watching a movie at home, I have my phone in my hand. Where have I see this actor before? Let’s check IMBD. My son comes downstairs, I pause the movie so he doesn’t see something inappropriate. My dog needs to pee, but I can let her out quickly without pausing it. Oh shit, what did I just miss? Eh, it’s fine, I’ll figure it out. Crap, this room is a mess, I am DEFINITELY cleaning tomorrow. Man, this movie is just not grabbing my attention!Streaming has made it uber-convenient to bring movies into the home. But that means that home has been brought into our movies.
She’s complaining about the netflix grindhouse:
In the the ten years prior to the pandemic, Hollywood released on average 730 movies per year. Most of those movies were released with little fanfare and gone from memory in 5 seconds. The big screen doesn’t make all movies bigger.
Most movies make no significant impact. You know what was #1 at the box office two years ago? Angel Has Fallen. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about this movie, other than that I’d guess it’s part of the “president under siege” …Has Fallen cinematic universe.
Exactly. Jenkins is an awkward messenger for this, because her concerns about streaming seem at least in part designed to excuse the performance of a movie that was just bad. But this article seems to deliberately misconstrue what she’s saying. And it is strange that even a major movie like The Irishman can get released without the broader public noticing.
Yeah calling out the three prestige pics that Netflix ponied up up for is disingenuous when they put out like one of those a year but release 50+ other movies that generally range from terrible to “pretty good but probably would never have gotten a major theatrical release.”
I agree I think? I mean, I loved The Irishman, but even in Scorsese’s catalogue I feel like I have to put an asterisk next to it, like it doesn’t count compared to his previous works. It’s the difference in Spike Lee’s BackKklansman vs Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. These are clearly bigger, longer movies, and yet they feel “less than” in some way that’s hard to explain.
Feel the same.That and the fact that I’m sitting at home watching. It’s not like I made an effort or gave up anything to watch the movie: phone’s on, windows are open to the sound of the lawn mower next door; I’m popping into the kitchen, checking for emails, seeing what the dog needs. If something comes up in the middle of the movie, I pause it. If it’s convenient to watch it later, I’ll resume (never with the same level of attention or interest). If not, whatever, whenever. There’s no commitment on my part as a collaborator in the collective creation of an art-mediated experience or meaning (sounds idiotic, but still). As long as I’m watching at home, my primary experience is being home with the movie on as a kind of lukewarm bowl of comfort to dip into or not, depending on my level of engagement or indifference. Which is fine. Maybe movies and television never were meant to be anything but low culture, pure vulgarity: unimportant. They were art for awhile, and now they’re back where they started.Viewed from a couch instead of deep in the rows of those aspiring cinema palaces of way back, it shows.
Sorry Patty, but Wonder Woman 1984 absolutely sucked…it had nothing to do with streaming.
It was a streaming pile of shit.
Snobbery over movie formats is probably a glass ceiling she could have just left unbroken.
Her second Wonder Woman movie came out in theaters and HBO Max simultaneously as part of Warner Bros.’ pandemic release deal with the streaming platform, and it failed to get as much attention as the first flick.Oh, it got a lot of attention. Mostly due to WW raping a dude because she magically had Steve Trevor steal his body.
The movie was just bad. It didn’t have the same cushion that the first WW did because you had two fun DC films come out with Aquaman and Shazam unlike the total Debbie Downer films the preceded the first one. I wanted to like ‘84, but I just couldn’t. It took all of the good will earned by the first one and tossed it out the window. They didn’t even try to make a good movie.
And even the first one wasnt anything spectacular either. It was mostly enjoyable due to the fact that somehow they didnt completely fuck up the character, unlike pretty much every DC movie before it. Wonder Woman was a paint by numbers action movie that played it safe and did nothing new to the superhero genre. And theres nothing wrong with that!
The good thing about watching it on my small DVD player was that I could skim through the romantic bits and thus missed the entire “taking over someone else’s body” thing. I also saw it on HBO and I still missed that part.
The ONE concession I’d make to her point is that when you set aside your Manks, your Irishmans, etc, there is something to the fact that lower-end Netflix stuff is deliberately shot to read equally well on a TV screen, a laptop, or a phone. That all contributes to the “flat” look you see in some straight-to-streamers.
And now that I’ve conceded that one thing, her comments are shitty and gatekeepy. I don’t love a lot of what the streaming boom has done to the entertainment industry, and it’s super unsustainable. But it’s also thrown open doors for people the old system would’ve either overlooked or written off. Deriding it just makes her sound like a dinosaur.
Stop trying to cover for the fact that Wonder Woman 84 was a terrible movie, christ.
You would think that she would be grateful that a once-a-century global health crisis came along at just the right time act as scapegoat to cover her stinky movie.“Underperformed, huh? Well, I guess a pandemic will do that – thanks for asking. Now, about Star Wars. . . .”
Every good movie released since May of 2020 has been met with lower reception, money, and fanfare as well.
Small screens may not be the best platform to watch superhero movies, but that doesn’t mean that all films released by streaming services are of low quality.
There’s no causal relationship between those two statements, but they are both true.
Ive watched all of the Marvel Movies either streaming or on disc and, even though they would be better in theaters in some parts, damn they are still extremely good and watchable, even with a budget television set
Disney+ has been pretty good about streaming the Marvel and Star Wars and Pixar movies in 4K and HDR.
Patty has a lot of chutzpah for someone who’s directed three movies in 20 years, the last of which stunk. How are Roma, The Irishman, One Night in Miami, etc. etc. not real movies?
Palm Springs was fucking brilliant and I watched that on a 20 inch TV while laid up in bed on a sick day.
It’s easy to dismiss her as if her last movie is all she’s ever done. But I kind of get what she is saying and agree.
