John and The Hole has lingered with me more than any other film at Sundance this year.

I filled out a critics poll a few hours before writing this review and it was a very odd experience. How does one define “the best?” Is it the easiest to consume? Most pleasurable? Most enlightening? Most personally powerful?

For me, the great movies leave me with questions, not every answer. And John and The Hole left me considering everything about being a parent and what it was to be a 13-year-old boy.

Pascual Sisto adapts the Nicolás Giacobone screenplay. If you know Giacobone a little, you know that he is not a literalist. And that is certainly true in this film. I mean, the most basic element… how does John gets his 2 parents and his older sister into the hole? Yes, he drugs them so he can manipulate the situation. But it is physically impossible for him to have gotten them into the hole with seriously hurting them, if it is physically possible for a boy of his size at all.

For me, the film is an exploration of the mind and soul of a young adolescent male who has not had the good fortune of having natural pleasurable distractions. He’s not physically limited, but he isn’t obsessed with his body. He enjoys tennis, but he is not going to be a highly-honed instrument. There is no blossoming sex partner.

Being in a pandemic for the last 10 months or so… having an 11-year-old son… and yes, being able to remember the vagaries of that age myself made me a perfect audience for the movie. I don’t think I was particularly odd as a kid, but I know I did weird stuff… like spending lots of time face down in the water or pushing the boundaries of my safety in rather banal ways. By the time I was hot for every girl with a starter bra or driving my car like an invincible lunatic, there was this moment of being soft, mushy, unset clay.

That is what John in the Hole is. As in other work by Giacobone, it blurs the line of reality, affording itself the benefits of being a literal work while having no compunction about going off into its own reality. Sisto fearlessly allows his film to be relatively inactive, not telling what the audience what to feel or think.

Sisto and Giacobone allow the 3 members of the family in the hole to freak out for themselves, but not for John. Once they get over their immediate concerns, they seem to kind of know where John is… and their deeper focus seems to be on waiting for this brief moment of his life to pass.

And indeed, John himself, giving himself a free pass for a few days, could not make more mundane choices. He drives a bit. He does stupid stuff in the pool. Hangs out with his friend. Feels fast and loose with money after taking a few hundred dollars out the ATM. When he misses his family, he makes dinner for everyone and doesn’t seem to think the anxiety in the hole is necessary. He sits on the edge of the hole like he was sitting at the dining room table just a few days earlier.

For me, the key to the movie comes near the end, when John wants to fuck next door neighbor Paula. And I use the word “fuck” with intention. John doesn’t turn into horny teen from Porky’s or try to drug her for sexual advantage… but as calmly as every moment of John in the film, you can see and feel his burgeoning desire. More importantly, Paula can feel it, the way she has felt a change of intention from men in appropriate and inappropriate situations through her 40-ish year life. She doesn’t believe it at first. But in the most subtle way, John confirms the intention of his puberty. And she knows that he has turned a corner and that she needs to avoid indulging him in any way.

But that is, basically, the end of John’s journey. This moment in his life is over. He is on to the next part of his life.

Back to life.

This is a true Step A to Step B story. The Hole suggests it might be something else… something more. And there are other elements worth chewing on here, like the behaviors of the parents and the sister, before, during, and after.

By putting his family in the hole, John makes the hole his normal life and the outside his hole, where he evolves. Just a little. But in the way I imagine most boys (and perhaps girls and perhaps all flavors of gender) experience, if not for a day or two, for a period in their lives.

Another magically weird morning thanks to the HFPA and their Globes of Gold. It’s like a flower that you have never seen in nature and will never see again, blooming in your hand before wilting and dying as trucks run over it on their way to the real awards.

Did they know when they decided that Hamilton would be qualified as a “motion picture” that it would be the only such qualifier with a lead or top three cast members of color? Hamilton fills two specific HFPA holes, also allowing for the appearance of the magnificently famous Lin-Manuel Miranda. The only other acting nominations among the five Musical/Comedy Picture nominees came from Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

Best Motion Picture – Drama 
“The Father” (Sony Pictures Classics) 
“Mank” (Netflix) 
“Nomadland” (Searchlight Pictures) 
“Promising Young Woman” (Focus Features) 
“The Trial of the Chicago 7” (Netflix) 

Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy 
“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” (Amazon Studios) 
“Hamilton” (Walt Disney Pictures) 
“Palm Springs” (Neon) 
“Music” (Vertical Entertainment)
“The Prom” (Netflix) 

In this season of small pictures, they almost had to dance through the racial raindrops to not get wet. Thank goodness for Small Axe and Lovecraft Country in the TV nominations.

Best Television Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television 
“Normal People” (Hulu/BBC) 
“The Queen’s Gambit” (Netflix) 
“Small Axe” (Amazon Studios/BBC) 
“The Undoing” (HBO) 
“Unorthodox” (Netflix)

Best Television Series – Drama 
“The Crown” (Netflix)
“Lovecraft Country” (HBO Max) 
“The Mandalorian” (Disney Plus) 
“Ozark” (Netflix)
“Ratched” (Netflix)

Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy
“Emily in Paris” (Netflix)
“The Flight Attendant” (HBO Max)
“The Great” (Hulu) 
“Schitt’s Creek” (CBC) 
“Ted Lasso” (Apple TV Plus)

When people, like me, continue to poke at HFPA on the issue of racial eyesight and general weirdness, this is why. Ratched (62% Tomatometer) is why. Music, which has not yet been released, apparently seen only by HFPA members, is why. And yes, a list of five “movie” dramas that somehow wasn’t interested in any of the unusually large number of films and strong work by people of color… except for the taped theater long since marked as “not a film” by The Academy.

On the flip side, there is a familiarity with the list that has been The List since August.

Same old Golden Globes.

Some things may seem surprising… but are also likely to “surprise” on the morning of *Oscar nominations. Like Mank having a big footprint. The trend line on that title has not been great from the release on Netflix… on the other hand, it is a more muscular piece of filmmaking, with a major-league director, and it’s about Hollywood.

Best Drama to Best Director here is a straight line, except that they subbed in the relentlessly promoted Regina King in for French playwright/director of The Father, Florian Zeller.

Best Director – Motion Picture
Emerald Fennell, “Promising Young Woman” (Focus Features)
David Fincher, “Mank” (Netflix) 
Regina King, “One Night in Miami” (Amazon Studios) 
Aaron Sorkin, “The Trial of the Chicago 7” (Netflix) 
Chloé Zhao, “Nomadland” (Searchlight Pictures) 

This is classic HFPA. King is so high-profile right now that she could end up shocking the world… plus, they like her, they really really like her. They didn’t like the movie enough to give it a screenplay nod.

Best Screenplay – Motion Picture 
“Promising Young Woman” (Focus Features) 
“Mank” (Netflix) 
“The Trial of the Chicago 7” (Netflix) 
“The Father” (Sony Pictures Classics) 
“Nomadland” (Searchlight Pictures) 

And the only actor in the film they embraced was the one they knew best, from Hamilton… who was also the only Supporting Actor choice who hasn’t won a Globe or Oscar. On the other hand, he also has a nomination for Best Song, so did that unique proposition propel him ahead of his three co-stars and others?

Best Actor in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture
Sacha Baron Cohen (“The Trial of the Chicago 7”) 
Daniel Kaluuya (“Judas and the Black Messiah”) 
Jared Leto (“The Little Things”)
Bill Murray (“On the Rocks”) 
Leslie Odom, Jr. (“One Night in Miami”)

I am not a big “category fraud” guy, but how exactly is Daniel Kaluuya a Supporting Actor in Judas & The Black Messiah? And for that matter, is Bill Murray really a supporting actor in On The Rocks?

As ever, my analysis of this is not a reflection of how I feel about the work. I don’t mean to bring doubt onto the work of the incredibly talented Odom, Jr. or the legitimacy of him being honored. The context here is HFPA, not the honorees. (Yes, it’s tricky.)

Also… I never refer to the “they” that no organization, even one of fewer than a hundred members, is. It is not a conspiracy. HFPA is not a racist group. But they have odd biases as a collective that show up every year. Part of it is how they are embedded in the industry. Part of it is the membership, both in age and race. (They are relatively decent in terms of gender representation.) Part of it is the power of celebrity and the distributors pushing them in this direction of that. Outsiders with influence don’t get everything they want. But they control the heart rate in many cases.

And then you get categories where HFPA seems to twist the other way.

Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama
Riz Ahmed (“Sound of Metal”) 
Chadwick Boseman (“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) 
Anthony Hopkins (“The Father”) 
Gary Oldman (“Mank”) 
Tahar Rahim (“The Mauritanian”)

Three men of color who have never been Globes- or Oscar-nominated before and two Oscar winners. Did Tahar Rahim get brought to the party by Globes favorite Jodie Foster being in The Mauritanian? Did HFPA members go with Riz Ahmed because of critics groups? Who the hell knows? Rahim and Ahmed are both significant actors and have been for years.

Other oddities include a set of nominations likely to be duplicated by The Academy.

Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama
Viola Davis (“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) 
Andra Day (“The United States vs. Billie Holiday”) 
Vanessa Kirby (“Pieces of a Woman”) 
Frances McDormand (“Nomadland”) 
Carey Mulligan (“Promising Young Woman”) 

But isn’t it odd that two of these Drama performances are actresses playing singers?

And in Music/Comedy, it’s a big, warm HFPA hug.

Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy 
Maria Bakalova (“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”) 
Kate Hudson (“Music”)
Michelle Pfeiffer (“French Exit”) 
Rosamund Pike (“I Care a Lot”)
Anya Taylor-Joy (“Emma”) 

One of this group of five has a legit shot at an *Oscar nod. And when it comes to Supporting Actress, again, a true HFPA party…

Best Actress in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture 
Glenn Close (“Hillbilly Elegy”) 
Olivia Colman (“The Father”) 
Jodie Foster (“The Mauritanian”)
Amanda Seyfried (“Mank”) 
Helena Zengel (“News of the World”)

With all due respect, the race here would seem to lean hard to Amanda Seyfried and the big footprint in their most-nominated movie. But she has to compete with the charm of Olivia Colman’s awards speeches. Seriously. Colman is never less than brilliant in any of her efforts. But so often, HFPA goes with the ones they love, with the work in second place. The other factor is Colman in “The Queen,” which could be their chance to embrace her on the night.

Likewise, Actor in a Musical/Comedy is a showdown between who the HFPA membership most wants to see on a Zoom call, Sacha Baron Cohen or Lin-Manuel Miranda. Both performances are epic. (Seriously.) But who they love best and, perhaps, the desire to give SBC something if they aren’t giving him Supporting Actor may influence the choice.

Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy 
Sacha Baron Cohen (“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”) 
James Corden (“The Prom”)
Lin-Manuel Miranda (“Hamilton”) 
Dev Patel (“The Personal History of David Copperfield”) 
Andy Samberg (“Palm Springs”)

If you want old school from HFPA, you can find it.

