Warner Bros. To Debut Entire 2021 Film Slate, Including 'Dune' and 'Matrix 4,' Both on HBO Max and In Theaters (variety.com) 97
When Warner Bros. announced that "Wonder Woman 1984" would land on the streaming service HBO Max on Christmas, the same time it debuts in theaters, many expected it to be an isolated case in response to an unprecedented pandemic. From a report: Instead, the studio will deploy a similar release strategy for the next twelve months. In a surprising break from industry standards, Warner Bros.' entire 2021 slate -- a list of films that includes "The Matrix 4," Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" remake, Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical adaptation of "In the Heights," Sopranos prequel "The Many Saints of Newark," and "The Suicide Squad" -- will debut both on HBO Max and in theaters on their respective release dates. The shocking move to simultaneously release movies day-and-date underscores the crisis facing movie theaters and the rising importance of streaming services in the wake of a global health crisis that's decimated the film exhibition community.
Matrix 4? What about 2 and 3? (Score:5, Funny)
Matrix 4?
Shouldn't they do a second and third before jumping to a fourth?
Re:Matrix 4? What about 2 and 3? (Score:4, Funny)
If it has a 4 in the title it has to be 4 times as good as Matrix 1 !
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If it has a 4 in the title it has to be 4 times as good as Matrix 1 !
If it's only 33% better than Matrix 3 I'll pass.
Re:Matrix 4? What about 2 and 3? (Score:4, Funny)
Matrix 4?
Shouldn't they do a second and third before jumping to a fourth?
Thank goodness they resisted temptation and never released a sequel before now! It probably would’ve sucked!
Re:Matrix 4? What about 2 and 3? (Score:4, Funny)
Thank goodness they resisted temptation and never released a sequel before now! It probably would’ve sucked!
Hey now, sequels can be good too. The Indiana Jones movies were all at least decent, and they knew well enough that good things come in threes and wouldn’t consider ever ruining the franchise by doing more.
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The Indiana Jones movies were all at least decent, and they knew well enough that good things come in threes and wouldn’t consider ever ruining the franchise by doing more.
Temple of Doom? Really?
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I suspect it is being released to cinema and 'stream' at the same time because they are piss poor movies.
Movies from the previous century have far better story lines than the current century and they have been getting worse, year by year. Some truly horrendous SJW spawn of the rich and greedy writing, really worthless stuff.
Jar Jar A the worst of the lot, the most lame bits of worthless story, just to string the action scenes together, strictly second set stuff and those actions scenes tell nothing of the s
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Matrix 5: Tokyo Drift [imdb.com]
The Fate of Neo [imdb.com]
The Matrix Presents: Trinity and Morpheus [imdb.com]
M9 [imdb.com]
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The Animatrix (2003) [imdb.com]
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Matrix 4: Matrix Harder with a Vengeance
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Matrix 4?
Shouldn't they do a second and third before jumping to a fourth?
Are you sure it's another Matrix? Or the same one twice?
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What number are we talking about? Is this the Eigenvalue of Matrix?
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It's the Identity Matrix.
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The Animatrix must have been double counted.
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I remember reading that the Matrix was planned to be a trilogy early on. So parts 2 and 3 were not the usual bad sequels that many movies get. I agree they were not as great as expected, but they were there, and they did have some interesting ideas that expanded the universe (also, the Architect who looked like Vint Cerf). I thought the "too bad no sequels" meme was annoying from the start, but quoting it for two decades is just really tiring -- I'd rather pour hot grits down my pants while imagining a Beo
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The Matrix 4's main selling point seems to be replacing the Walkowski Brothers with the Walkowski Sisters and then rewriting history to claim that the brothers never really had all that much to do with the original Matrix films but that was the only way to sell the films at the time. It's entire production is predicated on the SJW culture.
Dune looks cool to me, but I'm a huge Dune nut anyway. Sopranos sequel I'll check out, but like most rehashes, it'll probably be pretty lackluster.
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I mean, that's what made the first one watchable.
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The Matrix 4 could be interesting if it extends and further develops that storyline ...
Or takes place on Arrakis ...
At this point in either the Dune or Matrix remake/sequel sagas, a crossover of the two would be more interesting. Script ideas anyone?
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The Matrix is the beginning of the Butlerian Jyhad.
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Holy crap, that's brilliant. It would certainly explain why they would outlaw "thinking machines."
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Re: Mostly A Yawn To Me (Score:2)
Re: Mostly A Yawn To Me (Score:2)
That wouldnâ(TM)t work because of the timelines. In Dune, humanity had several thousand years of peaceful interstellar travel before the machines took over and precipitated the jihad. The year 10,191 when the story starts, is not AD, itâ(TM)s AG. Thatâ(TM)s After Guild; as in: 10,191 years since the beginning of the guildâ(TM)s monopoly on space transport, which came about a while after the jihad wiped out all the computers that previously made space travel possible. But the machine take
Re:I've seen this pattern before (Score:5, Insightful)
running into gangs of AntiFa thugs attacking you
Really? You think Antifa is the second biggest problem facing the movie theater ticket sales? You had a perfectly insightful comment up until you decided to go all political.