At the end of WW84, my first thought was that I would have liked that a lot better in theater. Certain movies, even great ones, lose so much of the experience at home. For example, I loved Pulp Fiction and own it on DVD. Had to replace my copy because it was so old it just didn’t really work anymore. But trust me, If you weren’t lucky enough to see that in a theater, you should wish you had been. If a movie like that went straight to video, or had just a NY/LA theatrical release, it would be still be the same movie. But I guarantee it would not be the phenomenon it became.There are hundreds of movies released in year. Some are great, some are not, but theaters are what reliably keeps people talking about them. Theatrical release just generates excitement in a way that home video can’t. It’s part of the advertising. Take away all urgency to see something, or like Disney Plus, actually incentivize waiting, and a movie just fades into the background noise of daily life. I’m pretty sure that’s what she meant.
I think it’s easy to dismiss her, in this case, because what she’s saying just isn’t the experience of a lot of people. And it doesn’t help that her most recent movie felt fake no matter where you were watching it.
Like many directors these days, just don’t let her write the movies she directs. I enjoyed WW, at least up until the big CGI vomit slugfest with Aries. Had they grown some balls and had Wonder Woman realize that the darkness in mankind is a part of it and has always been there and not the whisperings of the god of war, influencing humanity toward endless war but is something hope in the best of humanity can overcome with Diana’s guidance and inspiration and Steve’s sacrifice, WW would’ve been an infinitely better movie.WW’84 was just a bloated, hot mess that didn’t know what it wanted to be.The action scene in the mall right after the dull and ridiculously long opening trials of Themyscira sequence was the best part of the movie.
No really, shes saying all of this shit because the digital release costs the movie a bit of money and it probably came out of her pocket..She cant accept the fact that part of the reason the movie didnt do so well is because it just wasnt very good. Even the original Wonder women, while enjoyable, was a paint by numbers super hero movie that would of been in the bottom tier of movies that Marvel made, but since DC has fucked up just about everything outside of Shazam, it looks far better in comparison
There are too many superhero shows on tv that I’m over it. Stop with the origin stories, the 15 character movies over 15 years to get to the ending and the redoing of characters after every third movie. Now there are super-superheros that were around but didn’t want to interfere with the other heroes. No thanks.
but since DC has fucked up just about everything outside of ShazamAnd Aquaman, The Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey, not to mention all their tv shows. Seriously, do people think Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman were the only movies DC has made in the last several years?
I thought Aquaman was fun.
It’s easy to dismiss her as if her last movie is all she’s ever done. I think it’s easy to dismiss her because what she’s saying is incredibly stupid. It’s nothing but sour grapes. Justified sour grapes because Warner Bros. used the pandemic to fuck her and her film over, but in the process she’s slagging off movies like The Irishman or Roma which largely got made and received accolades because of streaming.Netflix produces a lot of shit, but so does the film industry. I don’t go off saying that films released in theaters seem “fake” because it produces shitty romantic comedies.As an aside, I find this particular statement weird because it sounds as if Patty Jenkins is some revered director, but she doesn’t have a particularly prolific directorial career. I understand that a lot of it is due to the industry’s inherent sexism – I mean Hollywood used to pretend that only Kathryn Bigelow exists and even then they usually forget (as they seem to do now because Detroit, a good movie, was a bomb) – but at the end of the day she has three films. Wonder Woman is a mid-tier MCU movie that succeeded at not fucking up an iconic character, further exaggerated by the fact that everything that came before it from the DCEU was abject shit – it’s great that a female-led, female-directed film did well, but it’s an important movie because of context, not exactly content. Wonder Woman 1984 is about on the level of Man of Steel, except Man of Steel didn’t include a truly weird plotline about a woman selfishly hijacking an individual’s body to help with her grief that the film never tries to examine properly (and this is a script she herself co-wrote). Monster is carried by Charlize Theron’s incredible, nuanced performance – nuance she injected largely despite the script and direction – and Christina Ricci’s then-misunderstood acting.And even if she was a prolific director, it wouldn’t mean jack shit. A dumb statement is a dumb statement. Scorsese got rightly skewered for his bullshit and for months.
So you even take it a step further – she gets no credit for anything she’s ever done, eh?
And talk about context. The “fake movie” comment was made at CinemaCon and immediately followed by further exposition that makes her point much more clear. That is not a public event, and context matters, right? A notable filmmaker was talking at a convention of theater owners, in the middle of a pandemic that had them all shut down for a year, about how she thinks theatrical release on its own plays a crucial role in movie marketing. It really sounds to me like that was her point.The argument about what movies you should like on Netflix is supposition from a blog post. But by all means, roll with that.
“I think it’s easy to dismiss her because what she’s saying is incredibly stupid.”Zack Snyder stupid or Quentin Tarantino stupid?
It’s easier to dismiss her because she hasn’t directed that many movies anyway. Also, has anyone ever dared ask her why WW84 bombed?
She directed one movie prior to Wonder Woman. 14 years beforehand. Yes, it was a well regarded 1 movie, but let’s not act as though Patty Jenkins is Kathryn Bigelow.
I rarely watch movies (anywhere), but somehow, I did see Pulp Fiction not just once but TWICE during its original release. You’re right. That was one hell of a movie theater movie.
I was too young for Pulp Fiction in theaters, and when I did finally see it (on TV) I didn’t really see what all the fuss was about, so there may be something to your point. (Still a good movie, don’t get me wrong.) As I think about it, around that time, I wouldn’t trade my cinema-going experiences of The Lion King or Jurassic Park for anything. The zeitgeist factor is something I don’t think watching at home can replicate, even with a top notch setup.
But the way we consume things has changed so much, I guess it was inevitable. I agree strongly about streaming movies, even the good ones “fading into the background noise of daily life.” The best our culture can do to make something the talk of the town is to go meme crazy on social media, and then we call it a ‘phenomenon’ as if it’s anything close to what a true cultural movie moment is.
Good points!I’m old. Going to the movies used to be fun. Drive-ins? Rocky Horror? Cheap, too!You had to be there.Can’t roll back time. It was something my generation had that another will never know, like cheap tuition. That’s the way it goes.