Best Original Score – Motion Picture 
“The Midnight Sky” (Netflix) – Alexandre Desplat 
“Tenet” (Warner Bros.) – Ludwig Göransson 
“News of the World” (Universal Pictures) – James Newton Howard 
“Mank” (Netflix) – Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross 
“Soul” (Pixar) – Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Jon Batiste 

This could easily be the *Oscar line-up as well. Theatrical movie studios. Big music. Familiar composers.

I won’t get into Best Song. You’ve never listened to any of these songs, unless that is your specific interest.

Likewise, Animation. Everyone got theirs.

“Foreign Language” remains a weird ghetto for a group of kinda-international kinda-journalists.

Best Motion Picture – Foreign Language 
“Another Round” (Samuel Goldwyn Films) 
“La Llorona” (Shudder) 
“The Life Ahead” (Netflix) 
“Minari” (A24) 
“Two of Us” (Magnolia Pictures)

As expected, foreign language at The Globes meant no other nods for Minari. No nomination love for Sophia Loren or Mads Mikkelsen. Whoever wins will be happy, but I don’t put a lot of stock in the judgement of this group in this category.

They should have announced the Globe nominations yesterday… on Groundhog Day. There are so many moving pieces, even in this limited award season. So you still can’t be 100% sure of much. But you can always count on HFPA to embrace the popular, to follow great talent, and to twist itself up in knots fulfilling its desires and demands.

Same as it ever was.

I’ve been at this a long time. The other day, another long-termer pal was commenting that they had started following Oscar publicly the year Gladiator won Best Picture. I was in a tux on on E! that year, swearing that, “As God as my witness, Gladiator will not win Best Picture.”

God let me and Steven Soderbergh down (not in that order).

This particular Oscar season has been, shall we say, challenging to me. I am 100% pro-streaming. And I am 100% pro-theatrical. These things are not in conflict, you see. I know that is the screed of much of the media. But they are, simply, wrong. There is a world in which we all end up on our couches and chairs and beds forever more, flipping channels and switching apps. But I don’t think we are ready to become the third act of Wall-E.

To have an Oscar season where hardly any of the films nominated have been seen by anyone – Academy members, the public, the press – on anything but a TV in the safety of our homes makes no sense to me. Emmy? Absolutely! Oscar? No.

But it’s not up to me. I am not eligible, in my profession, to be a member of The Academy, much less a leader. So it is what it is.

And this week, it became even clearer how things work.

AFI
The 4 Netflixes – Da 5 Bloods, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Mank, The Trial Of The Chicago 7

The Searchlight Frontrunner – Nomadland

Disney Animation – Soul

The Ordained Since September Field – Judas And The Black Messiah, Minari, One Night In Miami…, and Sound Of Metal

Coulda been the Gold Derby Awards. Maybe the were too late to get onboard the recent, deserved surge for Promising Young Woman. Perhaps Universal had too big a movie star in their News of the World.

This a small group of voters making the call and they were too careful to even choose between Hamilton being a movie or a TV show… so they gave it a special award.

And then there are the Independent Spirit Awards, which now cover films under $22.5 million. Besides being the confused mush of disconnected nominations, brought on by nominating committees—meaning that Promising Young Woman can gave one of the best directors, actresses, and screenplay, but not make it for Best Picture or even Best First Feature —they still managed to do as they do every year, which is to lean into the expected and give a slot or two in every category to an unexpected name.

“Eligible films must have either: a. Been programmed in 2020 at one of the following seven film festivals: New Directors/New Films, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, SXSW Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival (even if, due to COVID-19, the festival did not physically take place), OR…”

No need for a cinema, though if you happened to play in one, that’s nice too.

Netflix got their Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in, although it is at a disadvantage because it probably won’t be indie enough for this year. First Cow, Minari, Nomadland, and Never Rarely Somtimes Always have been locks for a while.

How is it that just as things feel like we are at the beginning of the season, we are actually at the locked down part of the season?

The Perpetual Movement Machine.

And don’t get me wrong. I like the vast majority of these films and am happy for the filmmakers and actors. And to be fair, none of these groups have a whole lot more than the titles they have chosen to work with, in the realistic constraints of award season. It’s not to say that the films are unworthy… just that we are in a singularly constrained season and the tail of award shows is now wagging the industry dog.

If one of my personal favorites becomes a frontrunner—there are none yet—it will amuse me. But after decades of playing in this sandbox, fending off questions about why any of this should be taken seriously at all, I can’t answer the question this year, even though it is the most serious, thoughtful, progressive award season ever. And that kinda sucks.

This will be brief.

Episode 3 is “The Brady Bunch” Birth episode. I see a lot of the “Easter egg” conversations online. Fascinating, but not my thing. Twins. The looming threat of Mephisto continues. Agnes is still hanging around, talking about her evil husband, Ralph. The little girl from Captain Marvel (Monica Rambeau) is all grown up and knows stuff. Once again, as in all three films, Wanda stops reality from coming into her manifested sitcom world.

I keep reading writers talking about how the show isn’t going fast enough. I don’t get that. It seems like anticipatory criticism, engaging one’s expectations before engaging the work itself. As always, this doesn’t mean that I expect an agreed-upon response, thumbs up or down. But when a show is using specific, detailed sitcom history as part of telling a tale that is clearly not a sitcom, the question is, “Why?” not “Why isn’t the sitcom funnier?” This is not unlike looking at Bridgerton and questioning the literal truth of racial history, as opposed to investigating the intention of making that choice. Or as someone once said to me, “Give them their fucking premise!”

What fascinates is the end of the episode, when Ms. Rambeau is expelled from Wanda’s vision by Wanda and we can see the military base and off to the right, the electronically created sets for WandaVision zapping along. We are getting closer to that mystery being exposed.

Also… the way Disney+ is managing the show for press. I’m on the list to get all the episodes, but I am not the NY Times. So I don’t know if there are variation in this… but so far, we were given the first three episodes… but there was only a 48-hour screening window, just before the public release. Episode 3 was put back on the press site at the same time it was released on Disney+. In fact, the first and only early look at the show noted, “Screeners will be available after the episode premieres on Disney+.”

Studios release content to press in a million different ways. But this seems unusual. For a show that has an online feeding frenzy, I was (happily) surprised that there was little writing about Episode 3 before it arrived. There was no embargo on reviewing Episode 3 in initial pieces… but I didn’t find anyone screaming, “Twins!” before last Friday.

The question, really, is whether Disney is protecting spoilers by keeping critics from writing early or is it is a philosophy about how to roll out content in 2021 or if this is specific to the early episodes of this limited series?

Amidst the endless conversation about how films/TV will be delivered, there is the question of how it will be marketed. Controlling the flow of the conversation is a big part of this, for sure. This is one of the most interesting elements of WandaVision in television history, if not Marvel history.

Earlier: Disney, WandaVision & The Future of The Industry

I was really, really looking forward to Malcolm & Marie. I have watched every episode of the first season of Euphoria at least twice. The hour “special episode” with Zendaya and Coleman Domingo talking for an hour in a coffee shop is one of my favorite hours of television, period.

John David Washington is clearly on the rise, still perhaps waiting for THE moment where he becomes an acting singularity as his father has become (excellent before St. Elsewhere, but carrying himself through that series with the consistent weight and ownership of the screen that has become his trademark), but his power is as burgeoning as a 3-day-old pimple.

Sam Levinson is the progeny of one of the greats, Barry Levinson, who not only delivered a lot of great movies as a director, but delivered some of the greatest television ever as a supportive executive producer, particularly with Tom Fontana, who had taken the reins at St. Elsewhere after Brand & Falsey moved on to their next glories. This is an entire branch of quality television history, hour-long reflections of the Norman Lear branch or the action-oriented Quinn Martin and Stephen J. Cannell branch and later the Dick Wolf branch that came of the Bochco and House of Mann branches.

But I digress (and really want to read Joe Adalian book on all this when he writes it and if not Joe, Sammy Wasson)…

Sam Levinson proved himself as a standalone talent in season one of Euphoria. Some may prefer Sam Esmail and his work on Mr. Robot as the bleeding edge of series TV. Cary Joji Fukunaga enjoys similar standing after season one of True Detective. All three have proven to be daring stylists of ideas and the camera.

Levinson’s parentage is really a non-issue at this point, though it is an interesting discussion in my mind. His father reached for a visual masterwork with Toys and was smashed to earth. Sam achieved that goal.

All that said…

Malcolm & Marie is a series of monologues and a few dialogues, seeking insight in the human condition of success, failure, race, male-female cis sexuality and desire (which doesn’t exclude the ideas of other sexualities, but does not actively include them), power, equity and fear. The segments of this piece will be done as presentations pieces in acting classes forever, right along with “Our Town.” They are beautifully written.

But they don’t fit together.

And it gets worse from there, unfortunately. Because the film is, when you get down to it, miscast. Or rather, with the cast that was chosen, the film doesn’t address the questions that they offer… like the age difference. Yes, 36-year-old directors do date 24-year-old women. But the intricacies of having a relationship that is this verbal with someone younger and coming from a life that isn’t as comfortable… barely addressed in the film. There are many different answers to the question. But how and why this young woman came to have the kind of power she has in this relationship is not addressed.

In a weird way, I think that respect for Zendaya was part of Mr. Levinson’s problem in addressing it, as sex and sexual power is usually the heaviest driver in these relationships… and that is avoided. This is not to say that I am demanding that the film put the young woman in a position of having less sexual power… or more, for that matter. But to pretend it is not a key element in an externally unbalanced relationship leaves a void that the audience may not pinpoint, but exists without question.

Levinson, in interviews, has told the story that the film was inspired by coming home with his wife, who was angered that he didn’t thank her in a speech when he got an award. Cool. But that is an established marriage. His wife, Ashley, was an executive at Annapurna or Bron when the speech misstep took place. She wasn’t 12 years his junior or, I expect, wearing a stunning gown that threatened to expose her naked flesh with every step.

Again… not telling Sam what to write. And obviously, he wasn’t just transcribing his memories of a fight. But an adult wife of similar professional stature (not sure if they had their child by then) is very different than a 36-year-old on the rise with a model-looking 24-year-old who somehow came into his life. (Some details about the film are eluding my memory and I can’t retrieve them from the film as it is not yet available on Netflix or via a screener.)

Replacing sex in the power dynamic in Malcolm & Marie is Macaroni & Cheese. Really interesting. Malcolm bangs his bowl of mac and cheese like a man trying to prove a point during sex, all intensity and no finesse. It’s one of the most memorable moments in the film… and that is not an insult. Washington makes a strong choice and doesn’t wink at the audience in any way. But there is no payoff.

On a different note, the cinematography in Euphoria is rather spectacular. Levinson has been absolutely fearless in the series, dipping in and out of big ideas, as a writer and a director, to bring the emotions of the characters to life. Or as in his two-hander special, shown incredible simplicity, but still found visual density in an unlikely space. That diner in Burbank has been shot thousands of times, but never looked the way it did in that piece.

