Why 'Wonder Woman' at home matters

If this is the moment when entertainment changes forever, it won't only be because streaming won. It will also be because total control is irresistible.

Warner Bros., the Hollywood powerhouse whose films include the "Wonder Woman" and "Harry Potter" series and "Casablanca," said Dec. 3 that all of its new films in 2021 would come out at the same time in movie theaters and on its sibling streaming service, HBO Max, my colleagues Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling wrote.

Before now, some new movies in the United States have been available for us to watch at home on the day they debuted in theaters. But never at this scale.

Warner Bros. said that its movies-plus-streaming approach was a temporary measure while the pandemic made some people wary of movie theaters. But don't be fooled. It will be almost impossible to go back to the old ways of doing things, as Brooks and Nicole wrote.

You and your binges of "The Great British Baking Show" know why. "This is about turning HBO Max into a Netflix," Brooks told me.

Conventional entertainment companies like AT&T, which owns Warner Bros., Walt Disney and basically anyone who ever made a TV show are trying to become Netflix, and fast. (Media writer Peter Kafka of Recode, who has said another factor of Warner Bros.' online film releases was the weaknesses of theater chains, wrote about the urge to catch up to Netflix several weeks ago.)

But it's also important to understand an underappreciated motivation behind the Netflix envy. This isn't only about streaming beating cable television companies and movie theaters. The Netflix model represents a complete reordering of entertainment into self-contained empires that control as much as possible from the first frame of a film shoot to the last pixel of a movie you watch on your phone.

This new approach dispenses with a bunch of that. Instead, Netflix tries to control almost everything from beginning to end. It's not there yet, and AT&T isn't going that far with HBO Max — yet — but that's the direction everyone is headed.

It's as if Ford aspired to make every part that went into its cars, assemble the vehicles and sell them instead of buying parts from a bunch of different suppliers and going through car dealerships.

There has been almost nothing like this before, and that's why this reordering of the entertainment industry is different from the history of big changes that has made Hollywood predict its own demise many times before.