I had the exact opposite reaction at the end of WW84: “That wasn’t great but I’m okay I watched it; but wow, I would’ve been pissed if I’d shelled out $40 plus concessions for my wife and I to see it in a theater.”Watching at home is probably the main reason I’m not as hard on WW84 as I could (should?) be. I can just shake my head about the numerous problems the movie had and say all I wasted was my time.
I have to admit I have never really thought of it that way. I approach it more like, “if it turns out to be a turkey, well, I still got to go to the movies.” But you make a great point. There are absolutely movies that I will sort of pre-select as ones I’m willing to wait on and rent. Everybody does that, and how you budget your money (and time) will of course vary by person and will change as your situation changes.But I do think that making everything straight-to-video kind of short-circuits that decision process before you even get that far. And it will end up killing theaters, at least for those of us outside of a major city. IDK, movies of all kinds have brought me a lot of joy over the years. I hate to see them fade away.
Wonder Woman 1984 absolutely sucked.There’s the real issue.
Last year during lockdown I got a VPN so I could subscribe to Hulu back home just to watch Palm Springs.
I loved that movie and have even watched it on my tablet once. I still count it as a movie, so wtf?
She should worry about making better movies where the protagonist doesn’t hold someone hostage in their own body for love.
Establishing legendary greatness really seems like it’s above her pay grade right now. Maybe concentrate on that.
While those director have made movies for Netflix, most of those movies were also released in theaters.Besides, for a pop culture site, you are being willfully ignorant of the fact that entertainment made for TV is fundamentally, mechanically, different than entertainment made for a theater and I think that is what she is talking about. Lighting, photography, blocking, editing, pacing, color timing, sound, and everything else is done a little differently because they are two different formats. Creators take scale and scope into account when they create.Now, a lot of people don’t care about that and that’s fine. A lot of people don’t care what food they eat, clothes they wear, how their hair is styled, what phone they own, what car they drive, what color their drapes are, what song is playing, or a million other things. But a lot of people do care about some of those things and ignoring their preferences is narrow minded and somewhat insulting to them. It is saying “You shouldn’t care about this thing you care about because I don’t care about it.” It is pretty safe to say that the people that make movies (or TV) do care about it. They can see that some movie on Netflix was shot for a big screen, not a small one and that it would have been done differently if it had been done for a TV, so it looks wrong to them in ways most people can’t appreciate. That is also fine. They should not be ridiculed or criticized for that.
I think the line is being more and more blurred between what is “made for TV” and “made for theater” with TVs getting bigger and bigger, with higher and higher definitions, and more widescreen “cinematic” formats becoming the norm, coupled with bigger and bigger budgets for TV shows to make them increasingly indistinguishable from films in terms of scale and effects (look at Mandalorian or, for all its flaws, Game of Thrones)…plus, innovations in technology have made giving things a “cinematic” scale much easier for filmmakers (again, look at the Volume used in the Mandalorian).
It is true that the divide is not as clear as it used to be, but there are still plenty of projects that definitely fall on one side or another and there are projects that a creator will make specifically for one specific medium. It is natural for them to be disappointed when that project is initially presented in a different setting which they were not specifically creating for.
Sadly, I’m right there with her. I’m a huge movie theater nerd and home theater setups do not, can not, and will not ever compare to that opening night experience…for me personally. But the discourse that bubbles up every single time a filmmaker gets upset about streaming (my home setup blows theaters out of the water, I hate being near other people, movies suck nowadays anyway, I prefer tv shows I can binge) is really proof that it’s all over. The nails are mostly in the coffin.
But the discourse that bubbles up every single time a filmmaker gets upset about streaming
Because their comments are always petty as fuck.
You can bemoan how COVID and streaming have changed the way we consume movies, but you don’t need to do so in such a way that shits on everything that found success through streaming.
You’re literally acknowledging that your interest is a boutique one. The audience for traditional theater movies isn’t going to disappear, but it is getting smaller. You’re basically in the same boat now as Punch and Judy fans. Is there still Punch and Judy theater? Of course? Is it mainstream anymore? No. There will always be theaters somewhere, but it’s safe to assume the demand is about to shrink precipitously. Movies aren’t special, really, and we’ve seen them mutate before. Remember the roadshow? Getting little pamphlets with your movie like it was a play? Gone now. Movie theaters are gonna go the way of organ pavilions and paddle boats shaped like swans.
The swan boats are still around. In Baltimore, they’ve turned into sea monsters.
Onto the trash heap with it, and good riddance!And take democracy and civil society with you!
If you’re not a fan of epic, huge action pics seeing movies at home on the small screen instead of in a theater is just fine. The older I get the less I want any type of ‘stress’ – including that in suspenseful or action packed television or movies.That and the stress of being anywhere in a crowd of exhaling anti-vaxers. And it is far too early in this “era” of streaming to call everything released “small.” We can’t know yet what will sustain or become a Classic.
I’ve been rewatching the Marvel movies at home with my kid and even the big dumb action stuff is still fun to watch at home because the movies are just fun.
Scorcese might have given Netflix a try but almost everything he has ever said indicates he agrees about the cinematic experience in a theater (pandemic aside, of course).
Scorsese argues that “the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator,
‘content’ ”, noting that a word used almost exclusively in the context
of business is now applied to “all moving images”. It is worse than
that. It is used for everythinghttps://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/martin-scorsese-streaming-services-netflix-b1803347.html
Which basically tells us that he’s deluded himself into thinking theater movies aren’t content somehow. They are. Theaters need to have something on all those screens so they can make money, exactly the same as streaming services need stuff to stream to make money. He’s got high-minded ideals, but he’s just doing a visual variation on “Kids these days and their cellphones, the newspaper was the gentleman’s read.”
Agree, his content comment is sour pussery. “Content” means “storytelling opportunity” for some filmmaker out there. HBO Max is not meant to take the place of the theater experience, which I think Scorsese and Jenkins would agree is where many of these stories are designed to be seen.
