Salem’s Lot remake has risen from its grave, but now it’ll get buried on Max instead
Everyone maintains that the movie is good and that its half-hearted release is not because it's bad
Aux News Max
Despite the fact that it has been sitting on a shelf for years, director Gary Dauberman’s new adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot is apparently not bad—with King himself saying just last month that it’s “quite good” and that he had no idea why Warner Bros. Discovery has spent the last two or three years refusing to release it. Well, soon we’ll all get to find out for ourselves whether or not it’s bad, because the movie finally (finally) has a release plan in place. Unfortunately, there are precisely two catches: We still don’t know exactly when that release will happen, and it’s going to happen on Max instead of in theaters.
Not great news overall, but there has been worse news about Warner Bros. Discovery movies, so let’s take what we can get. Plus, this move had been predicted by insiders, so it’s not wholly surprising.
Anyway, King’s original novel is about a writer who moves to a small town in Maine to finish his next novel (where does King come up with this crazy stuff??), only to discover that the townspeople are being turned into vampires. There were two TV miniseries adaptations in the past, one in 1979 from the great Tobe Hooper and one in 2004 starring Rob Lowe (a decade after he was in the first TV adaptation of The Stand).
Dauberman’s adaptation, which was produced by horror maestro James Wan and written by Dauberman himself, stars Lewis Pullman, Makenzie Leigh, and Alfre Woodard. In a classic bit of Hollywood trickery, nobody has been officially announced/credited as Kurt Barlow, the head vampire. What does that mean? Probably nothing. It might just be a fun surprise, or it’ll be a stunt performer/puppeteer under complicated prosthetics. There’ll be a vampire either way, they can’t do a vampire story without the main vampire.
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I’m no expert, but I wonder if this is WBD being worried that another high profile shelving would spark a government inquiry. Instead, they’ll throw it on the server for six months or so and then quietly delete it.
If they don’t release something occasionally they run the risk of their production business being reclassified as a hobby.
“Sometimes, dead is better…”-D. Zaslav
All good. Will be available to stream through your favourite streaming site that isn’t MAX soon after it is available on MAX. That’s all that matters.
Count yourself lucky it’s seeing the light of day at all.
Yup, I’m happy I will get to see it but it’s also a reminder of what sacks of shit WBD are.
Is this a play on words? Because if it is, you nailed it.
“Oh look, some other work that involved massive amounts of corporate time and money that I can bury and burn for a quick quarterly bump in tax savings” – responsible CEO
Except that this is being released, even if on streaming, and therefore will be bringing in revenue in some form or another and not be a tax write-off.
Back off, man, none of that was in the intentionally misleading headline.
therefore will be bringing in revenue in some form or another and not be a tax write-off. With normal, non-massively-greedy-NOW humans, one would expect that this would be good reasoning. But this is the cream of the crop of the 0.1% investor class, where everything that can be burned down for a quick buck, shall be burned down for a quick buck.It’s much like the head of a local bank deciding to smash his bank’s ATM for a several thousand dollars of change, but leaving aside the tens of thousands of dollars of cost of repair to the bank, or even the loss of his own $100,000 job, just because he wanted that quick profit NOW.
>burned down for a quick buck,That isn’t how tax write-offs work. They’re literally about you losing money. Think of it this way.I spend $100.I don’t make nay money on it, but I get to write off $20 because I lost $100.I’m still out of $100. I still lost money. Now I just don’t have to give an additional $20 to anyone else.Companies want massive successes because even when you pay taxes on those you still make massive amounts of money. Having something fail so bad that you can use it as a tax write-off is something no company wants. No company wants tax write-offs from failed investments because it means they still lost all the money in those investments.
No company wants tax write-offs from failed investments because it means they still lost all the money in those investments.
No company with a sane executive team that thinks beyond next quarter’s profits at all, that is. There are those teams and CEOs and investors that are quite willing to burn down years of investment in exchange for a quick pump and dump for themselves.
I don’t care what anybody says… the fact that they sat on it for years, and have now decided to dump it on streaming rather than the originally intended release definitely implies that they DO think is is pretty weak, if not outright flop material.
If it was any other studio, I’d agree. But Zaslav is not making these kind of moves on the basis of quality.
Sure, I know who we are dealing with here. But honestly, if they thought it had a chance of doing well in theaters they would release it to get that money. Like you are implying, this is about money above all else. The fact that they sat on it forever and are now putting it on streaming says they think it is not going to be profitable in a release, but it might make better than zero in streaming.There have always been costly flops. Some have helped kill some studios. In the old days you still released crap because recovering a bit of your money was better than not recovering any of it, and even then you could write off your losses to a point, and there was always the trickle of money over time with home video sales. But home video tapes/dvds are dead, and these days you have other options, like streaming (to drive subscribers or ad revenue), or just killing it outright. This one feels like they have gone that route.
Recent history has shown that these things are quite a bit more complicated than they seem to us. There may be different tax writeoffs and compensation deals in place for theatrical versus streaming releases. WB has dropped some great stuff straight to Max and killed things with very positive buzz outright, and still put obvious trash like Wonder Woman 1984 and Aquaman 2 in theaters, so the correlation with quality is murky at best and potentially nonexistent.
I think you are correct. Quality isn’t the right word. It is profitability. Will this movie make money in a theatrical run is the question they are asking. If they think there is a better chance with a tax write off or streaming, that is what they are going for.
There’s also just the usual balance sheet chicanery, where they spent X in year Y and earned Z etc. It merits keeping in mind that all of the streaming services are just massive, massive loss leaders (the only studio to net profit from streaming is Sony, because they license content but don’t run a streaming service), and the calculus is a lot more baroque than just “how much money will this movie earn at the box office?”
I am sure you are right. I will still totally watch this. I am especially intrigued because King previously characterized it as “not embarrassing or anything.”
Well I do really like the book, so I will probably show up to see how it turns out.
Eh, fuggit, I’m in.
It’s amazing to me how often studios telegraph that a movie is bad before it is released.I suspect the long delay here was the result of Warner Bros. holding the movie in reserve to see if it needed a theatrical release to fill the schedule disrupted by the actors’ and writers’ strike. Now, it’s decided it doesn’t need that for whatever reason, so it’s releasing it on Max, as it has probably planned to do for a while. But surely you harm any excitement about the movie, and any buzz it generates for Max, by effectively announcing that you have so little faith in it.
Surprise! David Zaslav will be playing Barlow.
I learned a long time ago not to trust Stephen King when it comes to adaptations of his books. If he says it’s good there’s a decent chance it’s the biggest piece of shit you’ve ever seen.
I hope they kept it as a period piece. One of the reasons it works is because of the time period – you can imagine some insignificant small town dropping off the map in the 1970s as part of the overall wave of economic change and dislocation, becoming just a haunted place that the locals know to avoid and a creepy closed off-ramp from the highway.
I wouldn’t care if it sucked, I’d still watch it. I liked the Rob Lowe version and that wasn’t an award-winner. I just wish they’d release it already, or at least do something with the stories related to Salem’s Lot.