IIn the upcoming film Anti-Life, Bruce Willis plays the leader of a rough crew mechanic who must save the remnants of humanity from the clutches of a murderous shape-shifting alien. At another time – say only 25 years ago – there is a chance that Anti-Life would end up as the seventh or eighth biggest film of the year. However, it’s 2021, and Anti-Life looks set to become another unfortunate, unloved video-on-demand (VOD) offering that exists primarily as a vehicle for Bruce Willis to walk up to his salary.
Or at least that would be the case if the cinemas were open. But this is not the case, so Anti-Life finds itself in the same way as every other movie that appears. Because now all movies, whether it’s in jeopardy, or the terrible Bruce Willis fillers of the late era, are VOD movies. Regardless of the quality, they are destined to go to the same gloomy streaming menu. At the time of writing, the section “top new releases” on Rakuten Wonder Woman 1984, The New Mutants, contains an Anthony Mackie / Jamie Dornan double-headed who can go over everything, a documentary that proposes the theory that we are all on a computer live. simulation, and a movie called Jiu Jitsu, where Nicolas Cage defeats some aliens with a sword.
This is the new film landscape, and it’s a level playing field. Now that we do not have to sneak away from work or hire babysitters to take a movie to the cinema, all movies will be judged on the same scale. Sometimes the criteria is, ‘I’ve heard good things about this.’ Other times it’s: ‘Screw it on, there’s nothing else and I want to see Nicolas Cage swing a sword to pay off his tax bill.’
What I’m trying to say is this: it’s not entirely unlikely to assume that Anti-Life will be a hit. It will earn just as much money as Wonder Woman in the cinema, that is, nothing, and the domestic population may be so hungry for entertainment that they want to see what Bruce Willis is doing, if only out of morbid curiosity.
In the spirit of public service, I must point out that this is a bad idea, because Anti-Life is cheap and dull, and Willis seems to be repeating all his lines phonetically in a void. But people can still watch it, just as they can see Eye for an Eye, the upcoming detective film by John Travolta that looks like the by-product of an administrative snafu in which the entire production budget was accidentally spent on wigs. Or Willy’s Wonderland, true (and I want to make it clear that this is a real movie that actually exists), Nicolas Cage has a bare-knuckle fist fight with a bloodthirsty beret-bearing crocodile doll in a ghostly theme park.
When all these movies end up on VOD services, they will have exactly the same impact as a trailer. The only thing that distinguishes Willy’s Wonderland from Godzilla vs Kong is the size of his publicity budget. And it probably can’t be much either. Both movies share a landing page on a streaming site. It’s a binary decision: King Kong hits a big crocodile or Cage with a big crocodile.
If you keep that in mind, it could become a golden era for fading legacy stars who have to force it on VOD. Now that this is the only way to look at new releases, these old-fashioned workhorses have suddenly found themselves in the game again. Maybe Boss Level, a ‘death-loop action thriller’, will turn out to be Mel Gibson’s access to the A-list. Perhaps Original Gangster, a film about an orphan in the London gangland, will provide the shot in the arm for Steve Guttenberg who has been absent for the past 20 years. Perhaps Nemesis, possibly the most generic Billy Murray movie ever made, will drag Nick Moran’s career back to his heyday of the 1990s.
Of course, this can be a fleeting phenomenon, either because the cinemas reopen or all short players start releasing directly after streaming. But now, even if it only takes about six weeks, the broken new landscape means that the chances are high that Nicolas Cage can regain his crown as the biggest damn movie star in the world.