How do you get people to see a movie if the actors can’t promote it? How do you finish making a movie if the actors can’t be in it? That’s an even trickier question, and believe me, I’m on the side of the actors and the writers.
The simple answer is: you can’t.
The wonderful success of Barbie and Oppenheimer last weekend was lightning in a bottle where a concept did the publicity for Warner Bros. Discovery and Universal. That’s likely not going to happen with the movies ready to be released, and Sony is the first studio to admit it.
With all work stopped on Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, there’s no reasonable way for us to have it hit theaters in 2024, not at the level of quality fans expect. As far as had been publicly announced, no actors had done voice work for it yet.
Kraven the Hunter is allegedly complete, but Sony has pushed back its release from October this year to August of 2024. Reasonably, they believe they need the star power of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, and Russell Crowe to be out on the talk show circuit. Regardless of the film’s quality, the average moviegoer does not know who Kraven actually is. Out of this slate change, I don’t know which is more frightening: that Sony doesn’t believe an agreement with SAG-AFTRA and the WGA can be reached by October, or that they’re still confident enough to assign a release date to Venom 3 (July 12, 2024).
Sony will try something a little different for the imminent Gran Turismo. The studio will have “preview screenings” on the original release date of August 11, in hopes that word of mouth will build online for a solid opening two weeks later. It’s a combination of true-life sports story and video game franchise, so… maybe.
Last month, Marvel pushed back the release dates for some of their announced slate, and it’s likely we’ll hear that Warner Bros. Discovery will, too. Don’t for a second think that has anything to do with film quality, or fan grumbling sight unseen about the direction of these films. Most of Marvel’s movies have not gone into full production; thank heavens Deadpool 3 stopped production, because Ryan Reynolds wasn’t even allowed to ad-lib on set, because that counts as writing. Sadly, it wasn’t until the actors went on strike that production suspended.
So here, Warner Bros. Discovery, I’m pleading with you to delay Blue Beetle. The ad campaign got better in the last month, but recognition of this property outside of the fanbase has not been high. Give it a chance to succeed, and prove that the studio is 100% behind it. (Just not in the way the studio did with The Flash; nobody, but NOBODY, trusts David Zaslav’s opinion.)
The dominoes are falling, and what I’d really like to see happen is a fair agreement with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. This isn’t about kobe beef sliders at craft services; this is about the ability to live and work in Hollywood. Oh, and make good movies.