In Malcolm & Marie, Levinson and DP Marcell Rév, who has worked with Levinson on all of his projects, go for epic black-and-white, but get… okay black-and-white. I have no insight into the technological choices. But in sequence after sequence, I felt like I was seeing the intention of the director failed by how the skills of the great black-and-white cinematographers were not on offer. And it was worse because the film is so episodic. There are moments that scream for Harrell and moments that scream for Connie Hall or for Haskell Wexler. And I think the audience would have gone for those variations. So many of the monologues feel like they are standalone. We get a middle ground that doesn’t make magic.

And there are other things, each of which may seem small, but kept gnawing at me. The house they are in, which eventually turns out to be studio-rented for an awards show. Huh? Coincidentally, I happen to “know” a bunch of Oscar-winning directors who have come to LA for Oscar week and I don’t know any of them who were put in $20 million houses on an isolated plot of prime LA land for the visit. Maybe The Chateau wasn’t up for filming, but the landscape for a movie like this is critical.

Likewise, walking into a rented house after an award show. How long does anyone stay in their awards get-up, home for the evening? And again, this speaks to the sex life and the power dynamic of this young couple… whether she pulls off her dress while in the kitchen or if she goes and immediately puts on the comfort clothes that she does later in the film. It doesn’t really matter what the answer is, just that the questions that these normal actions answer about this relationship, which is all this movie is about.

Aside from the details, what happened for me in this movie is that I kept waiting for it to tell me why we were watching. Why are these people interesting, aside from being dazzling? What is this movie trying to tell me? As this was happening, I was feeling more and more distant from the duo because I felt like I was watching a movie and not anything real. And as unreal as Euphoria (and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is, the emotion is very real in an often-surreal background. That is the magic, when it happens. Not here.

There are many things I admire in Malcolm & Marie and some of the dismissals I’ve read were too easy. I don’t know where the problems started. As I wrote, amazing cast… wrong cast. At least for this script. And really, the problem was Zendaya, who is an amazing actress and a great beauty, but not really believable feeding her guy mac-n-cheese instead of love & lust on his big night and being so matter-of-fact about it.

I didn’t even believe her going outside to smoke. Not saying her character could not, but the show of respect for the rented house and its rules or alternatively, her fuck-you attitude about smoking against those rules or alternatively, her use of smoking outside to flee being around her boyfriend… we got none of that. We just got a young woman of some kind of means coming home from a big award show and wandering outside to smoke. If California Suite was set in 2020 and Maggie Smith had to go to her porch in the Beverly Hills Hotel to smoke, you would know how she felt about it, regardless of whether Neil Simon wrote a great line about it or not.

And may I mention that house again? It is a maze of modern design and instead of feeling like it is a character, it feels like this was the best house they could find for their purposes and they kinda shot around it. But the house screams out to be part of the conversation, whether it’s that they avoid parts of it or work hard to use all of it while they have it or whatever other idea there might be.

I guess the ultimate answer is that I went into the film open to any idea that was going to be put before me and the film didn’t ask me to go anywhere compelling, even though the players were untraditional. So I started hoping that it would surprise me in some other way and instead, it became more and more monologue-ish, which is a style I know well from theater… and don’t really love from theater. In a series of monologues, I take home one or two that struck home and not the evening of theater.

At the same time, I was waiting for Marie to stop working that dress that she was clearly done with from minute one of the film. I was waiting for Malcolm to express what he needed or didn’t need from Marie to be who he was so desperate to become. I was waiting for Marie to honestly express what she was getting from this man, aside from softer sheets. Etc, etc, etc.

Some of the writing may have better addressed some of my expectations than I remember. I would really have liked to have watched the movie again before writing. The fact that it lost my interest early and often may mean that my memory is less generous about the last 30 minutes of the film.

And part of the pain of a film like this, that doesn’t quite come together, is that I still walk away with so much goodwill… passion, even. I watched the second “extra episode” of Euphoria within minutes of it launching on HBO Max. I still think Zendaya is a huge star (still in the making). I still think John David Washington is going to be a huge star with an aggressive charisma that matches and exceeds his legendary father. I want to see everything this trio of individuals does.

I will watch Malcolm & Marie at least one more time to answer the questions I now have because of writing this. But the film is not being misread by the critics who aren’t in love. It doesn’t work. Great artists misstep. Sometimes that is part of growth. Sometimes not. But it is no sin. It is no shame. It is life. And it is as much of the magic of cinema as success.

Seven months ago, I offered a list of planned theatrical releases that were “untouchable.” There were eighteen 2020 titles. I didn’t project into 2021.

Tenet and Mulan were theatrical release experiments back in September.

WarnerMedia released Wonder Woman 1984 day-n-date domestically and internationally in theaters… and after a month, they’ve done $143 million worldwide. Their other film on the list, Dune, doesn’t seem to want the day-n-date deal, even though the same company, Legendary, sold off 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong to the concept.

Disney pushed Soul to Disney+ and will release a 2021 animated film, Raya, on that platform with some kind of charge (for now), in the reflection of Mulan.

Universal pushed out The Croods: A New Age under their 17-day window deal with AMC. $136 million worldwide in theatrical, $40m of that total being domestic.

And sold off to streaming were Coming 2 America (Paramount 2 Amazon) and the animated Lord/Miller production, Connected (Sony to Netflix), retitled The Mitchells vs. The Machines.

That leaves eleven of the titles to be touched. A Quiet Place II, Black Widow, The Conjuring 3, Dune, The Eternals, Free Guy, The King’s Man, The Last Duel, No Time To Die, Top Gun: Maverick, and West Side Story.

But as people have started to realize, we aren’t out of the woods and the realistic, perhaps hopeful expectation is that enough Americans will have been inoculated by mid-summer to consider a real return to movie theaters… “Real” meaning up to 50% occupancy.

So now, the heads are on a swivel, trying to project what is coming for these eleven titles, other “untouchable” titles that were pushed well into 2021 when I made that list last July (F9, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Minions: The Rise of Gru, Jungle Cruise, and the 2021 titles of weight, like Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which has been placed between Black Widow and The Eternals… which may be flexible or not.)

Movies that can be sold at a profit that matches in-house projections for a proper theatrical as well as the windows beyond will be sold or thrown to streaming unless there is a strategic or relationship reason not to do do. But don’t mistake this statement of the obvious for an assumption that everything will go to streaming.

I count 13 significant studio titles scheduled for theatrical before July that are likely to jump to July and beyond, as the domestic inoculation level is promised to be at 115 million Americans by May.

MARCH
The King’s Man

APRIL
No Time To Die
Peter Rabbit 2
A Quiet Place Part II

MAY
Black Widow
Rumble
Marry Me
Free Guy
Cruella
F9

JUNE
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Luca
Venom 2

How “touchable” are they?

Rumble is the only title in this group that I am not sure about. Why? Because it’s a Paramount title. And who knows what they will do? They haven’t sold it to Netflix, which suggests it could possibly not be very good.

There are three other titles (Bob’s Burgers: The Movie, The Asset, Vivo) that seem open to… who knows what? And Bios, freshly moved-to-August.

And of course, WarnerMedia will be throwing away The Little Things, Mortal Kombat, In The Heights and Space Jam II in this same period.

If you believe that theatrical box office will remain at 60% availability in July, maybe you try to make a move with some of these titles that have not already been on the block. On the other hand, if you’re just a few months away and you have been betting on the value proposition of theatrical for three seasons already, why would you give up then?

Also, forget Paramount’s revamped streaming option as a landing spot for a cash cow like A Quiet Place 2. They aren’t in that game yet. And the reboot that will be Paramount+ has a lot of work simply to start rolling. Throwing expensive films into the marketing pond doesn’t make sense at this juncture.

Want to move to July? It’s already loaded to the gills…

JULY
Top Gun: Maverick
Minions 2
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
The Forever Purge
Uncharted
Old (Shyamalan)
Jungle Cruise

August isn’t as loaded. And long-held traditions about release dates are out the window.

June is Sony’s month. But they may have to abandon ship in the next week or two. (I fear that a new story may have dropped as I write this.)

I’d expect all the big May titles to shift before February 15. June is on Sony, mostly. And I expect July movies to sit tight until at least the Ides of March. Things will be clearer then… especially whether President Biden has achieved the million vaccines-a-week pledge. If he does, we will be past 175 million vaccinated Americans by the end of June. And there is hope in a number that big.

Meanwhile, there will be a sale or a shift every once in a while to spark our interest. But the big fever of last summer has come down to seven titles and Warners over the last nine months.

And away we go…

I watched the first three episodes of WandaVision that were provided to the media… with modest interest. The buzz was super-hot. The internet, as it sometimes does, so oversaturated the web with anticipation that the actual show seemed anticlimactic. Still, when the content became available, I jumped on it, not because I wanted to see the earth’s two most perfect specimens recreate the TV of my childhood, but to get the big answer.

Why?

This question has many answers, of course. Why is Marvel approaching this in this way? On screen, there was a meticulous recreation of the sets and the tone of The Dick Van Dyke Show (sans Ritchie), Bewitched (sans Endora or other family members), and in Episode 3, The Brady Bunch (sans Marcia, Marcia, Marcia or any of the other kids or Alice).

We also know by the end of Episode 1 that there are outside forces and that all the fun of going back through couples sitcom history is not the focus of this project.

If you have been online this week and swimming in the genre pool at all, you have seen lots of detailed breakdowns of the clues hidden all over the first two episodes of WandaVision. I mean, virtually every decision in these episodes seem to have subtext, whether those elements will have a specific future effect on the show or not. Once it all rolls out, no doubt there will be book-length analyses of every detail and what it meant. All very interesting, but not critically important for a small-time geek like myself.

What is important is to me is how Disney is, on the creative and financial side, investing in a more complex idea of how the future of filmed entertainment is going to work.

Kevin Feige announced that Marvel would integrate Streaming TV and Theatrical Releases in Summer 2019, so this is not really a surprise. But as it is now actually happening, the reception doesn’t suggest it is well understood outside of the Geek Universe.

The idea of this kind of integration actually started in the Star Wars Universe, though again, the idea that shows like The Clone Wars and Rebels were more than standalones with nods to the hardcore audience were never normalized.

With The Mandalorian, the Disney+ series became a sensation with the arrival of then-Baby-Yoda, but didn’t make a non-geek-audience-friendly connection to the overall story of the Star Wars Universe until the second season with the arrival of Boba Fett and then even more so in the last episode of that second season. (The series now seems placed between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.)

Feige and Company came from a different direction, first with individual movies for Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor leading to The Avengers and then, what seemed like side movies in the MCU leading to the last two Avengers movies.

But the notion of an ongoing and consistent dialogue between Disney+ TV limited series and theatrical releases is something no one has done in 60 years of mainstream television and theatrical films living in the same space.