Re: I've seen this pattern before (Score:2)
Re: I've seen this pattern before (Score:2)
Maybe they are a flag-carrying N@z!, which would explain why anti-fascists want to attack them. Letting those guys go unchallenged always winds up bad for someone.
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Interesting way you have chosen to portray yourself: pro fascist.
But it is all the rage these days i suppose. And by these days, I mean that americans have been embracing fascism and racism before those were even terms.
Whatever (Score:1)
. . . underscores the crisis facing movie theaters
Movie theaters are an anachronism that should have died a few decades ago. I haven't been in a movie theater in about 20 years. No need for it. They can all just fuck off with their over-priced bullshit.
In the Heights is a musical... (Score:1)
... and always has been a musical
Theaters here aren't opening anytime soon (Score:5, Interesting)
Up here in Canada, we aren't doing so well with COVID19 lately. The west coast, largely spared during the first wave, is hitting BC very hard. Alberta is faring even worse.
Also, we have no domestic vaccine production facilities thanks to a previous administration (*cough* Harper *cough*) thinking that we could just sell off those companies and rely entirely on foreign production, which would have in theory been just fine unless the other countries happen to need the same medication, so the action left Canada highly susceptible to the effects of a pandemic.
So our current government has been trying like crazy to secure as many doses of vaccine as it can, but the way things are looking currently, only about half of Canadians are going to be vaccinated by next fall, and that's assuming that there won't be any delays at all in Health Canada's approval for domestic use (although none are currently expected). I don't expect we will reach the critical effective herd-immunity threshold before Christmas of next year, and I will be shocked as hell if theaters actually pen up here before then.
Also, HBO Max isn't available here... neither are a few other streaming services that I wish I could get where I am.
So.... as torrenting pirated content isn't really my thing, and I'm not interested in risking my ISP coming down on me for cirucumventing region licensing restrictions by using a vpn to misrepresent my location, I'm thinking we're probably gonna just have to wait for the DVD.
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Alberta is being hit hard because its full of conservative morons.
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I'm thinking we're probably gonna just have to wait for the DVD.
Or you will save your money when it turns out all of those movies are horrible suckfests. Most of the blockbusters of the past few years have been rather disappointing. As bad as "I want my money back" disappointing.
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It's even worst than that. I'm getting 99% of my movies from Netflix Canada, which already has a smaller list than Netflix USA, and sometimes movies are "I want my time back" bad.
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It's always been like that. Most movies are bad, especially blockbusters. We just think they were better in the past because we forget all the bad ones.
Check out the release schedule for the 80s and 90s, most months were real crapfests.
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If this was true (i.e. if everyone held this same opinion of those films) then there wouldn't have actually been any blockbusters in the past few years.
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Yeah.
Finding a VPN endpoint that HBO doesn't know about and block is a thing. Having a credit card billing address in the US is a bigger problem.
Having your ISP care at all about you using a VPN is not a thing. They don't even care when you pirate the movie without a VPN, although they may have to forward you the nastygram that HBO emails them when you do it.
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To be honest, the people working at the ISP probably don't actually care, but misrepresenting my location to get around region restrictions and access content that isn't otherwise licensed in my area could be construed as a kind of fraud.
It would not be illegal at all to misrepresent my location to access content which was available in my region, but why would I do so if I don't have to? The only reason to misrepresent my location is if the content isn't otherwise available where I live.
I do not sub
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Going out of your way to pay HBO to watch a movie that isn't legally available in Canada doesn't really seem like it's even morally wrong to me.
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Whether it seems like it is morally wrong to you or not is irrelevant.
The fact remains that if something is not legally available in Canada, then that restriction does not offer any kind of actual permission being offered to Canadians to ignore the licensing restrictions.
I'd be quite eager to pay typical prices for a handful of streaming services here in Canada that are only in the USA right now. Wanting something does not entitle me to it, however.
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To be honest, the people working at the ISP probably don't actually care, but misrepresenting my location to get around region restrictions and access content that isn't otherwise licensed in my area could be construed as a kind of fraud.
In the US, it is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse act.
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Hey you're in Canada, all tucked away down there; sorry Simpsons ref. :D
BC is probably useful but what about Alberta.
Doesn't CA have some sort of media tax so you can download without punishment?
Though not upload.
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Indeed it is still technically not illegal to pirate movies up here as long as you don't upload. Certainly no one is getting in legal trouble for doing so.
