Yet until recently — with only a few exceptions
— those haven’t been the big-budget spectacles
Hollywood runs on. Eight months into the
pandemic, that’s changing. Last month, the Walt
Disney Co. experimented with the $200 million
“Mulan” as a premium buy on its fast-growing
streaming service, Disney+ — where the Pixar
film “Soul” will also go on Dec. 25. WarnerMedia
last week announced that “Wonder Woman
1984” — a movie that might have made $
billion at the box office in a normal summer
— will land in theaters and on HBO Max
simultaneously next month.
Much remains uncertain about how the movie
business will survive the pandemic. But it’s
increasingly clear that Hollywood won’t be the
same afterward. Just as the Spanish Flu, which
weeded out smaller companies and contributed
to the formation of the studio system, COVID-
is remaking Hollywood, accelerating a digital
makeover and potentially reordering an industry
that was already in flux.
“I don’t think the genie will ever be back in
the bottle,” says veteran producer Peter Guber,
president of Mandalay Entertainment and
former chief of Sony Pictures. “It will be a new
studio system. Instead of MGM and Fox, they’re
going to be Disney and Disney+, Amazon,
Apple, Netflix, HBO Max and Peacock.”
Many of the pivots in 2020 can be chalked up to
the unusual circumstances. But several studios
are making more long-term realignments
around streaming. WarnerMedia, the AT&T
conglomerate that owns Warner Bros. (founded
in 1923), is now run by Jason Kilar, best known
as the former chief executive of Hulu. Last
month, Disney chief executive Bob Chapek, the