- The Snydercut could not have been produced for any other distribution method but streaming
- Cinemas will increasingly face competition from streaming services
- Under covid-19 restrictions, many cinephiles are already planning home cinema spaces
- Streaming allows filmmakers to create content free from artificial restrictions on length as well as content
Above: A promotional image for Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
BitDepth#1297 for April 15, 2021
It should come as no secret to anyone, even those with no interest at all in superhero movies, that the collective wailing of DC fandom over the release of Justice League in 2017, heavily revised by Joss Whedon, resulted in last month’s release of the Snydercut, a restoration by the original director.
The story of how that debacle came to be, the tensions at Warner Brothers over the decline in audience for successive films in the “Snyderverse,” his brooding interpretation of DC’s biggest superheroes, the studio oversight of the making of Justice League, the tragic death of Snyder’s daughter, Autumn, and ultimately his withdrawal from the completion of the film is a whole epic unto itself.
Whedon dramatically revised Snyder’s film, doing extensive, expensive reshoots that reshaped the story and tone, creating what’s now called the Josstice League. Fans were not happy with the result which used just ten per cent of the work Snyder shot and called for Snyder’s version.
The cast joined in, picking up the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut and adding claims of workplace hostility by Whedon on the set.
HBO Max, looking for new content to bolster its online profile, came up with US$70 million for Snyder to complete the film.
Current IMDB rankings, on the site which has become the go-to resource for film popularity place Justice League (2017) at 6.2/10. Zack Snyder’s Justice League is at 8.2/10.
Was this a big hit for HBO Max and the fans of the film? Not exactly.
Having won one round, the very vocal fans who championed for the Snydercut are now calling for a restoration of the Snyderverse, with a retooling of other films the studio adjusted for tone, most notably Suicide Squad, and additional films featuring the Justice League. That probably won’t happen.
HBO Max reported its biggest jump in video streaming in the week of the release of the film, but that doesn’t mean it made more money or won more subscribers.
It does mean that 8.9 per cent more people launched the mobile app. It also means that there were 1.48 million new downloads of the app, but there is a mass of HBO subscribers and AT&T users who already had access to the streaming channel but haven’t used it yet.
The release highlights the biggest challenge with the way that streaming has changed the game of film production, particularly with cinemas either closed on operating at half-capacity. The way money gets made is fundamentally different.
It’s the difference between programmed entertainment, which is based on the idea that people to sit in one spot and view one piece of entertainment at a particular time and streaming, which is…different.
In 2017, Whedon’s Justice League played too audiences who paid to sit in a comfortable chair with popcorn for a set fee that could be easily calculated.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a quite different business proposition. While making the new version of the film cost a stiff fraction of the US$300 million Warner invested in the official release of the film, it also depends heavily on the initial work that money bought.
It’s also a film that has little precedent.
The running time is 242 minutes, more than twice the 90-minute length of the average feature film.
In traditional cinemas, it would have cut run time available for showings in half, even if an audience could be found for such a marathon of bombast.
Darkseid preceded Thanos as a comic character by two full years.
Kirby’s design of the DC character clearly influenced Jim Starlin’s ultimate purple villain for Marvel.
As a streamed artifact, it is subject to different rules. A viewer could, if they wished, begin watching it on the couch, watch some more on a tablet in bed and finish the film while sitting in a park.
We are already in an era that’s seen a generation come of age with little tolerance for entertainment that can’t be paused or rewound at will. The next generation simply won’t understand anything else.
It’s long-tail economics waving its potential with a whip of thunder worthy of Godzilla.
It’s not hard to imagine the big streaming services as a massive kaiju battle, brawling their way across a landscape of IP searching for the next big audience attraction.
Netflix has already made clear what an appetite for content streaming services looks like. Extraction, for instance, is another film adapted from a comic (Ciudad, by Ande Parks) and with a location change to Mumbai, became a potential franchise for a post-Thor Chris Hemsworth.
Mix into this brew the post-Covid world.
Any cinephile with a budget for a large-screen TV has already invested in one to tide them over a year of limited access to cinemas and probably developed a comfortable space for viewing epics that were once regarded as essential cinema experiences.
For film makers, content distribution is in the midst of a massive disruption. In TT alone, the TT Film Festival hosted two free streaming experiences for local films funded by NGC.
On April 01, FILMCO launched its own streaming service with a lean but growing selection of local and regionally relevant films.
Until now, streaming was the same cinema, delivered differently. The Snydercut suggests that movies no longer have to fit cineplex slots. That’s likely to change everything.
