Sending 'Wolfs' to Streaming Broke Me a Little Bit
Apple thinks their movie won't be a hit in theaters, so it mostly skips theaters.
As much as I enjoyed watching the new George Clooney/Brad Pitt crime-comedy Wolfs from writer-director Jon Watts, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of anger and irritation. The film received a minimal theatrical release on September 20th before heading to AppleTV+ on September 27th. How did we get here? How does a film featuring two charismatic movie stars and an easy-to-grasp premise (two lone-wolf fixers must work together to clean up a scandal) skip movie theaters? Why is this movie less worthy of a theatrical release than Deadpool & Wolverine or Kinds of Kindness?
Let me try to walk through the streaming arguments. If you send it quickly to AppleTV+, it becomes a way to sell the streaming service. If you want to see Wolfs, you have to get an AppleTV+ subscription, and if you get the subscription, you’ll stay subscribed and watch their other programming.
However, given the rising costs of streaming, users are more selective than ever about what they’ll sign up for. Is one movie going to tip the balance? Even if users subscribe, is there enough AppleTV+ programming to prevent churn? And does the money from potential subscribers mean more than revenue from theatrical? Yes, theatrical has its costs in terms of prints and advertising, but we shouldn’t pretend like streaming is money in the bank. Streamers only work if the ongoing content is worth the subscription fee, which means you’ve sacrificed multiple revenue streams (television, physical media, hotels, airlines, etc., all may be shrinking, but they’re still money) so you can grow or retain subscribers.
And perhaps the rules don’t even apply here for a company like Apple. The thinking goes that the streaming service is more of a loss-leader in getting people into the Apple ecosystem. You’re buying an AppleTV or an iPad, and then you decide to get a Mac or an iPhone, and so forth. So, if you squint, you can kind of see a line from Wolfs to an AppleTV+ subscription to selling you a bunch of Apple products. This seems like an incredibly roundabout way to make money from a movie.
Then there’s the argument that Wolfs wouldn’t make money during a theatrical run, or at least not enough to warrant the cost, because it’s not big enough to rival a Deadpool & Wolverine or Beetlejuice Beetlejuice but also not small enough to get the arthouse crowd that would show up for Kinds of Kindness or Thelma. It’s a midsized movie, and now there’s no formulation to make it a hit, especially because it’s not based on preexisting material.
This approach becomes a self-fulfilling doom loop. The only movies that are deemed worthy of theatrical releases are those that can gross hundreds of millions of dollars in a matter of weeks plus have enough international appeal to boost the worldwide gross. The audience then goes to the theater only expecting these movies (or, at the other end of the spectrum, the arthouse plays), and a midsized film has no place there. A Clooney/Pitt crime-comedy won’t gross $100 million in its opening weekend, which means it won’t have legs, and now you need to start sending it out of theaters immediately to make up the revenue elsewhere. A system that used to support a midsized movie being a modest hit in theaters now can’t tolerate it.
That makes the entire experience of watching Wolfs bittersweet. I don’t want to fall backward into nostalgia and crow that movies were better twenty years ago when I was twenty years younger. But I also think streaming, for all its uses, can also be a black hole. When you dump Wolfs on streaming, you remove all urgency from watching it. Maybe Clooney and Pitt aren’t as big with younger audiences, but I think they’re undoubtedly A-list celebrities who can’t walk down the street without being asked for a selfie. Jon Watts may not be a household name, but he did direct an incredibly successful trilogy of Spider-Man movies. And now it will just sit on AppleTV+ forever, and only AppleTV+. You can’t even fully recommend it because you don’t know if the person you’re recommending it to wants a whole AppleTV+ subscription for one movie.
I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that streaming is always bad. This past weekend also saw the release of Will & Harper, a documentary about friendship and pushing back against the bigotry trans people encounter. Documentaries have always struggled to make a dent at the box office, and you will give it a far bigger audience by placing it on Netflix. But there was a time when Wolfs would have been a solid hit that played for multiple weekends and thrived as a movie rather than an advertisement for some larger business plan.
Keeping movies like Wolfs out of theaters and putting them on streaming is a further reminder that movies take up less place in our culture, and while part of that is a result of technological change, it’s also a result of limited imagination and severely curtailing what kinds of movies are shown outside of streaming platforms. Movies, as a popular art form, aren’t promised to last forever, but they also don’t have to be as ephemeral as a social media post.