Flip intellectual channels to the ever-problematic DC Cinematic Universe and the entire WarnerMedia strategy that was rolled out by Jason Kilar a few weeks ago. The only purpose of the move of all of 2021’s movies to HBO Max (at least, for now) is about trying to deliver subscriptions to the company’s streaming channel. There is no coordination. There is no subtext. It’s throwing raw meat into the arena and hoping the natives will grab it. And then, figure out how it all comes together.

It took DC and WarnerMedia years to catch up to the Marvel/Disney notion of side movies of different styles than the central titles/characters (which took a while for Marvel to figure out itself… but it did), but they still haven’t figured out why Marvel was really doing this. In fact, they are doing almost the opposite, building big excitement within the Snyder fanbase as he is heading out the door forever. Wonder Woman and Aquaman took a very different tack than the Snyder films. Joker, too. Suicide Squad is being (kinda) rebooted and The Batman suggests a very different tone than WB has ever done. And don’t even get me started on Shazam!

Imagine if the CW Batgirl has anything at all to do with the rest of the DC Universe of filmed entertainment… or Supergirl… or if any of this was really connected. I respect WB for hiring really interesting directors on a bunch of these movies… but they are continuing the idea of each individual film having its own space and financial value. When people talk about the industry living in its past… this is a good example.

The idea is to maximize revenues and connectivity (aka committed subscribers and ticket buyers). Every revenue possibility will be on the table for the most successful companies. Limiting options, except when appropriate, is not the future.

Netflix, of course, doesn’t have much IP that they can experiment with in this way. They are coming at it from a completely different direction, so they are a non-issue in this discussion… for the moment. I would be shocked, honestly, if they haven’t already started a Cinematic Universe Project – all launching on the app, of course – where five (or four or six) sets of limited series lead to a group universe. There is no reason for a company creating the amount of content that Netflix is creating cannot put $1 billion into a plan where this can be executed.

Disney is, naturally, best-positioned to execute a multi-year event like this. They have the theatrical strength, the streaming strength (which they are aggressively posturing internationally), the parks that will support an ongoing experience with this content, and the broadcast network to promote and benefit from this kind of thing.

And they have The Feige.

This concept is not for every piece of IP. I won’t be looking forward to the Chuck Lorre Cinematic Universe. Dick Wolf crossovers are already stretched to within an inch of my patience.

But imagine a James Bond Cinematic Universe where the issue of “Who is James Bond?” becomes less significant, as the other double-0s have their own arcs on, say, AppleTV+ or Netflix. The much-desired Idris Elba 00 Experience could be happening right now… without the pressure that sits on the feature film side of “need to have four or five movies… he’s getting too old… what is his unique place… what if it doesn’t work?” hanging over the choice. No Time To Die features a black, female double-0 in Lashana Lynch, but there could have been a backstory limited series for her already… or there could be one due right after the theatrical launch.

The keys to WandaVision, in the broadest sense, in the limited episodes currently available, are the briefest moments of the texts. In Episode 1, there is a moment of real danger when The Boss is choking. The show is on a kind of loop, with his wife saying, “Stop it” and him choking and Wanda and Vision just watching… until he hits the floor. And then Wanda lets Vision save him. Things reset and the couple leaves as though nothing had happened.

Episode 2 starts with a never-explained series of explosions outside, offers sex that while subtle is still way beyond Bewitched, breaks into color with what seems like a S.W.O.R.D. logo on a toy helicopter, matching the symbol seen by whoever is watching “the show” at the end of both episodes. The couple do a neighborhood talent show that is “all for the children.” And just as Wanda and Vision say those words, boom, she is showing as pregnant for the first time. “Is this really happening?” “Yes, my love, it’s really happening.” Another bang outside. It’s The Beekeeper. (See many geeks for a guess at who it is and why, if you like.) But once again, at the moment of confrontation, Wanda not only resets… this time, she rewinds the show and avoids the conflict. This is the second offer of color, as Vision’s head turns to its natural red color and the whole show with it (as Bewitched changed in its third season).

So we know that Wanda is in control of “the show” and we know she is avoiding conflict and trying to maintain the false reality. We don’t know why or how or who else is actively involved.

For those who feel like Episodes 1 and 2 were too slow, there is a ton of action coming in episode 3… but I won’t spoil that here. There are other sitcoms gleaned from promotional content… and there are actors listed in the credits who don’t appear through the first 3 episodes. All very interesting and fun.

But I am most interested in the open-minded thinking about how TV and films can work together, interlaced. The idea that content, once it goes to streaming, is forever and that a very expensive 9-episode limited series is worth the expense, well beyond the simple idea of maintaining the subscription base.

It is my belief that the best content leads the audience, as opposed to existing to satisfy the audience. It’s like finding something you LOVE at a restaurant. All the structures involved with going to a restaurant are the same. But a dish, familiar or not, is served and something about it is better than most of the things you have ever eaten. And it sticks with you. Some restaurants are well-liked because of the energy of the space or something that clicks that isn’t about the unique pleasure of the food. Same with movies and TV. Sometimes, we crave familiarity and the IP world satisfies that.

What is starting with WandaVision is a potential new “forever” paradigm in entertainment. Disney and Feige and everyone involved are ahead of a curve. They are creating something that is brand new, even if the formats they are using involve nostalgia. (Think of the first 20 times you heard old hits sampled into new music.)

That is why I intend to watch WandaVision closely over the next couple months. It is an entertainment and will work for audiences as such. But it seems to be something bigger than that. And those moments are even more precious to those of us trying to read the future of this industry.

It’s almost over.

It hasn’t even begun.

That is the story of this *Oscar season.

Netflix seems to have blown off the extended Oscar calendar. They are already all-in. They have a couple more movies that will go public this month and next… but media and Academy voters have access to everything now.

Nomadland has become Fox Disneylight’s only title of weight… and it has gotten a deep embrace by the film critics groups that decided to announce around year’s end. The film is the lost soul of the season, as it would be in any season, except that most of us are feeling like lost souls after nearly a year in COVIDLand.

People are trying to get revved up for the final films to enter… but sorry… not gonna happen. The only movie I can’t speak to directly is The United States vs. Billie Holiday, which Paramount just told us isn’t quite good enough by selling it off to Disney’s Hulu. I mean, there is no easier Oscar dunk right now than this year with a game-changing movie. They don’t have to spend the big release marketing dollars, but could go into an eventual theatrical marketplace with an Oscar or two on the shelf. And Paramount is covering its ass with Disney’s money. Not a good sign.

But back to the lost souls…

Aside from Netflix, this is a season of ennui.

Ammonite, First Cow, Minari, News of the World, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, On The Rocks, The Father, Soul… even Judas and the Black Messiah. Moody, moody, moody.

What strikes me as I watch these movies is… all good.. terrific performances… good directing… and nothing feels above the rest.

I am not mocking people who love any of these. Not the point: the point is that each of these titles has something specific that draws specific people. There is a remarkable lack of universality. And that is to be admired, but challenging when it comes to awards.

Nomadland? Middle-aged beloved woman wanders America seeking her peace. You want to find me a film critic in America who isn’t considering that as a lifestyle about now?

And what of the Netflix movies? A parade of B+, B, and B- titles. For me, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is clearly the best. But again, like the non-Netflix titles, everyone has their preferred titles, but is there a single title that is an absolute? Absolutely not.

And here is another blurry part: Netflix contenders started launching in October. Do you want to vote for The Trial of the Chicago 7 because you remember every minute of the film or are you now voting based on how you felt when you saw it four months ago? Or Mank? Or Da 5 Bloods, which launched more than five months ago in “Summer of the Pandemic: Episode One.”

Critics groups abandoned much of the Netflix schedule, so that doesn’t help. Talent is not floating around for meals and cocktails, so that isn’t helping.

It is the system of hype currency which determines the totality of life on Planet Oscar. That is the natural order of things. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things! And The Academy has meddled with the primal forces of nature! (H/t Paddy Chayefsky.)

On the other hand, is anyone making fresh memories?

How many more people think of Regina King as a director because of a Cadillac commercial than her first feature, One Night in Miami?

Are people fully committed to Minari or is it a reflection of last year’s Parasite win? Minari is in the traditional indie mode while Parasite was a crackling good yarn that entertained as well as made you think and feel.

Is anything coming going to feel as sticky as movies that landed late in other award seasons? No big movie stars. No major directors. What will make the PLOP! of these films thrown into the pot loud enough for anyone to listen?

Late entries Judas & The Black Messiah, Malcolm & Marie and Cherry, which all land on streamers, suffer from some kind of imbalance from their very foundations, whether it’s hiring a 31-year-old Oscar nominee to play a 21-year-old, rarely seen historic figure (and hiring one of the other ubiquitous actors of the moment to play a previously invisible street hustler) or shooting an age-mismatched couple to do monologues in surprisingly flat black + white but stopping short of real Cassavetes fireworks or a brother director team showing enormous growth as visualists, but losing track of the movie while they show off their skills.

All three of these films could have been greater. They needed space and time and more screenplay care. But each represents a lot of truly great talent on the rise that will be winning awards for years to come. And I would say, “not this year,” except that the void is so profound this season that who the hell knows?

Two of my personal favorites of 2020 are Promising Young Woman and Let Them All Talk. Both have problems getting traction. I’m not going to tell publicists or consultants how to do their job… but the job has not been done for either of these films. Talk is a harder lift, because a streamer launch for a film that is likely to work better for older people and needs major support from the film’s talent to get it over the hump… is tough. On the other hand, Promising is a tough, smart, unflinching film and maybe people just don’t have a sense of that kind of humor in this rough moment.

I started writing today with the intention of nailing down the Acting categories…

There are three lead performances by a woman that should be mortal locks: Fran, Viola, Carey. And even there, Ma Rainey is a true ensemble and an unknown in that title role would be running in Supporting.

I haven’t see Andra Day. So not sure. But there are a lot of great performances in this category that really aren’t Oscar roles… though they could be *Oscar roles. When is Kate Winslet bad? Or Saoirse? Or Streep? Or Moss? Or Coon? Or Moore?

No one thinks more of Zendaya than I… but she doesn’t belong in the conversation for this role. There is almost nothing left but the idea of Sophia Loren in her movie… you really get more from the side-doc, What Would Sophia Loren Do?. Vanessa Kirby is very good in Pieces of a Woman, but she isn’t even the best thing in the movie. Hillbilly Elegy is stuck in the mud, no matter how much any of us love the actresses (or look away from the fact that the lead of the story is played by a ghost, though that is not the actor’s fault). I have been waiting for Michelle Pfeiffer to find her great third-act role and after seeing the not-quite-Wes-Anderson version of Auntie Mame, French Exit, I am still waiting.

And the guys?

More complicated and a shorter list of performances even worth considering. Riz Ahmed is always great and is great in Sound of Metal… and now Amazon has to get people to watch the movie. Chadwick Boseman reached a new level with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and is also not a clear lead (like Viola), but yeah. And Anthony Hopkins gives one of his less complex performances, but is letter-perfect in The Father.