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The "media tax" you refer to is called a private copying levy, and is for making private and personal use copies.
However, the levy is not paid on mobile phones, computers, memory, flash drives, or hard disks.
So no.... the private copying levy is not generally applicable to downloading copyrighted content without permission.
Also, the private copying levy does not alter whether copies of infringing content are themselves infringing, even if they are on media that otherwise has the levy paid for it. If
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Also, we have no domestic vaccine production facilities thanks to a previous administration (*cough* Harper *cough*)
I used to cough to hide insulting words. Now I do the opposite.
Just HBO MAX or HBO MAX AND HBO? (Score:2)
Just HBO MAX or HBO MAX AND HBO?
Also when will directv have the full HBO MAX line up on the Directv sat box?
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HBO, and AT&T, don't freakin' know what the hell their naming scheme is anymore. There's a vicious rumor circulating that they're going to change to something else next year to "put the whole family under one roof." But I thought that's what Max was supposed to do?
As long as they don't dump my entire watch list and viewing history like they did with the Max name change. That was not appreciated.
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And that was before they bought a massive media conglomerate and duct taped it to their existing corporate corpus and let it dangle like it was part of a Halloween costume. They didn't kno
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And others like Roku, Spectrum's cable TV boxes, etc.
Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" REMAKE? (Score:1)
Sorry, did I miss something?
Villeneuve's is not a REMAKE at all. It's his adaptation of the novel...
It's the same is you call the last "Stephen King's It" move a "remake"...
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Sorry, did I miss something?
Villeneuve's is not a REMAKE at all. It's his adaptation of the novel.
The Sci Fi channel did two miniseries called "Frank Herbert's Dune" and "Frank Herbert's Children of Dune" a few years back. While the first didn't have blockbuster special effects, and some of the acting was weak, I personally enjoyed it.
It had been a couple decades prior to the first miniseries release since I read the books, however it was certainly a lot closer to how I remember it vs. the Lynch movie. I did read that some critics stated that it was a little too close to the books and it suffered from b
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They did the story better than Lynch for sure, but I think he better captured the feel of it.
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The author is just scarred by that abomination Lynch made in the 80s. As are we all.
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Such a shame that Villeneuve's version looks just like a lame rehash of all the same ideas and tropes from Lynch's movie. I'm not holding my breath for it resembling the book much.
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It sounds like Villeneuve actually read the book, so his version can't be as bad as Lynch's.
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Actually the author isn't "scarred by that abomination" at all since he almost 25 years ago. 8^)
Glass half full / half empty (Score:3)
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I expect DVD sales to increase if movies studios only release their movies on their own respective streaming platforms. If those movies don't make to to Netflix or Prime, then I'm just going to buy the DVD.
I tend to buy the DVD of any movie I think I'll like, anyway, because they tend to disappear from streaming services.
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I tend to buy the DVD of any movie I think I'll like, anyway, because they tend to disappear from streaming services.
Same for me. I figure it's still cheaper than two or three tickets and I can watch it from home as many times as I want.
I've actually been wondering what this is going to do to the movie business. I can't see studios making quarter billion dollar movies short term at the very least. But I have to wonder if theater attendance is ever going to recover from this enough to justify such things going forward. My hope is that a lot more independent lower cost movies get made/released. But most big media companie
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from now on they can more or less drive a stake through the heart of theater chains and decide how they distribute movies
Not really. I suspect they will soon revert this position when they see their movies pirated in high quality on day zero of their releases. Even pirates who partially cared about a partially decent screening used to go see things in the Cinema until the bluray came out.
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The same could be said of new content on Netflix / Amazon Prime / Disney+ and yet they still manage to turn a profit.
The question was not if they "manage to turn a profit". They will. The question is by how much. The RIAA was still profiting highly in the Napster days too, that doesn't mean they didn't pull all sorts of stops to try and get it under control. In that regard this is a step backwards for the movie industry.
Studios realise as much as anyone that theater chains are suffering an extinction event so they'll adapt and probably be no worse off from it.
As has been pointed out countless times before there's no such extinction event. Theaters are healthy and expanding across the world. Just portions of the USA seem to be in decline. Hell just before COVID
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Good (Score:3)
Movie theaters should be pop culture museums and video game halls. I'm circling my local independent movie house like a vulture just waiting for them to fall over so I can swoop in and do just that.
Waiting for the PirateBay release (Score:3)
This is very handy (Score:2)
Now I can not watch poor movies in the comfort of my own home, instead of looking over a theater menu and going "Nah".
Although I probably will watch Dune, cannot resist. Even if the Mandalorian did a better sandworm than Dune already...
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Even if the Mandalorian did a better sandworm than Dune already...
My thoughts exactly! Poor Dennis -- out done by a TV show!
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Dune might be ok, but I'm not that hopeful, because it is coming from the same company that thought Wonder Woman 1984 was a good idea.
