Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 endured several delays to its cinema release – but it’s being sent to video on demand at speed.
Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Parasite has struggled to find a theatrical audience, and within a matter of days could find itself playing on home formats. According to When To Stream (via Dark Horizons), it looks as though Warner Bros has elected to send the film straight to premium video on demand in the hope that its newness will persuade those who weren’t tempted by a theatrical screening.
Sources suggest that Mickey 17 will make its digital debut on the 25th March – just 18 days after its appearance in cinemas. This hasn’t been confirmed yet by Warner Bros, but we’ll update this piece when we hear any official word.
If you want to apply the cold calculus of business to the situation, the decision might make sense. What Warner Bros and Universal and every other studio seem to be ignoring, though, is the detrimental effect these continual smash-and-grab PVOD releases could have on the future of cinema.
While it eventually managed to right itself, we all saw the damage that home releases did to Pixar’s status as a prestige studio in the aftermath of the global pandemic, as audiences became ‘trained’ to see Pixar films as small screen releases. That was after just a couple of films from the animation studio went straight to streaming, though thankfully, the studio was able to reverse that audience mindset as we saw with the fabulous commercial performance of last year’s Inside Out 2.
The current trend for studios to yank underperforming films from cinemas within three weeks and place them on premium home formats is far more troubling, because it’s a process that has been ongoing for much longer.
At some point, some segments of the audience for a film will simply cease to consider a visit to the cinema because their habits will have been reformed. Perhaps that’s already happened, which is as sad a sentence to write as it likely is to read.
Read more: Mickey 17 review | Another Bong hit
Mickey 17 has picked up decent reviews, and while its commercial performance isn’t setting the world alight, the film has made $90m at the global box office, not a small amount of cash. But with the film’s production budget and marketing believed to come in at around $200m, there’s no question that it won’t break even during its theatrical run.
Warner Bros has likely seen Universal have some joy in sending its own films to PVOD quickly, a tactic which makes sense given that a home release can ride the tail-end of a not-insignificant marketing blitz. As Sean Baker, director of Anora has repeatedly pointed out during this year’s awards trail, however, shortening theatrical exclusivity windows is a short-sighted business strategy.
If studios damage the sanctity of the cinematic experience, they won’t have the means to make their films special, and cinema will be reduced to little more than a series of tiles on a streaming platform.
Warner Bros has several more huge auteur-driven projects on the way in 2025, and we’ll be watching to see if the studio elects to repeat this strategy should those projects not race out of the gate either. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is out next month; could we see the studio doing the same again?
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This is a story that looks set to continue throughout 2025. We’ll bring you more as it unfolds.
