'Wonka' and 'Dune' Hope To Power Year-Long Box Office Comeback for Warner Bros.

In a year sure to struggle amid strike delays and with Marvel mostly MIA, Warner Bros.' varied and media-friendly slate could win 2024 by default

Warner Bros. Discovery just dropped the third (and final?) trailer for Dune Part Two. In the 159-second clip for the Legendary/WB production is a cards-on-the-table visual knockout, offering new looks at Chris Walken’s tyrant and Austin Butler’s professional hitman sent to deal with that pesky would-be prophet. The core romance, between Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, has shades of Avatar (a “stranger in a strange land” romances a high-ranking member of an indigenous tribe and essentially switches sides), although Frank Herbert fans know that this isn’t going play out like John Carter or The Last Samurai.  

Nonetheless, the crowdpleasing trailer for what could be next year’s first blockbuster (even presuming decent returns for the likes of Paramount’s Mean Girls and Universal’s Argyle) affirms that David Zaslav's Warner Bros. Discovery is making good on its promise to focus on theatrical. 

That the trailer is likely to play theatrically this week with showings of Wonka instead of launching with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom next week is potentially a sign of which big year-end WB movie is the top priority. To be fair, Wonka is earning solid reviews and just opened with $43 million overseas in advance of its global launch this weekend. James Wan’s ability to deliver Imax-friendly crowdpleasers under impossible circumstances aside, and its existence as the year-end fantasy franchise tentpole flick, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom faces an uphill battle for reasons almost entirely unrelated to the movie.

Nonetheless, the obvious variable of Dune and Wonka sharing a leading man aside, the trailer will surely play in front of most theatrical showings of Wonka, Aquaman 2 and the (particularly good) feature adaptation of the Color Purple stage musical, all of which open in the last week of the year.

Yes, WB has three big movies opening between Dec. 15 and Dec. 25, a fact they highlighted in a 120-second TV spot earlier this week. Aside from those mini trailers for Fox flicks like Fight Club, A.E.: After Earth, The Beach and Anna and the King that played in theatrical showings of Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, I cannot recall another instance of a studio selling three movies all opening almost concurrently as a company branding exercise. Even if Aquaman 2 doesn’t even pull earnings on par with, I dunno, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, the narrative being presented is that WB has much more to offer than just DC flicks.

Beginning with Wonka this week and continuing into 2024, Warner Bros. Discovery is aiming for a full-throated theatrical comeback, with or without the likes of Aquaman 2 next week and Joker 2 next October. In a year when strike-related delays have created a movie schedule vacuum that could be worse than 2021 – three underperforming MCU movies are better for theaters than just one MCU movie – WBD could be a by-default box office champion even if they don’t have anything resembling a Barbie-sized mega-smash.

They are closing out the year with three big holiday releases and then will offer eight major theatrical titles (Dune Part II and Godzilla x Kong, both from Legendary, alongside Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, George Miller’s Furiosa, Ishana Shyamalan’s The Watchers, M. Night Shyamalan's Trap and both parts of Kevin Costner’s western epic Horizons: An American Saga) between March 1 and Aug 16. Counting, uh, #AquaWonkaPurple, that’s eleven movies over nine months. They’ll close out the year with Beetlejuice 2 on Sept. 6, the Lady Gaga-starring Joker Folie a Deux on October 4, the David Zaslav-greenlit Robert De Niro-starring mob flick Alto Guys on Nov. 15 and the animated The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim on Dec. 13. 

Comparatively, Disney has – for the entire year -- five Fox flicks (The Auteur, a prequel to The Omen, sequels to Deadpool and Planet of the Apes and an in-between-quel in the Alien series) plus Pixar’s Inside Out 2 in June and the Barry Jenkins-directed Mufasa: The Lion King at Christmas. That’s one reason the Mouse House will release the three Pixar films that went straight to Disney+, Soul, Luca and Turning Red, into theaters early next year. With Elio, Snow White, Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts sent to 2025, Disney proper is almost taking the year off. 

