The Dwayne Johnson film, which has grossed $378 million at the worldwide box office since opening on October 21, arrives free on December 16 for HBO Max subscribers , nearly a month ahead of schedule. The film is also available from December 5 for rental and sale on the digital platforms Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, Apple TV, Rakuten TV, YouTube, Movistar +, Orange TV and Microsoft Store. We had speculated that Warner Bros. would follow the same strategy with this movie as they did with Elvis., which was the first to break the premiere model on HBO Max 45 days after its debut in theaters and which reached the digital platform 68 days after it was released in theaters, with which Black Adam could have arrived on Thursday, September 6 at the earliest. January 2023. With the official premiere on HBO Max on December 16, it comes ahead of the Christmas campaign and competes directly with the theatrical release of Avatar 2.
Black Adam has been Warner Bros. third highest-grossing film in 2022, behind The Batman , which earned $770.8 million at the box office and Fantastic Animals 3 , which grossed $400 million. Black Adamit has surpassed the collection of Elvis (286 million dollars). It has been a success? A failure? It depends on the scale. Shazam , another movie of a DC comics character unknown to the general public, raised 366 million dollars and note that it is about to release a sequel. And Aquaman , on the other hand, came in at $1.148 million. In a pandemic, Wonder Woman 1984 and Suicide Squad suffered the theater crisis and did not exceed 170 million dollars each. Taking into account that the unofficial budget of Black AdamIt has oscillated between 175 million and 200 million dollars, it has been fair. But it is proven that theatrical performance is not an indicator of subsequent opening times on HBO Max. How does a premiere like this reinforce the HBO Max movie catalog?
Since Warner Media is not currently following any specific strategy and since it did officially announce that although it initially planned to release Black Adam 45 days after its theatrical release, it was not going to go ahead with this plan, it was impossible to have any certainty about when it would re-release. the movie free in digital format on HBO Max. Especially now that the large producers and distributors are beginning to resume the strategies prior to the pandemic that forced them to change the rules of the game. Just look at Universal and Paramount and their 2022 hits The Bad Guys and Top Gun Maverick, who have not been in any hurry and have taken the license to reach the free platform six months later (in Spain only the first has reached Movistar +). And Disney and Marvel seem comfortable with following, for the moment, a window that oscillates around 60 days from the theatrical release. The fact is that only The Batman and Fantastic Animals 3 have benefited from the 45-day window initially planned for 2022 for Warner movies , both of which are already on HBO Max.
The January 6 thing was not a random number, but a calculation based on the strategy followed with Elvis , a film with a lower budget, but similar expectations, which arrived on HBO Max 67 days after its theatrical release. But perfectly the Black Adam movie could also follow the times of Dune and Matrix Resurrectionsthat they applied a different strategy and did not land on HBO Max until four months after its release in theaters. Producers and distributors, as I told you before, want to return to the old model of making their products profitable through traditional channels: digital purchase and DVDs, digital rental, doing the pre-pandemic tour through digital platforms and not considering reruns. until at least four or six months later on their own digital platforms. The 45-day window strategy was only justifiable from a commercial point of view for the majors to the extent that there had been an exceptional situation in theaters and it represented an opportunity to strengthen their digital platforms.
What has become clear is that the previous digital release models that Warner Bros has applied during 2020, 2021 and 2022 have not worked. It didn’t work, to begin with, for obvious reasons, the simultaneous release on both platforms of Godzilla vs. Kong , The Matrix Resurrections , The Suicide Squad , and Wonder Woman 1984 . Dune has already been left out of this formula. The Batman premiered on the 46th on HBO Max and Elvis went free.