It’s not a glamorous word, but I think “content” helpfully democratizes the various things one views. Now that things are streaming, we can see that there’s not a reason to distinguish between tv shows and movies, to determine that a movie must be of a certain length, etc. Do whatever it is that best tells the story.
Oh trust me, I have wasted plenty of money seeing “content” at the movie theater too. At least when I am at home, it didnt cost me anything more than I was already paying for my streaming service and I can easily turn it to something else if its crap
Scorsese would seem less like an old man yelling at clouds if he hadn’t made yet another gangster movie, where he unconvincingly de-aged the same actors he’d worked with on his previous gangster movies rather than casting people who were age-appropriate.
It’s not working as a model for establishing legendary greatness. That is the single most pretentious and yet nothing statement I’ve read in a good, long while.
It kind of undercuts her argument that it’s about a quality experience and reveals that her real issue seems to revolve around the damage to egos.
Do you think if Apocalypse Now dropped to Netflix on a Wednesday evening between Fear Street 1947: Part 3: Part 2, and Paul Blart’s Father-in-Law’s Zookeeper, it would have the same place in film culture?
Weird choices since all the Blart films have been theatrical releases. If we’re worried about the company that Apocalypse Now has previously kept, your hypothetical is already a sad reality.
Never leave the Segway
Are we saying Wonder Woman ‘84 would be better regarded had it been initially released in 70mm in only three movie theaters prior to an expanded 35mm release?Citizen Kane’s original theatrical release was notoriously sabotaged, but the film’s legendary status seems pretty solid now.It’s A Wonderful Life (not a terribly good movie) became legendary as a television staple. Nobody went to see Blade Runner when it came out, but it became an iconic and well-regarded movie through distribution on cable and home media.I dunno. I’m not necessarily even saying you’re wrong. I guess the point is that maybe we don’t really know because we’re very early into this new model, which is part of why Jenkins’ remarks come off as silly and hyperbolic. I don’t think there’s going to be a serious reappraisal of Wonder Woman ‘84 in ten years, but I could be wrong; I don’t know if there are any Netflix originals in the queue that will be regarded as highly ina decade as much of Coppola’s œuvre, either, but I’m not going to rule it out.
It’s A Wonderful Life (not a terribly good movie) became legendary as a television staple. I mean it became a Christmas TV staple purely as copyright lapsed on it due to a clerical error , making it public domain and therefor free.
Get over yourself, Patty. Sure, there are a lot of disposable movies cranked out by streaming services. But back in the heyday of theaters, before they were all owned by the same companies, there were a shitload of disposable movies cranked out for theaters, too. The fact is that, going forward, now that big name stars and big name directors are more comfortable producing films for streaming services, we’re going to see more and more major releases with very limited theatrical runs or avoiding theaters altogether. And I think that’s swell.
5 years ago, I would of hated this. I loved going to the movie theaters, even alone, and enjoyed the experience mostly. Now, im married with a newborn son with a 4K TV at home with a surround sound system. I find the upsides of streaming movies at home far greater than the downsides at this point. Being able to pause the movie when needed, make far better snacks a lot cheaper, and not paying 15 bucks a ticket to watch the new movies that could be ruined by other patrons. Hell, even I had no issues shelling out 30 bucks to Disney+ to watch their movies on TV
and not paying 15 bucks a ticket to watch the new movies that could be ruined by other patronsThat’s the worst part for me. And also the need to pee by the third act, no matter how much I abstained from drinking anything earlier (I’m an old fucker).
Same boat, this shift to streaming coincided with the birth of my daughters. I used to love going to the theater. I can’t now, but at least I can see the movies when they come out.
Man, what an elitist comment. There are so many filmmakers out there trying to put out a movie however they can, calling it “fake” is kinda shitting on their hardwork. As if just because a movie comes out on the big screen makes it good, well, pretty sure “G-Force” was on the big screen. A theatrical release is more grandiose, but it doesn’t ensure quality.
Yeah, suck it Scorsese!
She’s so grouchy and unwilling to admit to herself the quality of Wonder Woman 1984 loooool
The comments! lol.I know I’m in the grays so no one will see this anyway, but I’ve never seen such a group of completely unironic halfwits. There are multiple comments about like “what does she know about movies? She’s only directed THREE movies! And the last one I paid to watch was bad!”Motherfuckers, how many movies have YOU directed? 90% of the people on Kinja aren’t qualified to direct traffic, much less a big screen movie.She’s right. The last “blockbuster” streaming movie I saw was that Chris Pratt Tomorrow War nonsense. Big budget, big actors. And it stunk. Seriously one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s painful to watch most of the direct-to-streaming movies. So where’s the lie?
And I love all the covert misogyny. WW84 was bad. Sure. The bummer is there were some fantastic ideas in there. They just fumbled the execution. And as if there aren’t at least a half-dozen male-directed superhero movies that aren’t as bad or worse. Also, the first WW was fine. Solidly in the middle. So shut up you dweebs.I just love that there are scores of people here with literally no knowledge of the industry, no expertise, no experience, and they feel like they somehow have compelling opinions on the topic. It’s literally insane.
I understand that a lot of directors are feeling frustrated about the issue of streaming as it relates to the classic movie theatre experience, and I think this has been a long time coming, with the problem exacerbated by the pandemic.But I suspect that the pandemic itself must feel very distant to people in Hollywood. After all, they haven’t had to worry about a loss of job, or a loss of income; they probably don’t struggle with schooling for their children, since they can hire lots of tutors anyway. They have access to great healthcare anyway, and were probably among first to get the vaccine, so not only have they probably not lost loved ones, but they probably don’t really know anyone who has. When you’re that insulated, and surrounded only by other rich people, the whole thing must feel almost abstract, like it isn’t even real.I really like Patty Jenkins and Denis Villeneuve, and all the others…but right now, for the love of Beebo, I wish they would take a step back, stop griping about this, and try to remember that people aren’t going to movie theatres right now because we don’t want to die.(I thought Frances McDormand using her Oscar speech to beg the little people to put their lives on the line to keep the movie theatres afloat was just about the most tone-deaf part of a whole night built on being tone-deaf.)
