Dune Director Enraged by Having His Movie Released on HBO Max
Dennis Villeneuve, director of Dune and Blade Runner 2049, is dissatisfied with the decision to move Warner Bros.'s film premieres to HBO Max. He blames the AT&T telecommunications company.
The film industry is outraged by the decision to launch all of Warner Bros' biggest hits of 2021 in cinemas and on streaming platforms at the same time. A few days ago, Christopher Nolan (Tenet, Inception) expressed his anger and objections, and now another respected Hollywood director, Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049, Sicario), has taken the floor. He can't get over the fact that his Dune will land on HBO Max right away and that corporations are only driven by the desire for money. However, he looks for the guilty much further, and instead of Warner Bros. accuses AT&T, a communications company whose sphere of influence includes Warner Media. The director used the following words in an interview for Variety:
"With this decision, AT&T has hijacked one of the most respectable and important studios in film history. There is absolutely no love for cinema, nor for the audience here. It is all about the survival of a telecom mammoth, one that is currently bearing an astronomical debt of more than $150 billion. Therefore, even though “Dune” is about cinema and audiences, AT&T is about its own survival on Wall Street. With HBO Max’s launch a failure thus far, AT&T decided to sacrifice Warner Bros.’ entire 2021 slate in a desperate attempt to grab the audience’s attention."
Villeneuve hopes that the cinema crisis will be solved after the pandemic when the audience returns to the multiplexes. Only their presence and actions can change AT&T and Warner Bros' decisions.
He is another key Hollywood filmmaker after Nolan, who speaks on such this important issue for the film industry. In the nearest future, we will probably have more statements of this kind. Let's hope that they will stimulate an open discussion on contemporary distribution practices.
