WEEKLY RECAP #6: Disastrous Max Rollout & Cannes Wrap-Up
5/21/23 -- 5/27/23
“Drop the ‘HBO’. Just ‘Max.’ It’s dumber.”
It seems as though this week was dominated by bad rollouts: as Ron DeSantis hosted a comically scuffed presidential announcement via Twitter Spaces with fellow voids-of-charisma Elon Musk and David Sacks, Warner Bros. Discovery officially launched Max, the updated version of streaming service HBO Max, to the public. The odd (and somewhat nonsensical) choice in name change was announced many weeks ago, but it wasn’t until this past Tuesday that users awoke to find the HBO Max fully updated into its newer, bluer form… that is, some users woke up to find that. Others woke up to find that their HBO Max app looked exactly the same, and that they actually needed to go into the App Store to find a new app titled Max that they had to download before deleting the previous app. In addition to this very confusing rollout, there were a myriad of glitches that popped up for people. (For example, many users reported that the “Start Streaming” button wasn’t working for them.) Signs of bugs upon the immediate launch of a new service is far from unheard of, meaning the Max update ultimately wouldn’t have become newsworthy… if it weren’t for one of the Warner Brothers’ most egregious streaming-era decisions yet. Upon launch, credits for major movies and television shows now seemed to display all the people involved in making the shows — writers, directors and producers — under the vague title of “Creators”, rather than actually distinguishing who did what. (The display for said credit is shown above.) This may not seem like the biggest deal to regular people, but you have to keep in mind: the denigration of all the careful work that goes into the artistic process as “content creation” is the very type of thing that groups like the Writer’s Guild of America have been actively fighting against for decades. Lesli Linka Glatter, president of the Director’s Guild, explains the issue quite well: “Warner Bros. Discovery’s unilateral move, without notice or consultation, to collapse directors, writers, producers and others into a generic category of ‘creators’ in their new Max rollout while we are in negotiations with them is a grave insult to our members and our union. This devaluation of the individual contributions of artists is a disturbing trend and the DGA will not stand for it. We intend on taking the strongest possible actions, in solidarity with the WGA, to ensure every artist receives the individual credit they deserve.” In short, the people working in the entertainment industry don’t take on pathetic wages, long hours and copious amounts of stress because they just want to get their check and leave — they do it because they love creating art more than anything else, and robbing them of the ability to be properly credited for the work they’ve done is unacceptable. But why did this happen in the first place? Was this some sort of cost-efficient decision? Was it an aesthetic choice to make the credits look cleaner and shorter? Was this a technical glitch that slipped past “oversight in the technical transition from HBO Max to Max”, as the spokespeople behind Max claimed? (If true, it’s a pretty egregious accident.) Regardless of how it happened, Max has promised to correct the credits, but it doesn’t quite change the fact that this new app, at least for the moment, seems like a bit of a downgrade. If Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and self-proclaimed art-despiser David Zaslav getting booed by Boston University graduates during his commencement speech there says anything, it’s that the company’s recent decisions are really testing people’s limits for how much they’ll put up with to use the app. HBO Max has had perhaps the best category shows out of any streaming service so far — basically anything under the Warner Bros. catalogue that hasn’t been erased from the Internet for budgeting purposes — and yet it often seems like higher-ups are daring users to delete the app through their executive decisions. Nothing goes together like art and money!
Catch Me If You Cannes
On the evening of this post, the Cannes Film Festival has officially concluded! Here’s the most notable moments from the second half of the most prestigious event for movies (outside of whatever the hell the Oscars are doing each year).
TikTok and artificial intelligence’s favorite director Wes Anderson is back at it with another twee, intricately-framed movie. This time, it was Asteroid City, a blue-and-orange tale about an alien invasion in a small desert town, which premiered at the festival. Weirdly enough, major entertainment publications seemed to be lukewarm on this one, but many individual critics seemed to be huge fans. From what I’ve read, this movie is going to hit the most with those who are the most familiar with Anderson’s work, so if you can’t get enough of his movies, then I’d be sure to tune in. If you are someone trying to run his movies through an algorithm to make a video titled “The Avengers Movies if they were made by Wes Anderson,” please destroy your computer and walk directly into the ocean.
In my notes app, where I quickly jot down the topics to cover in my weekly posts, I had a bullet that said “The Idol lmfao”. I technically do need to mention that the first two episodes of Sam Levinson’s new neon fetish concoction The Idol premiered out-of-competition (if you can believe it) at Cannes, but it’s difficult for me to take this guy seriously. It was nice to see Sam tearing up after the screening ended, as he does seem like someone who cares about making art, but the actual content of his art is often questionable, to say the least. As someone who actually quite enjoyed the first season of HBO’s Euphoria, I will say that Levinson’s work is at its best when it’s reigned in and grounded in a topic he understands well. But, as projects like Assassination Nation, Malcolm & Marie, and the uneven second season of Euphoria demonstrate, Sam truly does go a bit sicko mode (in a bad, goofy way) when he’s given too much power. Like most of his projects, The Idol boasts star power and strong visuals, but the Rolling Stone expose on its disastrous production and the reviews from Cannes confirming most of the negative speculation don’t have me hyped. The Idol currently has the worst Rotten Tomatoes score of any HBO series (27%), and critics warn of its oversexualized, substance-less scenes, but I doubt that will stop most regular viewers from tuning in.
Oh, yeah — the awards were announced today, too! The largest prize of the festival, the coveted Palme D’Or, went to French directress Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall. This win is particularly notable due to its distribution company, NEON, which now claims ownership of the four latest Palme D’Or winners. (Parasite in 2019, Titane in 2021, and Triangle of Sadness in 2022.) In other words, the executives at A24 are undoubtedly shitting themselves in the fetal position right now, because there’s a new household name for indie cinema in town. Speaking of A24, they own the distribution rights to Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which instead took home the Grand Prix award and (due to his previous work) is my most anticipated film of the year. It’s odd to see a movie about an Auschwitz commandant right next to Dune: Part Two for my 2023 hype list, but hey — the heart wants what it wants.
Great issue!!!!