But I suspect that the pandemic itself must feel very distant to people
in Hollywood. After all, they haven’t had to worry about a loss of job,
or a loss of income; they probably don’t struggle with schooling for
their children, since they can hire lots of tutors anyway. They have
access to great healthcare anyway, and were probably among first to get
the vaccine, so not only have they probably not lost loved ones, but
they probably don’t really know anyone who has. When you’re that
insulated, and surrounded only by other rich people, the whole thing
must feel almost abstract, like it isn’t even real.
EAT THE RICH!
I’ve heard they’re delicious although a tad bit salty.
I think that might be true for very wealthy Hwood folks who could ride out the pandemic at home, like Jenkins. Not so for a lot of folks who work on productions. Plus, a lot of things went back into production under strict covid protocols so it’s been a constant presence for those folks.
She’s still going on about this?Streaming or not, WW84 sucked.
The sequel was terrible. These complaints hold no weight coming from directors who put out bad movies.
WW84 Fucking SUCKED. Nothing to do with streaming services or whatever. Stop contriving “blockbusters” – put the budget into developing a good script, and perhaps rehearsing your actors (especially your performance challenged lead actors). There is so much engaging content on streaming – made with fractional budgets – that this type of whining is almost insulting. Perhaps stop expecting marketing departments to make a hit out of your boring-ass movie.
After watching both Wonder Woman movies and Justice League, man is it hard to watch Gal Gadot act at times. She seems so stiff acting and almost unnatural at times
Part of the theatrical release cycle is the tens of millions of dollars in marketing, building hype among the potential audience, and the ceremony of going to a theater, buying overpriced popcorn and soda, and plopping down to be overwhelmed by the sound and spectacle, so much that the rough edges get smoothed.What’s happening is that we’re getting to see movies without all that ceremony and at face value. And the truth is, a fair shake of movies are bland.
Wonder Woman 1984 was a fake movie.
Fully agreed—streaming movies are straight-to DVD movies. The quality control isn’t there, the buzz and the spectacle aren’t there, the streaming services are a sea of shit with virtually no islands of art to be found. You could delete 95% of content made for streaming and no one would blink an eye.I mean, a decade of streaming, and the best you can cite is Roma, Mank and the Irishman, aka boring, boring, and redundant?The irony with Jenkins’ comment, of course, is that WW84 was perfectly suited for streaming, because it fucking sucks, one of the worst comicbook movies made, it made Josh Trank happy, ffs.
Maybe WW84 just looked like a fake movie no matter where you see it.I’ve seen a decent amount of movies now for the first time on streaming, and if they’re good, they leave me feeling just as good as if I’d seen them in the cinema.
Her movie DID look fake, yes. She is not wrong there.
2021 Home theater > 2021 TheaterAdapt.
Did anyone ask her how “fake movie” The Old Guard, managed to be a lot better than “real movie” Wonder Woman 1984?
Small screens may not be the best platform to watch superhero movies
A bigger screen wouldn’t have made WW84 any less horrible.
It’s also just false. Many of us grew up watching superhero shows on screens smaller than kids have nowadays. If that made them inferior it sure hasn’t been reflected in how those properties stuck in the general consiousness.
She’s obviously speaking generally, and pointing out a few notable exceptions doesn’t change the fact that she’s right! The other day I saw an ad for some random streaming movie and commented that it looked like a 90s direct to video movie. When I’m browsing, most of the original streamer movies look so low-rent compared to movie movies.
Do you think the ad you saw for that one movie makes her right?
The next sentence: When I’m browsing, most of the original streamer movies look so low-rent compared to movie movies. The ad was just an example of that. Clearly. Not difficult.
You do realize that streaming services do make lower budget movies as well? They dont always look as good because they didnt spend 200 million to fart out a terrible super hero movie. Its still a real risk to them so they cant always give movies the biggest budgets to help them look better. I have seen plenty of great movies made by Netflix and Hulu though and they have never bothered me quality wise or image qise
Netflix does seem to do mostly trash. I think their algorithms have determined people will watch old sitcoms and whatever stupid melodrama that pops up. As long as there is something to hit play on, people are happy.
…pointing out a few notable exceptions doesn’t change the fact that she’s right! The other day I saw an ad for some random streaming movie…“You can’t use an anecdote to prove your point! Here is an anecdote that proves my point.”
As stated above, the next sentence: When I’m browsing, most of the original streamer movies look so low-rent compared to movie movies. The ad was just an example of that. Clearly. Not difficult.
Another word for your story of how you perceive the difference between “streamer movies” and “movie movies” is “anecdote.”
Nah. The anecdote was the ad – it was good timing cause I just had that thought of it as a 90s direct to video movie and then saw the article which included a similar thought by Jenkins. The anecdote elucidates the larger experience/realization that so many streaming movies have that weird, straight to video, slightly off feel – I hadn’t pinpointed it before that poster and this quote. For every Roma or Irishman there are like 70 weird little flicks meant as disposable streaming garbage. The posters, trailers, and movies themselves – I def get into streaming holes where I’ll watch them for some reason – all have a super low rent feel. And they’re almost factory designed to be disposable.
Everybody’s an auteur.
Just takin’ all that goodwill from the first Wonder Woman and stomping all over it, eh Patty?
are you fucking kidding?First the tears about not being able to release her movie in theatres properly as if it was SOLELY a terrible creative decision, rather than a *fucking pandemic*. And now this elitist (and wrong) horseshit?Lady, I loved the first WW. It’s in my top 5 superhero movies, ever. I haven’t seen seen WW84. I want to but there’s a point where when critical and fan conensus is so weighted towards “bad” I expect it’s fairly accurate. Also, it’s not on free streaming for me, so whatever. But maybe you should just stop talking. Elitists can get tae fuck as my newcastle mate would say
Oh well you HAVE to watch WW84 now! it makes the context of her statement so much more delicious! See it! Do it! Report back!
