How ‘Wolfs’ became the embodiment of everything wrong with the streaming era
Outside of the latest chapter in a proven franchise, not many movies are guaranteed hits waiting to happen. However, based on the talent involved, Wolfs markets itself to the widest possible audience and possesses all of the ingredients required to turn a tidy profit on the big screen.
If anything, the film markets itself. It’s an action comedy with two of the biggest stars in the industry in the lead roles, written and directed by a filmmaker whose previous three features brought in billions. If trailers still had voiceover guys, then they’d be having a field day over narrating the promotional spots.
After all, Wolfs is a darkly comic crime story headlined by Academy Award winner George Clooney and Brad Pitt, with Jon Watts—director of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Spider-Man trilogy with Tom Holland—at the helm. It’s a slam dunk, but the powers-that-be decided they didn’t want to share it with the world.
Breaking it down even further, it’s indicative of the perils of streaming that Wolfs is being withheld from a wide release. Pitt and Clooney have been superstars for decades; they’ve got a combined haul of four Oscars from 15 nominations, and the last time they shared the screen as characters who operated on the wrong side of the law, Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean trilogy cleared a billion at the box office.
Watts, meanwhile, last stepped behind the camera on the third highest-grossing film to ever screen in the United States and the seventh top-earning movie in history. Every major studio and streamer in the business waded into the frenzied bidding war to secure the rights to the project, and Apple emerging as the victor was always going to pose a problem.
According to recent estimates, AppleTV+ has around 44 million subscribers globally. It’s not a drop in the ocean, but it’s minuscule compared to Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney+. The streaming service has backed some phenomenal pictures and widely acclaimed TV shows, but outside of Ted Lasso, it hasn’t produced a single thing that captured the zeitgeist, established itself as a must-see, or led to a major uptick in customers.
Denzel Washington’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, Tom Hanks’ Greyhound and Finch, Jennifer Lawrence’s Causeway, and Taron Egerton’s Tetris all won strong notices but were quickly forgotten in the fast-paced world of cinema, while Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon did buck the trend with a lengthy big screen run, but bombed. That’s not even counting episodic titles like Silo, Severance, Dark Matter, Slow Horses, and Bad Sisters, either; all of them are great shows, but not many people are watching them or talking about them compared to streaming’s buzziest hits.
Wolfs was initially scheduled for a wide theatrical release, which was part of Clooney and Pitt’s deals when they shacked up with Apple. However, nine months after the tech giant reached an agreement with Sony to handle distribution in the United States, it was announced that the high-profile potential hit would instead enjoy a one-week limited run before taking up permanent residency on streaming.
It isn’t even getting that much internationally, with Clooney admitting, “Of course it’s a bummer,” that Wolfs was basically a streaming exclusive, acknowledging that “it would have been nicer to have a wide release.” Money talks at the end of the day, but Apple’s decision that the risk wasn’t worth the prospective rewards speaks to a bigger problem with cinema.
For one thing, original films continue to struggle. The box office has been rebounding to a certain extent, but the 14 biggest hits of 2024 so far are all sequels, reboots or adaptations. John Krasinski’s IF is the highest-grossing movie based on a completely original idea, and even then, its profit margins were razor thin if they even existed.
The shortened windows between the big screen and on-demand have made the theatrical experience less essential than ever, but having Pitt and Clooney in a high-concept caper helmed by the Spider-Man guy ticks an awful lot of demographic boxes. Instead, Wolfs will land on AppleTV+ with a whimper, and in the space of a couple of weeks, it’ll drift off into the cultural ether, never to be spoken of again.
