Inside Wonder Woman 1984Diana Prince uses her magical Lasso of Truth to swing, like Spider-Man, from (at various times) a shopping mall balustrade, a rocket-propelled grenade and a real lightning bolt. Logistically, these moves seem quite risky. Sort of like, in an unprecedented break with the way support titles are normally released, the film’s distributor, Warner Bros. WW84 in US theaters and HBO Max on Christmas Day – providing the first real barometer of how box office hits will fare in the studio’s controversial “hybrid model”, aimed at all 17 of its 2021 films. The question is, has the $ 200 million DC Extended Universe sequel managed to get a substantial number of new subscribers to WarnerMedia’s streaming service?
When more than 60 percent of the country’s cinemas remain off-limits to audiences, and all other films from major events in 2020 except for Principle and a handful of resisters were dropped from the year’s release calendar, as rising rates of coronavirus infection continued to cut oxygen from the film industry, WarnerMedia bet big. This shook the long-cherished theatrical distribution scheme of an old summer blockbuster in a naked attempt to generate new entries for its troubled OTT platform.
Theatrically, the results do not seem to be good or catastrophic. During his first weekend, Wonder Woman 1984 grossed $ 16.7 million – exceeding pre-launch expectations to record the biggest box office of the N95 era – but dropped to just $ 5.5 million on its second weekend to close Hollywood’s least profitable year so far. (The film recorded a mediocre $ 118.5 million globally.)
Meanwhile, in terms of streaming, WarnerMedia celebrated WW84 having “broken records and exceeded our expectations”, but not disclosed any HBO Max subscriber data that would have confirmed – or invalidated – the effectiveness of this change.
According to Antenna, a streaming services measurement and analytics company, however, Warner can claim an important victory, if qualified. Inside Wonder Woman 1984In the first three days on HBO Max, the platform registered more new subscriptions than any other streaming service registered in any other three-day period last year. It is important to note that Antena does not yet publish, as a policy, projection numbers of specific subscribers. But the comparative data the company released on Monday shows that WW84 surpassed its closest runner-up, the film version of Lin-Manuel Miranda Hamilton at Disney +, by 40%. And eclipsed the third place winner, Disney + ‘s Soul, which also came out at Christmas, by an impressive 107%.
To put this achievement in a broader perspective, Antena says WW84 significantly surpassed the only other megabudget event title of the year to go straight to streaming, generating 5.7 times as many new subscriptions in the United States as Disney’s 200 million live-action adaptation of Mulan. (The downside, according to Samba TV, a viewer monitoring company that collects data from 13.5 million smart TVs in the United States, Soul caused a kind of upset over the Christmas weekend: Pixar’s least promoted animation game was watched by 2.4 million Disney + households while Wonder Woman 1984 was broadcast in just 2.2 million households in the same three days.)
However, even with a concentration of hand-selected information giving WarnerMedia executives reason to exalt, in the brave new post-pandemic Hollywood, the business of quantifying Wonder Woman 1984 how a streaming hit remains far from simple. With studios like Universal and Warner Bros. recently arriving to narrow or close the 90-day “window” between the theatrical release and its online availability, most industry watchers say it’s still too early to tell WW84the short-term victory of a victory in continuous war. In the continuing absence of a normalized operation of the cinema chain, the common refrain in Hollywood is that the viewer’s behavior remains impossible to predict. And to hear this from an executive at Antena who spoke to Vulture in the background, even though Wonder Woman represses new HBO Max subscriptions like no other title before, for now, we can only see half the success 1984 really is.
The main metric – subscriber retention – remains unknown. Whether customers stay loyal to the platform or simply cancel HBO Max and subscribe again whenever a new movie they want to watch online, no one knows.
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