Love Delroy Lindo. Love Gary Oldman’s work. Who doesn’t love Tom Hanks? Do they deserve Oscar noms for delivering as expected? Perhaps.

Steven Yeun always puts it all out there and always deserves love. Kingsley Ben-Adir is not the lead of One Night In Miami, as none of the four actors are… An absolute ensemble. But he also played the opposite of Malcolm X, Obama, this year, which makes him interesting and on the rise. Denzel is giving us classic “old man” Denzel still lingering on his youth in The Little Things, but we are, perhaps, too familiar with him for this to jump out. Son of Denzel is, I think, soon to be one of our biggest movie stars. But neither of his films affords him a launching pad that is Oscar-nom-worthy this year.

In a season with all the traditional elements off the grid, will we see Best Actress and Best Actor each filled with four previously nominated actors and a single newcomer… pretty much like we expect of most seasons? Could be.

Much of the excited buzz around *Oscar this year is of the “the revolution has arrived” mindset. This is the opportunity for The Academy to deliver the round of nominations that turns the page on movie history. Familiarity breeds contempt!

Or it could be the season that proves that history changes slowly and that being among the top 10 – 15, combined with money and effort, is what brings home the bacon.

One of the things we have not yet seen in this award season is negative campaigning. It will come.

Netflix is not moving forward without a nomination for David Fincher, but there is a good chance that this season will have four of five Best Director nominees as female and/or of color. I don’t see anyone except, maybe, Nolan, breaking up that party. I count eight real possibilities. So that should keep progress happening.

But we’ve only just begun…

I pondered this for years, especially as YouTube and blogging were first happening. In this business called show, what is the difference between being a pro and being an amateur?

My answer: Intention.

And by intention, I don’t mean goals for a desired outcome. I mean the intention in doing the work.

Amateurs become pros. Pros become amateurs. The world is a fluid place.

Some people feel that getting paid makes you a professional. It does not. Nor does not getting paid make you an amateur.

It is my experience that the best pros are people who have professional intent under every circumstance.

Now turn these notions towards the question of “What Is A Movie?”

We are stuck in a moment where there is a weird battle over this issue. Why? Mostly because we are stuck on defining the work based on how it is delivered.

Martin Scorsese has made shorts, low-budget movies for theatrical, mid-budget movies for theatrical, big-budget movies for theatrical, pay-TV series, documentaries for theatrical, documentaries for pay-TV, documentary series for pay-TV, documentary series for cable, documentary series for streaming, a big-budget movie for streaming, a single series episode for broadcast TV, music videos, and a streaming special about a broadcast television show that was required to do Canadian content. And that’s just as a director.

So what does Scorsese make? We make a judgement every time out. Primarily based on form. And not just as a reflection of awards. The Last Waltz isn’t New York, New York and The Irishman isn’t New York Stories and Vinyl isn’t Bad…

Steve McQueen didn’t want to split the Small Axe series of films into five Oscar-qualified or theatrically offered films. That was a choice that wasn’t caused by awards season rules of any kind.

Still, critics groups have decided to include a number of the Small Axe films or the combined group of films in their year-end film awards and Top Ten lists. While everyone loves positive recognition, one has to wonder whether these honors insult McQueen’s distinctive intention.

Who gets to decide? What is TV? What is a movie?

I am comfortable with the filmmaker making the decision. And I am comfortable with organizations that give out awards making the decision for their specific award.

What I am not comfortable with is this endless wrestling over what qualifies based on arbitrary rules that manage to be very narrow in some cases and overly broad in others. I can deal with evacuating the bowels or getting off the pot… combinations of both tend to be messy and undesirable.

This rolls right into The Academy and their abandonment of theatrical exhibition as a the definition of films that qualify for Oscar.

This is not a criticism, although I am critical of it. Just the fact. The Academy has adjusted to changes in the industry repeatedly. When musicals were big, there were categories for the genre. Animation has been rewarded and forgotten through various rule changes. The number of films honored… the standards for qualification… just this year, the branch covering Sound wanted, I am told, to reduce from two awards to one.

The most recent cause-and-effect rule change, I believe, is banning documentary series (more than one episode) from competing for Best Documentary, coming after the win by OJ: Made in America.

There are many arguments to be made about the rule change. But none of them have to do with the quality of the work. Or the intention.

Ironically, just a few years ago (2012), the Documentary Branch decided to narrow their rules to (mmostly preclude television-funded docs, requiring a theatrical review in NY or LA. The next season they decided to drop the committee process for selecting nominees. But in 2016, it was not only OJ breaking through, but the first Netflix nominations. In the three m seasons since, Netflix has won twice while no HBO docs have been nominated and a single PBS doc got a nod.

So what has the intention of The Academy and have they stuck with it? Netflix has become the biggest spender in the doc world. But HBO and PBS – which were the focus of the 2012 rules changes – are probably #2 and #3 with NatGeo somewhere in there, even in an expanding world.

The quality of the films that got nominated and won are beyond reproach. But so were films that were lost in the changes… often by the choice of the companies that chose not to jump through The Academy’s evolving hoops.

If you have an intent and the only thing needed to bend around that intent is the intent of a distributor, is the goal achieved. It’s not an issue of complaining about Netflix and Doc Oscars. We know their intent. And they have been very effective. They have done nothing wrong. They worked within the rules.

The question about the unintended consequences is about The Academy.

This is the part where people of enormous power and honor often just shrug and say, “It is what it is.”

Speaking of unintended consequences, I would argue that the acceptance of Netflix films as the same, competitively, as theatrical features almost forces people to make the argument that theatrical is a dying form. To wit, if Netflix doesn’t release theatrically in any real way, theatrical must not be important or significant to The Academy in the engagement with “film” anymore, why should The Academy support it by making a theatrical window a part of the requirement to compete?

This is the part where people of enormous power and honor often just shrug and say, “But seeing movies in theaters is the best way to see movies and I have always felt that way and I always will.”

So what are we looking at right now? An entire *Oscar season that will not require a theatrical window for films to compete.

COVID, obviously. But there are open theaters across the country. The Academy showed its intention by expanding the list of qualifying cities/states, making sure to include extreme rightwing governed states, thus assuring the option to qualify. If any of the high-profile titles have done that, they have done it very quietly.

It remains unlikely that NY or LA will reopen movie theaters in the next two months. So whatever the rules are now… they will change to assure that an *Oscar season and more importantly (#1), a show will happen.

Intention.

We are in a societal moment in which we argue so many things down to the nub and then are forced to agree to disagree, no matter what the facts are and no matter how pointed passions remain.

This is why making real-world, sticky, enforceable law is so difficult… because it determines lines in a very rigid way. There are good laws and bad laws. But the rigidity of the law (which is often balanced by the ephemeral nature of human beings) is a statement of intention.

The intention of 99.999% of businesses is selfish. This is capitalism. Deal with it.

Be crystal clear. I have no problem whatsoever with Netflix or any other company acting exclusively in their own self-interest. Besides nature, there are many quite excellent things that Netflix does, internally and publicly, that are caused by self-interest, but are still incredibly positive.

Likewise, I have no problem whatsoever with the private club that is The Academy acting (almost) exclusively in their own self-interest. It is their club. I am not a member. I will likely never be a member. And they don’t owe it to anyone to act in a way that the group does not feel is best for their current moment and future.

What is the intent that drives decisions?

Netflix is a hybrid broadcast and pay-tv network. That is where their intent is. They are in the business of keeping and growing the number of subscribers who watch on their TVs and phones and tablets. They have been generous with some theater owners and organizations. Still, theatrical is not in their business model, except as a qualifier. Which is fine. Their money. Their business.

The Academy is an organization where the tail (The Oscar Show) wags the dog (everything else The Academy does). That is where their intent is focused. Show #1. Everything else second.

But what are the natural outgrowths of these simple, clear intentions?

Well, right now, The Academy is sticking its finger in a dam and hoping the water on the other side will subside without anyone noticing. The majority of people in the media and a significant number in the industry are screaming at the top of their lungs, “Streaming is the future!!!”

And it is. I know that. Television was the future in the 60s. DVDs were the future in the 00s. And now streaming. Streaming is not likely to fade like DVD, because of the subscription model. And that there might be variations, but the idea of streaming, combining so much of the new and the old on demand, feels like forever.

Since television became mainstreamed, the theatrical business has gone through waves… but the chop has been relatively small. TV overwhelmed it for a while. VHS rentals became a threat. Cable and the 200-channel universe was a threat. Sell-through DVD dwarfed theatrical for a while. But the exhibitors adjusted and the movie killers found waves of their own. But movies are not the mass culture event they were before television. And even when the movies were hot, individuals watched more TV hours in any given day than would to the movies in any given month. That hasn’t changed. That will never change. Ten hours of movies in a theater cost the same or more than a monthly streaming/cable/satellite bill.

A movie in a theater isn’t everything. But it is a thing. A different thing. It’s going out. It’s communal. It’s much more expensive than sitting on your couch, streaming. And yet, all those people buying tickets are not morons from some bygone age. They are people who like going to the movies. That hasn’t changed. That will never change. And it has almost nothing to do with Netflix or Disney+ or any other TV-based entertainment… unless studios decide that they are better off without it.

The Academy —and this is rhetorical, not literal — should thank God for COVID because it has allowed them to skate on the question of what a movie is for another year, even with streamers as capable of delivering non-theatrical films of Oscar competition quality heating up.

Many assume Netflix will get four Best Picture nominations this year. HBO Max has a movie. Hulu has a movie. Amazon has a couple movies. Disney+ has a movie. What if it’s streamers and four or five movies that never got a theatrical? Is that the true intention of The Academy?

And if it happens, how much more likely is it to happen again next year? Or even more so?

Of course, every film from a company that seriously wants to qualify will be able to qualify under the current rules, post-COVID. They could do it now, if demanded.

Theatrical release of films will not die of loneliness. The people who bought over a billion tickets in America alone last year are not suddenly super-glued to their couches. They are frozen in place by COVID. However long it takes, it will pass.

But the business of theatrical. The distributors can strangle it, slowly and elegantly, to death. They can, as Universal has done, made them partners in their slow fade to losing viability. They can, as Warners has done, piss all over their lobby and dare them to not clean it up for the studio. There are many more models that will come and go. Eventually one might stick. Or more than one. Or we might see a step back in tradition.

The future of theatrical is like watching the NFL playoffs. Top teams that have earned their way there… and still, some will just wet the bed. No one really knows what variables will have what effect until they are out there, smashing into one another on the field.

But all of those players walk onto the field with something that many have lost sight of in these complex, difficult, scary days… intention.

I don’t want to review Wonder Woman 1984. Honestly, it would force me to think about the film too much. Oh… that terrible CGI. Oh… the complete illogic of the mall sequence. Oh… why does the Latino with the preacher wig and the blonde without lines and a fear of carbs have an Asian child?

No. Don’t want to go there. The film is poorly written, directed and FX-ed. But what bugged me about the film is at its core. Why does a movie about a powerful woman who everyone loves so worried about the attention of men? It’s like a two-hour-30 minute-long anti-Bechdel test.