Why you gotta hurt me, man
I am going to do the one thing I usually hate that people do, comment on an article without fully reading the article as I just want to say, Patty, just stop. You got paid when HBO said they wanted to put WW 1984 on HBO Max, so just be happy and to please stop blaming the streaming day and date release (or pandemic) of WW 1984 for its lackluster box-office.
The movie had some fun bits (I like the set piece in the mall, wish there was more of that and less Cheetah and scenes where a museum airplane is fully gassed and ready to fly), but it was too long and disjointed to be considered a classic. It was overstuffed and at first I was looking forward to WW fighting Cheetah in this film, but wow…that part of the of the film turned out to be quite the letdown.
We get it; all options for releasing Wonder Woman 1984 absolutely sucked.
This just seems like shit gate keeping crap that Hollywood has always done. The same kinda shit where actors would never do TV because if you did, then your film career was over. Or that television, in general, is a lesser work of art then a movie. The business is changing. Covid isn’t the reason but it may have accelerate things. The fact is movies coming out for home release the same day as in theaters has been something the industry has been tip toeing towards since the 90s. Once they started reducing the lead times between movie release and at home release and stop prioritizing cable TV deals for second leg of a movie distro. Movie theaters are not going to go away but they are going to be seen more as a high end, boutique viewing experience for people who seek them out but most, if not all, movies will also be getting near simultaneous home releases in the future. This is what the future is going to be, adapt or die.
The thing is, while the pretentious handwaving about seeing a movie on a tv making it somehow “less” is dumb, there is some truth in what Jenkins is saying.Specifically, there are two problems with the current streaming model when it comes to creating “hits”. First, the fragmentation of the marketplace, and second, the lack of transparency.Here’s what i mean. A bit part of what allows movies in theater to become huge spectacles is that there is very little barrier to entry. Just about anyone can walk into just about any theater all across the country and plunk down their money for a ticket for a movie. Even if it doesn’t come there the first week, once word of mouth spreads, more theaters will pick it up. But with streaming currently, most original movies end up being exclusives. So if you want to watch Roma and you dont have a Netflix subscription, you’re shit out of luck. Or if you wanna watch Without Remorse and don’t have an Amazon Prime subscription, etc. Which inherently makes it harder for a movie to tap into a universal zeitgeist.The second issue is that a lot of what makes movies the spectacule they are isn’t just the movie itself. It is also the conversation around box office numbers. When you hear that Such and Such movie made top of the box office, that entices other people to go watch it and see what the fuss is about. Which means you can get a movie that everyone thought would be just a small thing, but it ends up being a sleeper hit. But since all the streaming services dont actually release their viewership numbers transparently, that conversation doesn’t happen. I think both of those problems are definitely solvable, but it’s gonna take some time and require working against pushback from both studios and streaming services. Cause even though the market is better long term with less fragmentation and more buzz, their current best interests lie in trying to drive viewers to their service with exclusivity and in using the vagueness of their viewership stats to make every movie look good. Even if that means that the true gems don’t get to shine.Eventually though, i think movies will end up being talked about on ways more similar to Premier TV where ratings and criticial buzz is bigger than raw box office. Nielsen, or someone else, will figure out a way to track what people are watching with a rating like system and that’ll be the end of the lack of transparency.
You make a great point that talking about the metrics around a movie is a huge part of their momentum. Imagine if The Blair Witch Project was just a random 27th Netflix movie they put out in a year. One of the most famous stories in film history, yet in this timeline we would all forget it exists by 5 weeks later.
you guys just gave a bunch of oxygen to a new ryan reynolds/the rock/gal gadot movie that was clearly written by an algorithm, so is she really that wrong?
I’m sure there’s one but I can’t think of it….what movie (mainstream blockbuster type) released during the pandemic on streaming services was worthy of a theatrical release in the sense that they’d make a lot more money? My feeling is the studios looked at what they had ready to go and realized that a lot of it was worth dumping, including WW84. Especially WW84. The studios that felt like they had good movies that could wait, waited. And are still waiting. And pushing back release dates again and again.
Tenet was worthy of a release and the only reason it was released was because Nolan forced the issue.Soul or Luca? Maybe. I was very disappointed by both so not so much.Everything else? Pretty sure it was dumped because the studios knew they were better off streaming them and not having to waste a ton on marketing.
WW84 definitely would have made more money. It had the goodwill of the first movie and that generally leads to a good box office haul, at least on opening weekend.
SoulComing 2 America 2Borat 2Godzilla vs Kong.
Even though Godzilla v Kong was ok/good/not great…that’s the kind of movie most people want to see in a theater. I probably would’ve gone to see it in a theater post-Covid if they had pushed back the release date.
I know I would have gone to Mulan. I would have been mad leaving the theater, but I would have gone. My disappointment not withstanding, all of these films would make a lot more money, big or small, worthy or not. It’s how the business model is structured. Grappling with that changing business model is the issue. (Becuase my feeling is studios always know they have crap, they just can’t get away with making money off of them, like they used to)
I would have liked to see Nomadland in a theater for the cinematography, tho
Ok…I may have overstated my case…yes, most if not all movies would make more being released in a theater. Most movies released during covid times (especially WW84), I believe, were dumped onto streaming because the studios felt like turning a negative into a positive and not waste a lot of money on marketing these movies. And on top of that, they were filming movies during the pandemic and wanted them ready/near ready when theaters were ready to open and didn’t want their turds getting in the way of their new movies. I didn’t word my rant as precisely as I wanted, but you get my drift.
