It’s entirely likely that December 3, 2020, will go down as the day moviegoing suffered a fatal ice pick from the cold, calculating hand of the streaming revolution. That was the day WarnerMedia, the entertainment division of AT&T and corporate inheritor of Warner Bros.—century-old studio home of Kubrick and Eastwood; Bugs Bunny and Harry Potter; Casablanca and Gone With the Wind—announced it would release its entire 2021 slate straight to the American living room via limited runs on its HBO Max service. (And in whatever theaters would have them too.) From 40,000 feet, it was a sensible, even perfunctory, move. Theaters have been largely shut down by COVID for a year and could be on ice for another. WarnerMedia has a nine-month-old streaming service fighting a near-impossible battle against Netflix and Amazon. The movies sitting on its shelf, which included Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman sequel and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation, could give the floundering app a boost.
Hollywood didn’t quite see it that way…
Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/02/did-warner-bros-hbo-max-move-really-kill-moviegoing