The big theme the film claims, spoken in so many words, is “You took the short path. You cheated, Diana. That is the truth. That is the only truth and truth is all there is. You cannot be the winner because you are not ready to win. And there is no shame in that. Only in knowing the truth in your heart and not accepting it. No true hero is born from lies.”

I bet you had to read that a couple of times… because it is really a bad piece of writing. But I’ll take away that you can’t cheat, you have to grow into winning, and if you know something in your heart but deny it, you are in trouble.

Problem is… that’s not this movie. Diana doesn’t cheat… she doesn’t need to become more mature… she’s a winner before the first frame of the film.

That said… Cut to 1984. We’re in Superman 3. Wacky Lex Luthor type on TV. For some reason, a mall jeweler has priceless antiquities in the back room. But one of the nonthreatening bumbling crooks drops his gun, causing a panic among mall patrons and mall cops. One of the crooks dangles a kid over a third-story space for no logical reason. And zoom… here comes the costumed superhero. Slumming it.

Damn! I started reviewing the movie!

Sorry. Completely senseless sequence of Wonder Woman using her powers, in full costume, on four bumbling TV Batman sidekicks. Oy.

So… Diana 84 is working in antiquities. She is keeping a low profile, wearing Norma Kamaliesque draped outfits of cashmere and satin. She eats alone. Men can’t stop hitting on her.

Meanwhile, Gillie… I mean, uh, Barbara Minerva is wearing 80s office casual and even when she falls on her face, no men will even acknowledge her. Even the woman who just hired her can’t remember her.

Jumpcut: There is a gem that grants you your dreams. (Seriously? That’s Season Three, running-out-of-ideas stuff.)

So what do our women want?

Diana wants her old, long-dead, irreplaceable boyfriend back. Minerva wants to be hot and desired by men like Diana.

Did I mention what the stone in question looks like?

I’m sure some of you will think it is some kind of projection that this image looks like Diana is handling a thick male shaft and some stony balls. But there are a lot of shapes this trigger of all desires could have been.

And while I wish to spend no more time on Maxwell Lord than I absolutely must, when he gets his hand on this item, what happens? It becomes a part of him. Hmmm…

Minerva gets her wish. What does she do? She immediately takes off her skirt and pulls her shirt over her leggings, creating a new skintight outfit tht immediately draws male sexual attention.

Reenter Maxwell Lord (briefly), who starts flirting with Barbara, but when Diana shows up, his focus turns to her. When she says she doesn’t have a TV, he offers her a TV, “19 inches… no strings attached.” Subtle. And Barbara’s jealousy is reestablished with a few frames of film.

Barbara goes shopping. Suddenly she doesn’t need her glasses. Blonder. More blue-eyed. Perfect make-up for a photoshoot. She shops. “Do you think it’s too tight?” “Just right.”

Diana goes to a party she says she doesn’t want to go to, apparently to investigate the stone. Her outfit, as my father would have said, is cut up to the pupik. Every man hits on her. They can’t stop looking at her. Men suddenly feel compelled to tell her they want her. But she was wishing for Steve, not some other guy, so I am not sure how this makes sense… unless this is always how it is for her.

Barbara is also at the party, in her new dress. Maxwell Lord takes her to her office and starts making out with her… but instantly focuses his energy on looking for something in the office. He takes the stone… which for some reason is sitting on her desk instead of its box.

One man, not dressed-up like the others, calls Diana by her name. She takes offense (for the first time in the film). “I wish we had more time.” (A callback to the first film.) In a slow circling DePalma movement, this man becomes Steve Trevor. “But how?” “I don’t know.” Neither does the screenplay. He tells some story about waking up on a futon. WTF? Did he take over this guy’s body and then knew how to find Diana? Suspension of disbelief. Deep kisses in a room full of co-workers and patrons.

They go back to his place. “His” being the body he has taken over. He still seems not to know she is a part-deity. “He’s great. But all I see is you.”

I’ll skip past the obnoxious/cutesy fashion montage. And teaching him how to use an escalator. And the Lasso of Truth, powered by truth, but when she uses it to catch someone or fly, what does truth have to do with it?

Another cutesy series of scenes occurs before the second look at Wonder Woman in full regalia in the film, at 1:21 in the film. Apparently, if she puts on her headband, the whole outfit comes with it. Apparently, the sight of her in the outfit keeps men from shooting machine guns.

But again… so distracted by the film itself.

The movie explains that the stone has destroyed previous civilizations with its power to grant wishes.

Barbara, who has now added a lot of eye make-up and cool clothes to her daily look, doesn’t want to give up her wish after becoming attractive (without much more than a makeover). Apparently she never saw The Wizard of Oz.

Diana doesn’t want to give up her wish either… which would be giving up Steve again.

Again… the badness of this movie becomes an issue. But let’s skip to where Barbara shows up in The White House wearing thigh high boots, a studded biker jacket, ripped tights, and a cheetah scarf-skirt around her lower bits. A truly poorly shot fight ensues.

Barbara is obsessed with Max Lord. Diana is obsessed with Steve Trevor and getting weaker as a result.

Why is this movie about two powerful women obsessed with men and giving their power to those men?

Madness ensues on the street. So Steve Trevor convinces Diana that he needs to go because the world will be better off. She is too weak to do it herself.

Don’t even get me started on her suddenly being able to fly, Just don’t.

This movie has more outfit changes in offices than Working Girl.

And I don’t know what they were smoking when they decided that everyone could now wish via TV.

Nonetheless, big last sequence with Diana in – for no reason – the Asteria armor (with the close-up of Lynda Carter’s eyes… leading to the mid-credit “surprise”). First look at Cheetah, which Barbara has evolved into for some equally unknown reason. She looks very Gozer. Yet another terrible CGI sequence occurs. The armor can take on the world, but Cheetah tears it apart like nothing. Scissoring ensues. Apparently, though she has Diana’s powers, Cheetah can be electrocuted, but Diana cannot.

Anyway… what is the message of all this mess? Being with a man makes you weak? Wanting a man makes you murderous?

“You cannot have it all. You can only have the truth.”

And then… seriously.. we get an entire sequence REDEEMING the the male villain of the film. Maxwell Lord has suffered. He was teased as a child. He had terrible shoes. He knows what it is like to be discriminated against.

But PLEASE! Do we need to redeem the male villain while the women fight it out on the rock quarry?

Wonder Woman saves the world by talking the neurotic lunatic male who is happy to destroy the entire world into giving up his power to save his son. (Kinda.) Barbara/Cheetah is left for dead, though then she seems to be alive when Diana leaves her. She ends up on a bluff, apparently having renounced her wish… but not clearly learning anything.

Again, put aside how much of this makes no sense. Because it is a screaming mess. Diana gets The Wonder Speech closer… spoken right into camera (FUCK!!!), which is basically WW as Jesus… she has sacrificed the most important thing to her for all of us mortals to live.

Heaven spare me ever having to watch the ensuing sequence again. (The kid is wandering on the beltway… no, he’s in the woods… if you just scream a name in Washington (although a second ago you were in a bunker somewhere else), your child will magically show up. And your abused son with give you a DePalma Casualties of War pass for all you have done.

And what of our Wonder Woman who is unsatisfied with her life because she is so obsessed with her decades-long-dead boyfriend that she can’t allow herself any relationship? She stares at little kids like someone with her Lisa DeVito clock running and in the end, is only attracted to the guy she already had sex with when he was inhabited by Steve Trevor, who is wearing her scarf that Steve hated. Oy.

But she can fly now.

If the movie was meant to include a theme of the toxicity of women giving up their power to men, I wish they had taken a more direct route. But mostly, I have no interest in that movie. Not because men don’t suck. But because Wonder Woman has the power from the start. And even Barbara Minerva just needs some more self-confidence.

The whole movie feels like it was developed scene-by-scene, with no one keeping the overall movie story in line. The whole thing is held together by Scotch tape and spit. The notion of building an entire movie around wishes… great if the filmmaker is Lynne Ramsay. Not so good for a mainstream action movie.

Short description of the movie could accurately be, “Two women of accomplishment use a newfound magical power to get laid while a guy who gets the same power uses it to soothe his own ego, destroyed by a lifetime of child abuse.”

Why? Why did they do that?

This film can only ever be redeemed with the third film opening with the breakup of Diana and Steve’s Body Guy in bed, him wearing a Chris Pine mask, but still not making her happy. Emerald Fennell directs.

You’ve seen stories on resetting the brain. The brain gets stuck on an idea or image or perception and the only way to reset? A serious shock to the system. Seems dangerous. The study of this phenomenon has continued in people who get these shocks randomly and see change. In recent years, more controlled electroshock, hallucinogens, and other tools have been used to create the reset without harming the patient.

Dr. David (not a physician or even a PhD) hopes to do the same with windows and revenue streams and theatrical and streaming. I’ve been damaging my head, smashing it against walls, trying to explain this to folks who just insist that they are forward-thinking and that references to history are for Luddites.

So here I am again, at the end of the worst year for much of the world since the end of Vietnam, taking another shot. Explaining this may seem counterintuitive, but I’m not trying to trick anyone into a reset. I’m just trying to make it as simple as possible…. and to let you make the decisions as to what is real.

Why is theatrical release an important part of the filmed entertainment ecosystem?And why have distributors hoped to shorten the window for a couple decades?

The 1985 release of Back To The Future played at over $1 million a weekend for 22 consecutive weekends and then did another five million-dollar+ weekends in second-run.

Then in 1989, Batman, which was a box office record-breaker, became the first smash hit to ostentatiously have its theatrical window shortened after release when the studio announced that the movie would be available for holiday gift-giving on VHS o November 15 at a sell-through price. They got a then-small fourteen $1 million+ weekends out of the film, which announced the VHS date in August. Cutting into your theatrical was just not done! But the revenue possibilities of sell-through VHS in the era of Blockbuster Video was too much to wait for… how many more would they sell for holiday presents than had they released it in February?

By 1996, VHS sell-thru was normal for big movies (and many not-so-big) and the year’s biggest hit, Independence Day, played at over $1 million for only 12 weekends before seamlessly blending into second run with grosses over $1 million for another seven weekends. And the studio was happy.

But that was just the start of shortening the window to catch the second major revenue stream within a quarter or two. Because even with some big hits on VHS sell-through, DVD arrived in 1997 – Twister was first – and the industry had decided that this format would be 100% sell-through.

The growth of DVD sell-through was slowed by the need for customers to go out and buy DVD players. 1997 saw an estimated 5.5 million units shipped in the U.S., generating roughly $110 million. By 1999, that doubled. By 2001, it was a $7.3 billion business while theatrical exhibition generated $8.1 billion domestically.

In 2002, domestic theatrical grew by over 10% with the arrival of Spider-Man. A record $9.2 billion. But the DVD market? More than $13.5 billion.

