Some are still warm from the night of the Oscars and others have not yet reached our hands, but what there is no doubt is the bad luck that all have had when it comes to opening in the middle of the pandemic. The season’s crop of movies offers titles for all tastes with one thing in common: they should be in a movie theater.
Home theater
With three jackpots, including Best Picture, Actress and Director, Chloé Zhao’s film ‘Nomadland’ has become the must-attend event of the year (with permission from ‘Another Round’) and laurels will adorn the arrival of the Marvel’s next big title, ‘The Eternals’. The history of this modern nomad has passed through our rooms with the limitations that the pandemic has caused, but it is that just five days later of the Academy Awards will be available on the Disney + service, Star, at no additional cost.
Yes, it is true that it is increasingly common to find homes with a first-rate projector and sound system, but I fear that the quality of streaming reproduction is light years away from the projection of a room and quite far from a disc in high definition. What’s more, the ritual of the room is in real danger with the closings of cinemas around the world and, especially this year, with the decision by large studios like Warner, which have decided to release the 2021 premieres simultaneously in cinemas and HBO Max. That means that many viewers have watched movies like ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ or ‘Godzilla Vs. Kong’ on a home screen.
Netflix is one of those great experts on the subject. ‘Roma’, Alfonso Cuarón’s film, was fashionable a couple of seasons ago and he went home with three Oscars. The movie was in select theaters for a limited time, but it was a platform-for-platform movie. The great Jan repeated the play with ‘The Irishman’, Martin Scorsese’s ambitious epic, and now it has done it again with ‘Mank’ and to a lesser extent with ‘The Chicago 7 trial’, which he acquired from Paramount without thinking about it twice. Fincher, Sorkin … Disney. ‘Soul’, which also ended with two Oscars, has also ended “on TV”. If you hurry me, I also think that ‘Of love and monsters’ is very similar to those old fantasies that we found in the rooms.
Anyway, seeing that Netflix strategy with its “prestigious” films, perhaps the pandemic has only been the last nail in a coffin that was being custom designed and in which the studios want their share of the cake as clean. possible. Paramount + will be the next to enlist in a war that does not seem to have an end in the short term. And if he was talking about Disney before, what about his ‘The Empty Man’. Project Nothing Friend of the Company, Fox’s residual adult horror thriller, David Prior’s film based on Cullen Bunn’s graphic novel has generated the necessary cult so that the platform that should have welcomed it originally receives it with open arms. The problem is that this film, like Fincher’s or Sorkin’s or Disney’s, was crying out for a cinema screen as insane as its proposal.
We have barely a third of a year and DC has also released TWO different montages of ‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’, one in color (or something like that) and another in flawless “gray.” It will like more or less, but Snyder’s vision always deserves the screen largest possible. We will check that detail again very soon, because his ‘Army of the Dead’ is just around the corner.
The last one, for now, will be ‘The Mitchell against the machines’, the Spanish title for the long-awaited ‘Connected’, the latest in animation from those responsible for the majestic ‘The LEGO movie’ and ‘Spider-Man: A new universe’, two authentic world-class cinematic experiences. Blindly I could assure you that with the seal in the Lord Miller production we will be facing one of the great animated adventures of a season that needs a lot of animation. The same could be said of titles like ‘A bad trip’ or the sequel to ‘Borat’, films that may not have the sharpest photograph of the year but that would provoke infinite contagious laughter in a full room.
It could be worse? Of course. We could have been perplexed at the auction for the rights of James Bond, something that perhaps is still there in the shadows and where Apple seems to be better placed than anyone. We could also have waited for some Tom Cruise to see on the train. Are we really going to suddenly devalue projects that lit up our hearts until four days ago? Of course, we need to stabilize the situation as much as possible health, vaccinate and seek immunity, but after that, before the toasts, we must go back to the movie theaters.