I’m a weird case. But I would have liked to see a ton of movies in the theater. Mank, Da 5 Bloods, Possessor, Invisible Man (that one I actually could have caught if I went in time), Bacurau, Kong V Godzilla, Color Out of Space, and even Dick Johnson is Dead. I just love seeing stuff opening night with a hungry, excited audience and there are a few cinemas here that fit the bill.
Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing movies in a theater. And I’ll bet I’ve seen more movies in theaters since theaters opened back up than most people on this site. Most movies I’ve seen lately have had just a few people in the theater but I saw Shang Chi over the weekend to a packed theater and it was a lot of fun.
Until we get more people vaccinated and authorize people who work at movie theaters to use tasers on people who refuse to stop texting, I’m ok with the rise in streaming.
In short: “I need to fool more people into thinking my movies are better than they really are by having them see it in a movie theater.”
This isn’t what she was talking about, but why stick to the point in a comments section: Does anyone else notice a certain…sheen on a lot of Netflix content that makes it seem almost artificial? Like, a literal look of their stuff that makes it seem not quite lived in and authentic? At least for the stuff in color? Maybe not for all of it but for a lot of it? I thought that’s what she might have been talking about before I actually read what she said. Also, I found Roma somewhat tedious.
A poor carpenter blames their tools.
All movies are fake, and all superhero movies look fake, but they’re a delightful spectacle on a big screen with a proper sound system.
It’s like the circus, which is also a big, fake spectacle we appreciate. There are real virtuoso performances in it too, but they wouldn’t be as fun in a small, intimate setting. Flashy has its charms.
This release model “It’s not working as a model for establishing legendary greatness,” says director who made mediocre sequel
Eesh. That transcript is awful. Jenkins seems out of touch with streaming realities and, possibly moreso, about the quality of WW84. She likely dodged a bullet with that crap going to streaming.
Ya grabbed the worst part for the clickbaity pull quote.“Jenkins: I also have a deal to make things for Netflix, because I really believe in limited series and television series. As a filmmaker there are stories I want to tell, like “I Am the Night” [for TNT], that are longer and don’t fit into the movie format. Streaming is great for massive amounts of content and bingeing TV shows. I think they are two very different skill sets and I see them succeeding as two very different things. That’s why I think it’s a mistake for the film industry to throw something away so valuable.”
Not talking to the United Association of Movie Theater People now, is she? She’s quite serious about the slant of this hill and what she intends to do upon it.
For someone with such a short filmography, her comments are quite obnoxious and elitist, especially when her latest movie bombed big time. I guess Rogue Squadron is gonna be released in cinemas then?I’d say most people today can and will only watch classics and popular films at home because that’s the only way they’re available to watch. You can’t go “Let’s watch E.T.” (or Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Jaws, Star Wars, Schindler’s List, etc, etc) and go to the cinema to see it anymore. You can only watch these at home. Some even watch on their mobile devices… gasp!
I’m sorry people didn’t like your bad movie.
I’m getting like militant anti-vaxer alt-right vibes from this whole purity of the cinematic experience that theatre owners and directors like Villeneuve, Jenkins and Nolan are pushing. Even the ScarJo lawsuit boils down to “how dare you release this movie on streaming” If Hollywood streams one more blockbuster I expect them to storm the Capitol (of Netflix).
It’s become increasingly clear that being a Blockbuster Movie Director does some kind of damage to your brain.
That and overpraise. Remember when some wanted Wonder Woman to get a Best Picture nomination? Yea. We created this.
I had the same reaction when I was watching the final fight scene with Cheetah. It was like I was watching something from a episode of MST3K.
Given how much smoke AV Club was blowing up her ass for making a decent WW movie and being a female director you’d think she’d be clutching an Oscar right now. Should’ve been paying attention to Chloe Zhao instead.
There is a scene In WW84 that is so badly edited , you can see the swap from actor to dummy during one action sequence. It’s so blatant that it leaves you kind of surprised it got by them in what’s supposed to be a huge action movie. After the first film I gave her a pass because the movie was good but the final battle was terribly shot and poorly edited. It’s clear after the 2nd movie she has some issues in post. Leaves me pretty worried for a CGI heavy film like Rogue One.
Cinemas can be fun.
Watching whatever I want, when I want, with whom I want, how I want at home is more fun.
Fight me.
I will probably never step foot in a movie theater again.So fake movies forever for me.
Certainly made-for-streaming films that have awards aspirations can be quite good. But I must say that I’ve rarely seen a made-for-streaming comedy, horror, sci-fi, and action film that was truly outstanding. The action films especially can be shockingly bad for what the budgets sometimes are, though I admit to liking Army of the Dead and some people seem to have enjoyed The Old Guard, even if I didn’t.
The person who produced Wonder Woman 84 is, if anything, an expert on making a movie look fake.
As shite as WW84 was, she aint wrong. There’s something about the lighting or the lens thats filming that makes almost all their shit look TV quality. I mean look at the wheel of time trailer. I KNOW they spents oodles of money on sets and locations and costumes, yet they look cheap. They’re in a real forest but the lack of shadows and detail makes it look CGI.
I have noticed that. Movies that looked great on the large screen often look much less convincing on TV (The Lord of the Rings trilogy being a prominent example). I know next to nothing about cinematography, but could a movie be filmed specifically to look better on TV?
Roma was a Netflix film and yet it didn’t look “fake,” it looked incredible.
Patty, you need to factor in that your movie was bad.
This is kind of like saying indie movies don’t look like real movies to me. I don’t get why directors feel the need to shit on stuff they’re not doing, but it’s tiresome. And someone who just made a movie that had made-for-TV CGI quality shouldn’t be the one throwing barbs.
Does that make her a fake director? Or is it just her inability to write and direct a competent movie?
Maybe, just maybe, someone who just signed up to make a movie for Disney, which uses its clout with distributors to bully smaller movies out of theater screens (and pretty much everything is smaller than a Disney movie), shouldn’t be so sniffy about other ways to deliver films to the masses?
ww84 was garbage and she is not a good director and she needs to learn to stfu.
