New Footage From 'Mortal Kombat', 'Cry Macho', 'King Richard' & More Arrives In HBO Max Teaser Video
Over a week ago, HBO Max provided a little tease of all the movies that Warner Bros. Pictures will be sending to theaters and the WarnerMedia streaming service simultaneously this year. Every single movie that the studio was planning on releasing in 2021 will get the hybrid release, including The Suicide Squad, Mortal Kombat, In the Heights, Malignant, The Many Saints of Newark, Dune, Cry Macho, and even The Matrix 4. Now a new, longer sizzle reel shows off new footage from all these movies and more.
HBO Max Movies Trailer
This new HBO Max movies trailer features the first footage from Clint Eastwood's Cry Macho and a little more footage and dialogue from King Richard, starring Will Smith. Plus, we finally get more Mortal Kombat footage, and it's even a clip in which they say the name of the movie and point at it written on a bulletin board. That's gotta be a rare occasion in cinema, right?
There's actually the addition of a new title to the line-up as well. Back at the end of last year, the time travel movie Reminiscence starring Hugh Jackman was removed from the 2021 release calendar entirely. But now it appears to be part of the HBO Max same-day premiere schedule sometime this year, and our first glimpse of the movie can be seen above, mixed in with all the rest of the films.
For those interested, here are all the movies teased in this new HBO Max movies trailer:
When all the titles are highlighted to close out this tease, it initially seems like they're being presented in the order in which they're released. But after In the Heights appears, we're not sure if that's accurate. The musical adaptation is slated for release on June 18, 2021, and the next Warner Bros. movie set for release after that is Space Jam: A New Legacy on July 16, 2021. But that title doesn't appear in the line-up until much later. In fact, the entire second half of the titles are almost entirely out of order when it comes to their release dates, with the exception of The Matrix 4 closing out the year as the last movie.
We wouldn't be surprised if there ends up being more release date shuffling for these movies, especially depending on how the vaccine distribution and handling of the coronavirus pandemic continues to improve.
This new strategy from Warner Bros. and HBO Max is something we'll be keeping a close eye on as all these movies get an unprecedented release to wide audiences. For their part, AT&T (the parent company of WarnerMedia, Warner Bros. Pictures, and HBO Max) sees this as "a bold and aggressive swing" in the movie business. That may be true, but it also feels like one that will unnecessarily hurt the theatrical distribution game, especially movie theaters. CEO John Stankey felt like these movies needed to get out there sooner than later. He said:
"We felt like we had a little bit of a spoiling asset that needed to be used more effectively."
Do any of these movies feel like they would have been spoiled by being delayed? Would interest really have waned on Mortal Kombat, The Conjuring 3, or The Suicide Squad if they ended up having to be delayed? Furthermore, everything being released in the second half of the year will theoretically arrive at a time when millions more will have been vaccinated and some sense of normalcy is restored. We know this is a huge ploy to build HBO Max's subscriber base, so let's not pretend this is anything but that. Will it pay off? It looks like it already has to some degree, because HBO Max has reportedly hit its subscriber goal two years ahead of schedule. It now has nearly 40 million subscribers in the U.S., with HBO having more than 60 million subscribers worldwide.
Since its initial publication, this article was updated to include data about HBO Max's subscriber numbers.