Entertainment: Bug accelerates digital destiny

Disney's Black Widow is slated for May 7 this year, a year after it was first set to debut. It will be the first Marvel theatrical release to hit theaters since the start of the pandemic.

Sony has delayed most of its big releases to 2021 or 2022, while Universal experimented with paid digital debuts of movies such as Trolls World Tour.

Warner Bros has recently announced that it will make all of its 2021 films available on the group's HBO Max streaming service for one month on the same day they hit theaters. That's 17 movies, including some potential blockbusters, such as Godzilla vs. Kong, The Suicide Squad and The Matrix 4.

The move, called "dramatic" by industry analysts, is to boost subscriptions to HBO Max, which was launched in May in the US and charges $15 a month.

John Stankey, CEO of AT&T, which owns Warner Bros, told an investor conference in December that the decision was a "win-win-win" for the company, its partners and consumers that fits current market trends and consumers' psyche amid the pandemic.

But the company's strategy has drawn criticism from filmmakers, with Christopher Nolan, director of Warner Bros movies such as Inception and Tenet, the most vocal critic.

"Some of our industry's biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before, thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio, and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service," he told The Hollywood Reporter.

"This is going to forever change how we look at the movie business," Hollywood producer Jason Blum told the Los Angeles Times. "It's the biggest thing to happen to the movie industry in my lifetime."

The lackluster box office results for those major releases seem to have validated the direct-to-consumer strategy. The $200 million Mulan took in only $66 million worldwide; Soul, which cost roughly $150 million, earned just $47 million worldwide; and Wonder Woman 1984, with a budget of around $200 million, grossed $132 million globally, according to Mojo.

On streaming platforms, those films delivered positive results. Nearly half of HBO Max subscribers watched Wonder Woman 1984 on the day of its release, and the streaming service saw the total viewing hours on that day more than triple in comparison to a typical day in the previous month, according to Warner Bros, without revealing specific numbers.

Disney has also seen rapid growth of its streaming platform Disney Plus. The company forecasts subscribers to reach 230 million to 260 million by 2024. It had expected the number to be 60 million to 90 million when the service was launched 14 months ago.

The "only real benefactor" of the pandemic has been subscription video-on-demand platforms such as Netflix, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime Video, said research firm Ampere, which projected a 12 percent gain in additional revenue growth over a five-year period for streaming services.

Media conglomerates are engaged in a fierce battle for streaming market share. Following the introduction of Disney Plus and Apple TV in November 2019, Warner Bros and NBCUniversal joined the race by launching HBO Max and Peacock respectively last year. Discovery Plus is the first new streaming service to launch this year.

Though Warner Bros executives said the company's streaming strategy is a "unique, one-year plan", many in Hollywood believe that the industry will never be able to go back to its old ways.

"US studios are fundamentally changing how they reach customers, with most launching or planning to launch their own streaming platforms. Films will reach huge numbers of viewers via streaming platforms," said a PwC report.