Paramount has just four films between January 12 (Mean Girls) and June 28 (A Quiet Place: Day One), with the original fantasy If and a Bob Marley biopic in between. However, they could end strong with Gladiator 2 in November and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 in December. To be fair, Sony has a decent-sized slate, including three non-MCU Marvel movies (Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter and Venom 3), Bad Boys 4 and Ghostbusters: The Frozen Empire.  

Universal -- this year’s market share champion thanks to The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Oppenheimer, along with breakouts like Five Nights at Freddy’s -- has its usual deluge of movies big (Twisters) and small (Lisa Frankenstein). Comcast – saving theatrical (partially to boost PVOD) since Come Play on Oct. 30, 2020! 

Whether any of WB’s 2024 releases — whether or not they excite me personally — earn enough individually to place among the biggest films of the year (lazy money says Deadpool 3 or Despicable Me 4), WBD has the best chance in years to win the annual market share race. It hasn’t done that since 2013 amid a $5 billion year thanks to the likes of Gravity, Man of Steel, The Great Gatsby, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Conjuring. They have a slew of films that could be a run of doubles and triples with a home run or two in the mix. Or, online excitement for a Max Max Fury Road prequel (even with sky-high reviews and eventually Oscar glory, Fury Road “only” grossed $375 million on a $155 million budget), a Beetlejuice sequel or the MonsterVerse’s second King Kong/Godzilla team-up won’t translate to general audience interest. Maybe, in the end, they all barely make more combined than Barbenheimer ($1.5 billion for WB’s Barbie and $950 million for Universal’s Oppenheimer). We’ll see.

Zaslav was publicly ahead of the industry curve in proclaiming that A) big-budget straight-to-streaming movies are essentially setting money on fire, B) buzzy streaming movies don’t aggressively affect quarterly subscription figures and C) releasing a film in theaters improves its eventual streaming performance. That theatrical + third-party licensing > streaming + hoarding mentality was correct, even if he reversed his predecessor’s “all eggs in the streaming basket” strategy in a media-unfriendly and talent-alienating fashion.  

That said, it’s not like Hollywood is racing to buy Coyote vs. Acme, and Clint Eastwood is currently making Juror No. 2 for WBD. Rachel Maddow once said (paraphrasing from memory) that she distinguished her coverage of the Donald Trump presidency by focusing less on what he said and more on what he did. On that note, whether under Zaslav or Kilar, WB has been on the front lines of keeping theatrical alive over the last few years.  

WB, under AT&T, released Christopher Nolan’s Tenet in the summer of 2020. They then sacrificed Wonder Woman 1984 to HBO Max and starving theaters at the tail-end of the first COVID year. Kilar’s controversial Project Popcorn gave WB the (presumed) safety net to offer up a full slate of 2021 releases, while the success of Godzilla Vs. Kong was essentially why we even had a summer movie season that year. WB under Discovery put four HBO Max-intended films (House Party, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, Evil Dead Rise and Blue Beetle) in theaters in 2023 and is almost singlehandedly “saving Christmas” this season.  

That doesn’t make Zaslav a hero, nor does it mean that every choice he has made was “good, actually.” A year or three without any high-profile films getting shelved would do wonders. However, to quote my favorite deleted scene in Sarah Polley’s Away from Her, life is complicated. But first, let’s see A) how the year-end biggies perform and B) whether Dune Part Two gets an upswing from Dune’s $400 million total (which would have been, at best, merely so-so in pre-Covid times).

The final verdict may be, at next year’s end, the extent to which James Gunn’s Superman Legacy is viewed as a key tentpole versus a do-or-die release. If WB’s 2024 lineup pulls through — as it very much did in 2018 with varied hits like Crazy Rich Asians, The Meg, The Nun, A Star Is Born and Aquaman, it’ll again show that the Dream Factory is more than just Batman and Harry Potter. But you (should) know that already.