Maxtrix 4 - A Fireside Chat (Score:2)
The Architect, Neo, Morpheus, Trinity, Agent Smith, and the Oracle, all gathered around a firepit discussing (as their characters) the two previous films and what went wrong.
Cameos by the Merovingian and maybe have wine served by one of spider machines, it would also feed the fire. If needed for a longer run time throw in Apoc and the Spoon Boy.
It could be the Star Wars Holiday Special but... I'm not sure "better" works here.
But I'd watch that.
Good-bye, magic! (Score:5, Interesting)
Many of us loved movie theatres as kids, but who as an adult still enjoys them? Too much dirty gets left behind by the previous visitors, there is always one guy who sits straight with a stick up his arse and blocking the view for others, dimwits chatting during a movie and even the quiet scenes, chewing gums stuck in every place, people with tiny bladders getting in and out of the rows multiple times, ... Then came along the mobile phones and still did some not manage to turn off their phones. All while the ticket and food prices grew higher. Yet, we remained faithful and attributed all this crap as a part of the "magical experience".
Frankly, COVID19 is perhaps just the last drop in what must have been a slow death for the theatres for a while now. Perhaps it's better to think of it as a quick and good death from now on. Parents will of course have to recreate the magic at home. And I'm sure the film industry will be happy in the long term when it means that it has one significant leak less of pirate copies when theatres finally close.
So I'm going to applaud the move and hope its a sign of a good change to come.
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Many of us loved movie theatres as kids, but who as an adult still enjoys them?
Yesterday I spent $499 on a subwoofer, the SVS SB-1000 that got best reviews for its price range, after the existing subwoofer's circuitry failed (maybe capacitors blown after its 10 year life? unclear). Last year it was a $1200 TV with 4k and HDR. Fortunately the previous owners left their high-end receiver and five surround speakers. We have a nice media room that's fairly well sound-isolated from the rest of the house, and that doesn't wake up our young kids.
All of this isn't a patch on the sound quality
Re:Good-bye, magic! (Score:5, Interesting)
who as an adult still enjoys them?
I do. I go on a weekly basis. Mind you I don't live in the 3rd world shithole you described. I really feel for you, my cinemas are clean, layout in a way that even the tallest people don't block the view, no one chats, and why the hell would you chew gum in a cinema anyway? Also phones in a cinema? Have you people no culture? Not even the teenage riffraff does that here.
Frankly, COVID19 is perhaps just the last drop in what must have been a slow death for the theatres for a while now.
Maybe in your location (not sure if the problem is your city, state, or country) but cinemas globally have been quite healthy, many chains have expanded, renovated or otherwise invested further into their healthy businesses.
I'm not sure where you live but I fell sorry for the fact that you even have this opinion. But please don't let your local situation applaud a move that actually prevents others from enjoying the things they enjoy.
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Maybe in your location (not sure if the problem is your city, state, or country) but cinemas globally have been quite healthy, many chains have expanded, renovated or otherwise invested further into their healthy businesses.
I'm not sure where you live but I fell sorry for the fact that you even have this opinion. But please don't let your local situation applaud a move that actually prevents others from enjoying the things they enjoy.
He’s not applauding the situation, he’s applauding the outcome. And so do I - great if you enjoy movies, but I’ve been to movies in 4 or 5 countries and the only time I’ve ever enjoyed it was when I paid about 100 dollars per seat in Dubai for a semi-private viewing experience. So I’m happy if I have access to movies earlier at home, and have no problem with you (and others) continuing to enjoy movies in theaters for so long as the theater owners and the studios can work someth
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I'm not sure where you live but I fell sorry for the fact that you even have this opinion.
When you have the opinion a movie theatre was as clean as your home then you should clean up better rather than feeling sorry for me.
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Warner has more monopoly potential than Disney (Score:2)
I recall that when Disney bought most of Fox that people were concerned about Disney becoming a monopoly. At that time I remember thinking that Disney is essentially a content creator with a massive library, and the ability to distribute digitally. However, they cannot prevent competitors from distributing. The old hollywood 'studio' system had a monopoly where the makers of the movies also own the retail distribution channel by owning the theaters. With the internet allowing anyone to upload, Disney can
Translation: On HBO Max (Score:1)
2020 and early 2021 are looking to basically be the final nail in the coffin of the movie theater industry.
At last: a reason to figure out what HBO Max is (Score:2)
As a brand experiment, HBO missed big with HBO, HBO Go, HBO Now, HBO Max.
If new release is only available on HBO Max, this is a clear differentiator, and potentially brings some clarity back to the branding.
In other news WB complains that people pirate (Score:2)
Unless they are going to apply the same "Steaming at the same time as the box office for all other parts of the globe" they are inviting copyright infringement