A true phenom (first $100m opening), Spider-Man stopped producing $1 million weekends in just 10 weeks. Then the DVD came out November 9.

Movies were now making more gross revenue in DVD than theatrical exhibition. Distributors continued to do whatever they could to shrink the theatrical window, as the bigger money was in the next phase. But with all that money at stake, another phenomenon started to happen… marketing budgets for DVD releases were rivaling and sometimes passing the budgets for theatrical. And the guys running the Home Entertainment divisions were flexing their muscles, which made the movie bosses that much more unhappy.

2003, $20 billion. 2004, $30 billion.

And you know what distributors thought they could do to shrug off the 45% or so movie theaters were taking out of their pockets? They thought people would pay “fight prices” to see movies on opening weekends of movies in their homes. $40. $50. Maybe more! Who needs a theatrical window?!?!

Unfortunately for them, no one was interested in paying fight prices to watch a movie on their TV at home. Every test flopped.

Two other things happened. One, Netflix had launched in 2002 and their subscription model was chafing Blockbuster and the industry. Two, bigger and bigger chunks of the growing revenue stream were not new movies being sold, but every library in town being dumped, TV and film alike, into the market, creating more and more intense competition and a glut of product that would lead to downward price competition.

The End (for DVD).

Of course, I am simplifying. But only a bit.

Home Entertainment settled into being a consistent $18 billion a year business by 2010. In that year, Netflix was $2 billion of that number. They had launched streaming in 2007, but it wasn’t very good. But 2010, it was getting better. And over the following decade, Netflix became a bigger percentage of that overall Home Entertainment number and the last couple years passed the $18 billion itself, pushing the overall number up.

Meanwhile, domestic theatrical grew modestly, from $8 billion to $11 billion. But another phenom was happening in theatrical. Throughout the new millennium, international box office was growing and surpassing domestic. There was a time when the international numbers were not (or barely) reported to the industry.

By 2008, theatrical, even with a lower return to studios than DVDs, became the dominant revenue source for “films” again. And it remains so today.

Still, the memory of the high-flying DVD era stuck in the heads of executives, who were thrilled with the notion of a shorter window so movies wouldn’t have to be marketed twice.

And you know what distributors thought they could do to eliminate that window that movie theaters were torturing them with? People paid $20 for a DVD. They surely will pay “fight prices” to see movies on opening weekends of movies in their homes. Who needs a theatrical window?!?!

Unfortunately for them, no one was interested in paying fight prices to watch a movie on their TV at home. Every test flopped.

In 2011, international doubled domestic for the first time. Another reason to be enraged at domestic theatrical. International was not only a huge growth market, but “those people” would watch all of Hollywood’s crap, so long as it was branded and loud.

But streaming was not yet the paradigm shift that it is today. It was hard and it wasn’t of the quality of cable or satellite. So guess what got exciting again? Video On Demand!!!

By then, people were buying digital movies from iTunes and Amazon. Rentals for $4 or $5, buying movies on digital only for $19.99.

But yet again, no one was actually interested in paying fight prices to watch a movie on their TV at home. And selling movies at $20 was ok, but in the theatrical window, each individual was paying $10 – $15. Theatrical was stable domestically and growing overseas, while VOD pretty much peaked in 2011 with Bridesmaids, which had grossed $169 million domestically, which is surely a driver in making it the long-time VOD champ.

Netflix grossed over $5 billion for the first time in 2015. $10 billion in 2017. $15 billion in 2018.

And here come the studios/distributors/big corporations.

And do you know what distributors leapt to… again? DTC is the new thing… so it will surely eat theatrical and all those brick and mortar fuddy duddies for breakfast and crap them out later, providing only event screens for our movies that will go directly to the consumer in exchange for a monthly subscription or maybe even were can charge them a premium on top of their subscription – fight pricing – to see it first and get paid both ways.

And here comes COVID… that must be an accelerant!!!

But the best that’s been done in a year of a half-dozen or so experiments is… mediocrity. You can’t say that they failed when the world is messed up and they re just trying to see if these ideas can take hold.

The question at this end of this segment of this discussion is… why exactly should movie theaters die or be greatly diminished in the name of streaming?

More people have seen movies on their TV than in theaters for decades now. It’s not a new phenomenon.

The amount of content that is always available to consumers has changed. And theatrical will soon become the secondary revenue stream to streaming. No one is really challenging that notion.

And streaming is not a short-term paradigm, as DVD was, because whatever technical changes come, streamers can adjust to keep their subscribers. If Virtual Reality ever really becomes The Thing, you can be sure Netflix will be there. No one is arguing that.

But there is an argument for theatrical exhibition as a primary window. Arguments, in fact. And none of them have to be “artists are so precious that they want the ego boost of a theatrical experience.” That may be true, but money doesn’t really care how Christopher Nolan or anyone else feels. Sorry.

But I have overstayed my welcome at this point. More to come. Arguments about money and marketing and what we are looking at in the future, not just this week on deadline. See you soon.

Writing this feels a bit like whistling past the graveyard, but as we move inside 20 weeks to the award show formerly known as Oscar, intensity is picking up.

We are a long way from the Academy membership settling into this season. Lots of complaining about the content on the Academy app, which suggests that many members don’t understand that this year’s “race” is going to be very inside baseball. The Great Settling has been postponed until March, when there is no organic driver of a Great Settling. It will happen… even if the nature of the moment will be driven differently.

Top Ten lists are leaning hard against Netflix… surely too much so. But film critics are, ultimately, fans. Very sophisticated fans. So if you want to go exclusively by critics at a time when no one is paying attention, amidst vaccines and electors and business closings (oh my!), expect the Best Picture nominees to be (in no specific order), Nomadland, Ammonite, First Cow, Never Really Somtimes Always, Promising Young Female, Beanpole, Palm Springs, Collective, and Minari.

I don’t expect that this will hold.

The big question, for me, is how the constituency for films that are not “high indie” will come together. High-powered studio content, which so often creates its gravity on its own, doesn’t exist this season. I’m good with News of the World, but it’s not the kind of movie they are going to launch parades to celebrate.

Screenings with Zoom Q&As are flying fast and furiously around the web, but Academy voters, as mid-brow as they can be, are sophisticated enough to want to see the movie and not just the celebrity froufrou. Q&As can create a target for viewing time , but as is ultimately the norm, it’s all about the movie, unless you can create a great narrative.

But what are the narratives this season? Inclusion and… and… uh…

Thing is, almost every candidate is inclusive of either women or people of color. Netflix has some of the only not-inclusive movies, but they also have movies in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Da 5 Bloods, and the gay-centric but problematic The Prom. Two movies have older white men protecting pre-teen silent blonde girls (one in space, the other in the old West).

The other major factor in this season looks like that the love-hate on almost every single movie is a jump ball. Every time I run into a series of voters who are positive or negative about a movie, it seems inevitable that I will run into another series of voters who feel exactly the other way. The media has written off, for instance, Hillbilly Elegy and The Prom… but I have run into multiple voters who love either or both movies. (Tellingly, they could not care less what the media told them to think.)

In many ways, The Academy is running into the story of the moment… streaming. As one result of all of the films that hope to be *Oscar nominees being seen exclusively on TV by the membership, it is all just a giant TV schedule. The Queen’s Gambit, a series not qualified for *Oscar is on the same mental line as Mank. Steve McQueen’s Small Axe pentalogy has been on more movie Top 10 lists than any Netflix movie but will not qualify for *Oscar. And just try to get a 70-year-old to differentiate Nomadland and Minari by name.

Speaking of Minari and Nomadland… how do you hard-sell beautiful, intimate movies that are all about their modesty?

And Warners has certainly killed the ambitions of Tenet with the war of words between the studio and Christopher Nolan and the general sense that the studio no longer cares about talent (which is a step beyond the actuality, much as I think The Kilar Initiative is a car wreck).

The magic trick of all Oscar seasons is that one or two movies tend to find the right narrative and the right combination of factors as we head into or just out of nominations… and we all think it’s organic. It’s not organic. It can’t be forced, but it’s like topiary, a natural plant, but very carefully shaped into looking like what is desired by the audience.

The answer for consultants could be that they get something new, late in the game, that throws over the table by appealing to the broadest audience amongst the candidates. Could that be The United States vs Billie Holiday or Malcolm & Marie? Maybe.

Thing is, the normal differentiators of an award season are out the window. There is a massive difference in impact between seeing a cool Q&A with an actor you like and the opportunity to shake the actor’s hand and have 45 seconds of small talk with a glass of wine in your hands. Just is. Can’t be recreated unless someone is going to get their talent to do Cameos for every voter in every group. And even then… “signed” notes are more old news. Unless Tom Hanks knows your kids’ names and hand writes them on the card… zzzzzz.

But the machine keeps grinding, as close to normal as possible, because… well… people have jobs and need those paychecks. Media too.

I don’t think there should be a competitive Oscar season this year. I like and love a bunch of these movies… but awards are about the least important thing imaginable in the film industry.

Moreover, whether they admit it or not, Oscar is moving faster down a track that could end the film industry that AMPAS was built to support and honor. Not to put too fine a point on it, but making Oscar into an award for anything captured on video that is between 90 minutes and 3 hours (with a few irrational exceptions) is the end of Oscar. And for many people, that is fine with them, even preferred. Hell, I can’t say that, outside of finding a new way to pay for my life, I would lose sleep over this.

But there is a deep importance to being honored by your industry that Oscar has represented like no other film award for a long time. Even those who have been marginalized by Oscar seem committed not to bring down the award, but to be included and awarded.

Unlike the business itself, which will define its own future no matter what the media and generally ignorant talking heads say because the ultimate standard is money and money carves out its own space like water defining a forest, Oscar is built on image and a weird faith that AMPAS members are the gold standard of the industry. Gestures matter. A lot.

The way Oscar is engaged by the industry, from start to finish, can stand some change. I am not arguing that hanging out in LA for three months to glad-hand at least half the Academy membership is an Oscar-worthy act. I’m not saying that the industry embracing the corrupt-by-design HFPA as a key step on the journey is great. Etcetera.

But this year without a structure. This year with a significantly reduced competition. This year in which money will eventually overcome purity, as it inevitably does (and which didn’t last season, thrilling most of the people involved, even from competitors). This season could expose, reshape, and push from troubled, overly paranoid status into real crisis mode for The Academy.

The nominees will be good movies. The winner will be loved by a lot of people. And right down through all of the categories. This is the micro and it will be okay.

But the macro view? The line from Excalibur keeps floating in my brain. “The King without a sword, the land without a king!”

I realize that most of my thinking on what may be a very significant moment ended up in tweets. so I gathered them for a more complete picture.

12/3/20

11:10am
Jason Kilar will be out of his job by 2022.

Waiting on NATO response. But here we go… WB passes Universal as most experimental. Netflix, which is cutting back on spending, set the trap for the studios and Kilar is the only sucker to bite so far. HBO Max isn’t ready for this.

11:17a
The only real question for NATO in response to WB’s suicide move is whether to refuse to play any WB movies, starting with Wonder Woman.