And most people nowadays have a large tv with a sound system. My 50″ 4k tv cost me less than 250 and gives me a much better viewing experience than going to a theater. This isnt the 80s when everyone had a 24″ crt.
This isn’t about how you feel about the Wonder Woman movies guys. Jenkins is wrong about streaming but that has nothing to do with the WW movies.
[streaming movies] look like fake movies to me. I don’t hear about them, I don’t read about them.Because they don’t get a lot of buzz makes them “fake movies”? I guess artistry counts for nothing and commerce for everything :/
“It’s not working as a model for establishing legendary greatness.”I can understand why she’s mad – HBO Max is well-known for having a ‘legendary greatness establishment’ clause in their distribution contracts.
Oh Jenkins, take some ego, humility and sensitivity classes, stat!
“Actually it was fake” is the best possible explanation for how shitty WW84 was.
i dunno, feels like Jenkins should be grateful that WW 84 was released on HBO max…as it stands, it was a terrible movie imo but i didn’t feel ripped off since i watched plenty of other shows and movies on the service during that one month subscription. I’d be a lot more annoyed with how bad the movie was if i had shelled out full price for the fam, along with it being the 1st moive I’d seen in theaters in nearly a year after being cautious otherwise.
On the one hand, obviously some great movies have been released on streaming services. On the other hand, she made this comment on the same day that the trailer for Red Notice was released, which absolutely looks like a fake film. So she’s not completely wrong.
Can Lucasfilm please fire her already?
Poor choice of words on her part, but I can find some common ground in what she’s saying. This article brings up Roma and Mank, and I’ve seen them, and I dunno… For all their accolades, they do feel a bit like experiments. Directorial side hustles. The project a rockstar might do while taking a break from his real band. Streaming movies, by nature, just give me that vibe.
But I’m biased. I’m an advocate of the cinema, and truly feel there’s no comparison, even with the best home setups. Detractors like to focus on the negatives like sticky seats, and noisy people, but those are creature comfort issues that don’t outweigh the positives for me. (When theaters were thriving, I mean. I’ll never go during COIVD). I couldn’t imagine watching Endgame’s “Avenger’s Assemble” moment streaming at home, only to get lost in the ether over a weekend. Maybe I’m overly sentimental about this sort of thing, but the communal thrill is the difference between just watching a movie and truly experiencing it.
I couldn’t imagine how Titanic might have fared as a “Hulu Original.” And I’d be interested to know if all these fine people ready for theaters to die would be totally okay with the next big Star Wars film releasing only on Disney Access. The simple buzz that comes from waiting in line for one of those is part of the excitement too. I’m no fan of Patty Jenkins (wanted a new director for Wonder Woman 2, and I still want a new director for Wonder Woman 3) but she’s not wrong that streaming can’t establish a model for “legendary greatness.” Name one. Name one *iconic* streaming movie that will stand the test of time. The most popular in recent years was maybe Bird Box? No, my dudes and dudettes, this is not the way…
She def lost her cool, what a fucking whiner.
Kneejerk reaction to the handful of good movies released over many years aside, she’s not wrong and it’s a problem. The Irishman was fantastic, doesn’t change the state of the industry. Exceptions to the rule.Yes, Mortal Kombat was huge for the service. Yes, it looks like a fake movie. These can both exist.The trend of lower quality movies being released on streaming services is real, and it’s disingenuous to be like “BUT one of the greatest directors of all time made ONE movie, so you are factually wrong!”.
A few years from now, these “movies must be watched in theaters” takes will seem about as prescient as the people who made fun of talkies when Hollywood was still churning out silent films. Entertainment goes where the audience is, or it gets crushed in the marketplace by all the other options we have. I might have more patience with this hot take if WW84 hadn’t been so satisfied with its own mediocrity, but that was a time-waster that was more than adequate on the small screen.
Not just ‘satisfied’ but seemingly proud of its mediocrity (which is more generous than it deserves).
“Wonder Woman 1984 absolutely sucked”I agree.
Mmm.
We get it; all options for releasing Wonder Woman 1984 absolutely sucked.
Directors involved in propping up giant monopolies and franchise films don’t get to simultaneously about how the industry is struggling to put out original content. Disney subsidiaries like Marvel and Star Wars, and the DCEU has entirely crowded out an entire side of the industry (theater sales) for anything that isn’t a low budget horror. Physical releases are gone as well. So the only market left for anything besides big budget films is streaming. Streaming services had to offer a counter to the theater experience: lots of content for you to wade through, and a film for every audience.Everyone one of these directors that fights for the “theater experience” vs. streaming (Chris Nolan, Speilberg, Jenkins) come off as fighting for the little guy, but they are really fighting for themselves and that’s it. They always emphasize how important it is to see these big spectacle movies on screen which is coincidentally the films only they have the budget to make, and has the side effect of making people not consider, you know, every other movie that is made as not being as important to see on the big screen. I’m sorry but if you are going to continue making giant production house slop that is owned by a monopoly, stop complaining about how streaming services have a bad selection.
This all seems rather tone-deaf to how most people watch movies beyond the theatrical run. So if I didn’t catch a movie when it was in first release, a movie is somehow fake if I only watch it on a small screen, and I guess not worth watching? Because there’s honestly not much difference to how many streaming original and theatrical movies are made, including WW84. The “fakeness” must come therefore from how they are experienced?
Wonder Woman 1984 absolutely sucked.
Maybe if they’re full of substandard CGI.
Define “small screen” 55′-65″ 4K tvs are the norm now. Do I miss noisy, disrespectful patrons who talk over movies and paying $10 for a $1 worth of popcorn with fake butter and another $7 or $8 for a $0.75 worth of soda? Not one bit. Sure, I’ll pay a bit more to watch first run movies at home. Letting people watch content where they want, when they want has been a long time coming. The technology is there and the pandemic was just the final push. The days of paying $100+ for date night at the theatre are over.