MeIn the next Anti-Life film, Bruce Willis plays the leader of a team of rude mechanics tasked with saving the remains of humanity from the clutches of an alien who changes his shape. In another era – say, 25 years ago – there is a chance that Anti-Life would have ended up as the seventh or eighth largest film of the year. However, it is 2021, and Anti-Life looks set to become yet another miserable and unloved video on demand (VOD) offering that exists primarily as a vehicle for Bruce Willis to walk up to his paycheck.
Or at least it would be the case if the cinemas were open. But they are not, so Anti-Life is in a position equal to all other films released. Because now all the films, whether they are committed box office hits or terrible stuffing from Bruce Willis’ last period, are VOD films. Regardless of quality, they are meant to be placed on the same tedious streaming menu. At the time of writing, Rakuten’s “new major releases” section includes Wonder Woman 1984, The New Mutants, a double header by Anthony Mackie / Jamie Dornan that can be about anything, a documentary postulating the theory that we all live in a computer simulation, and a movie called Jiu Jitsu, where Nicolas Cage beats some aliens with a sword.
This is the new setting for the film and is a level playing field. Now that we don’t have to run away from work or hire babysitters to watch a movie at the cinema, all films will be judged by the same criteria. Sometimes, this criterion is: “I’ve heard good things about it”. Other times it is: “Screw it, there is nothing else and I want to watch Nicolas Cage brandishing a sword to pay his tax bill.”
What I am trying to say is this: it is not completely implausible to assume that Anti-Life will be a success. You’ll make as much money as Wonder Woman in the movies, which means nothing, and the homeless population may be so hungry for entertainment that they want to see what Bruce Willis is doing, at least out of morbid curiosity.
In the spirit of public service, I must point out that this is a bad idea – because Anti-Life is cheap and monotonous, and Willis seems to be phonetically repeating all his lines in the void. But people can still watch it, just as they can watch Eye for an Eye, John Travolta’s next detective film that appears to be the by-product of an administrative mess in which the entire production budget was accidentally spent on wigs. Or Willy’s Wonderland, where (and I would like to clarify that this is a real movie that really exists), Nicolas Cage has a bare fist fight against a crocodile mannequin with a bloody beret in a haunted theme park.
When all of these films reach VOD services, they will have exactly the same impact as a blockbuster. The only thing that separates Willy’s Wonderland from, say, Godzilla vs. Kong is the size of your advertising budget. And without a doubt, even that doesn’t matter much at the moment. Both films will share a landing page on a streaming site. It’s a binary decision: King Kong punching a big crocodile or Cage punching a big crocodile.
With that in mind, this could become a golden era for declining legacy stars forced to use VOD as a slum. Now that this is the only way to watch new releases, these old-fashioned old-fashioned workhorses suddenly found themselves back in the game. Perhaps Boss Level, a “deadly action thriller”, will be Mel Gibson’s gateway to List A. Maybe Original Gangster, a film about an orphan in a London gang, will be shot in the arm by Steve Guttenberg , absent in the last 20 years. Perhaps Nemesis, potentially the most generic Billy Murray film ever made, will drag Nick Moran’s career back to the heyday of the 1990s.
Of course, all of this can be a passing phenomenon, whether because cinemas reopen or all box office hits begin to be launched straight for streaming. But now, even if it only lasts for another six weeks or more, this new broken landscape means that there is a very good chance that Nicolas Cage can regain his crown as the biggest movie star in the world.