If there is no unique compensation for playing WB’s films under these rules, NATO members are likely better off shutting the door.

12:07p
Keeping the doors open at 15% of normal grosses is not keeping them alive. And this stands to reduce the post-pandemic box office by at least 10%.

They need to get PPP and close down for 4-6 months is what they need.

12:10pm
For the record… AT&T stock is up .17% on this seismic news. Wall St is saying, “Fuck off until you prove something.”

Meanwhile, AMC is off 18%, Cinemark is down 19%, IMAX is down 8%.

12:18p
Here’s what happens next on the Warner Bros move…

Every AMC 15 becomes an AMC 4 with only 4 premium screens with higher prices. The extra space can’t be rented.

HBO Max adds 5m subs HBO subs (65m dom). No stock movement. HBO Max expands internationally before the end of 2021.

12:40p
“streaming is no longer an ancillary profit stream for big entertainment companies. It’s the business, period.“

Yeah… except for the revenues.

12:42p
This is bigger than Roku.

But it is another sign that WarnerMedia is way out over its skis on this. No Roku. No international. And don’t count on any of these movies playing in movie theaters domestically. And they will certainly have a France problem

12:45p
AT&T stock has gone from being up a tiny amount to being down for the day.

I feel like I am watching Paramount trying (and failing) to tweak their stock price a decade ago.

12:59p
By the way… this unilateral move by WB is profoundly stupid by design.

You push to streaming (& theatrical?) for a month and THEN try to get a theatrical going? Is this the lesson they learned from Tenet?

Whoever analyzed their way into rationalizing this will be the 1st fired.

1:20p
Killer Kilar: “Having this release model… we believe economically first and most importantly, it’s the right thing to do for fans, it’s the right thing to do for exhibition, and the right thing to do for talent, considering the circumstances.”

But he didn’t bother asking them.

1:24p
Killer: “The revenues that are generated by the box office of course, & the other is the value of the consumption on HBO Max from existing subscribers & what we anticipate to be more subscribers coming into HBO Max who choose to do so because of the presence of these films.”

Huh?

1:27p
Killer: “we believe that the marketing investment works better if eyes were out there talking about these great films title-by-title-by title, that that marketing can benefit not just the theatrical experience”

OMG… he thinks he is Netflix & doesn’t understand theatrical at all

1:50p
I bet the other studios are almost as appreciative of Killer Kilar’s big move as the theater owners.

As a quarter of the market, he can come close to sinking everyone’s business.

NATO can call his hubris. And there may be real pressure to dump this before summer. Tick Tock.

1:56p
Remember… HBO has 160 million subscribers worldwide already.

They are not playing from far behind Netflix. They don’t need to change everything instantly. They haven’t rolled out Max overseas… and if they don’t by March, they should all be fired for seeking failure.

1:58p
This was a unilateral move by a sub-model guy who doesn’t understand theatrical. It is not good news for any other studio. It is not good news for exhibition.

He needs to get his own house in order.

2:06p
Kilar’s fantasy thinking is that international will be theatrical and GREAT!

This is proven wrong, for now, with Tenet. As you say, even Canada isn’t open yet. Closures across the globe.

They don’t have any needle-movers until summer. So they have time to fuck it up worse.

2:32p
And as a friend points out… how will this notion of launching on streaming affect VOD and PVOD?

It’s not the largest revenue source… but it means a lot to a lot of bottom lines.

3:29p
Everyone can refuse to play WB films. We will see if that is the tactic. Exhibitors could try to do a deal to get paid a high percentage for everything. Or just shut them out.

3:30p
By the way… Killer Kilar’s tears for theatrical may be because he is legally required to distribute to theaters before any streaming.

New contracts may not include that. 2 year old contracts probably do.

3:34p
“Kilar also noted that international movies — which generates the bulk of box office revenue — will be first released in theaters with normal windowing rules. HBO Max will debut globally next year.”

If it takes him a year, he will be unemployed when it happens.

3:41p
New streamers have a growth window of 3 or 4 years before they will mature. Lots can be hidden in that.

Kilar is making a lot of statements of facts that he doesn’t actually control. A lot. And I think it will kill him before 3 years. Maybe in 2021.

4:34p
By the way… as stupid as the WarnerMedia plan is, they are still creating windows in the US and sticking to traditional windows in the rest of the world.

So if you are saying windows are dead, you are factually incorrect.

4:44p
“Under a traditional model, big-budget movies like “Dune” would need to gross hundreds of millions of dollars at the domestic box office to turn a profit.”

False. Domestic, international, VOD, DVD, streaming, 1st pay-TV/Streaming, int tV & dom streaming would need combined $450m

4:62p
I’ve said for many years… we are heading towards a single window for everything forever under a subscription. Once a film goes to post-theatrical, it’s value will be booked “forever” in all but a small % of titles. So how to differentiate? Theatrical will be the only separator

4:56p
People, inc professionals, are all excited… “Movies will premiere on my TV!! Yay!” But they get distracted from the next reality.

The plan is maximum subs, smallest spend possible.

We aren’t there yet. But it should take less than 5 years to get there. Then it won’t be cute

5:33p
If (super-analytics about audience interests) really worked so well, studios – inc Netflix – would do better than 50% success.

Having the entire history of film and TV at your fingertips is great. People still want to leave the house. There have been just 40m frequent moviegoers in America for decades

5:43p
There is a uphuge cost to operating brick and mortar. Studios take exhibition for granted. They have taken 5 or 6 significant revenue streams and are whimsically taking it down to one that cannot be measured economically.

Good luck with that.

5:47p
The studios killed VHS rental by making DVD sell-thru priced. The studios killed DVD by oversaturating the market & price cutting. Studios took the “free money” from Netflix and let them launch streaming without competition for 5+ years.

So today… the studios are always right.

5:59p
HBO Max is domestic only, even though HBO has a 90m sub footprint outside of US. And likely very few non-HBO sign-ups domestically.

They need to get their house in order first before trying to set the world on fire.

12/4/20

8:50a
Piracy is real. But the industry, overall, has moved on. They work on it constantly. Hard. But it’s a given.

The Tenet launch happened because “theaters are open overseas.” But they didn’t deliver, even at reduced expectations.

This is all about fear & incompetence.

9:05a
The deafening silence from NATO (exhibition) is likely Fithian trying not to do what Kilar did yesterday… acting unilaterally.

My guess is that they are negotiating a deal for theaters of over 80% from WB and whomever else wants to run this new “system,” creating a new window.

10:24a
HBOMax is not taking out Netflix. Netflix is not able to block Disney or Warners or Amazon (or Peacock, though on a slower track) from matching their worldwide reach in the next 5 years.

We need to be able to discuss the future without everything always invoking absolutes.

10:26a
Streaming is the future… of television. It has been for years. It isn’t a debate.

Movie theaters have major value now & moving forward, though yes, studios can kill theatrical. It is a symbiotic relationship. Studios won’t buy theaters in numbers. Theaters won’t become studios

10:28a
The longer that National Association of Theater Owners remains silent on this – almost 24 hours now – the more likely that Warners’ pronouncement yesterday will not proceed as they said.

Not saying WM won’t push the button. But by announcing w/o negotiating, WM gave NATO power.

10:33a
I’ve said it a million times. Streaming has a natural cap. I don’t think it has more than 250m – 300m worldwide.

Netflix is just under 200 million.

HBO is just under 150 million

Amazon Prime has 170m members.

So in 5 years, when the streaming wars calm… where is more money?

10:43a
One has to wonder if NATO is being cock-blocked from slamming Warners and pulling out of WW1984 agreements by Regal, even though Regal isn’t open to play the title.

Lots of negotiation. This event is not over.

AT&T stock price still up minimally. Theaters stock dropping less.

10:52a
The other thing that could be slowing the NATO response to WarnerMedia is the money that seems to be coming out of the chute from Washington in the next two weeks.

No one wants to upset that apple cart, which is suggested to be $15 billion. Blocking Warners could become a thing.

11:26a
The funny thing about the “seismic” Warners unilateral announcement?

CNBC isn’t covering it. A little yesterday. Talking more about Disney’s rally.

12:11p
I understand that people love Christmas and we are all bored & really, really want to open presents & find something new and exciting.

Yes, this could kill theatrical. Yes, this could end up strengthening theatrical. Both are possible.

Puppy-like love of change is for suckers.

12:12p
Mark this… if the Warners trajectory is changed – and none of this is FOREVER until theaters start closing – all the people who jumped up and down like children will find a way to say it is still happening, it’s just been slight delayed.

People don’t like changing their minds.

12:15p
And yeah, I can be resistant to changing my mind as well.

But I have explained the math a lot of times. It’s not a whim. It’s billions of dollars & many unknown effects caused by breaking windows.

I disagree with Moffett Nathanson on a lot, but we agree on the math here.

So…

12:23p
Theatrical, as an emotional issue, has changed for me over the last few years.

Media has been bashing theatrical forever, but it keeps growing. $40b in 2019. But media loves “reporting” change more than understanding #s.

You are right. The content fights will outlive change.

12:27p
The story is cable/satellite.

AT&T has all but dumped DirecTV. Comcast will either find a solution or take a massive loss as cable actually dies (still over 80% in US). Disney will lose on the transition.

All that said, real people only want more & better TV for less $.

12:32p
This isn’t about subs, ultimately.

It’s about stock price. And it has already been rejected by Wall Street.

Kilar moved without negotiating, completely disregarding the many partners involved with every film, including exhibitors.

HBO Max is US only… so this is stupid.

12:34p
The only part that may not be suicidal is that the line-up is relatively cheap. They will save some risk on marketing.

But we don’t know what the theatrical situation will be, here or abroad.

Like the Tenet miss or the Mulan miss, this is an experiment & one never knows. But…

12:37p
The problem for a guy like Kilar, who is a baby in the movie business, is that he is boldly taking wild swings that have ways of showing losses, but few ways of showing success, if there is any.

If he has to change course, no one will trust him because he acted unilaterally.

1:08p
That’s why the media response amuses and irritates me. They called Warner names for the launch. They have watched a bunch of veterans fired. And now… this is EVERYTHING.

It’s like the people who kept telling us about “the new Trump” and how he was going to learn his lesson.

1:09p
I believe that the public is less intensely focused on the details than we in the media are.

Honest, watching CNBC and waiting for them to be worked up over this has created perspective for me. Until they have to act, no one much cares outside of the bubble.

4:12p
The one thing I object to, even in a well & deeply reported piece like that specific CNBC piece, is the idea that it’s all about battling Netflix.

Netflix is not the definer of any other streamer’s success. Consumers will end up with the 4 or 5 new “networks.” Just do your thing

5:36p
My last thoughts on Killer Kilar for the weekend. I expect WW84 agreements to be honored. I expect Kilar will spend Dec digging out of the cesspool he created with non-exhib partners. And I expect there will be a pricey accommodation or a exhib blockade of WB after New Years