A Blockbuster and a Pixar Movie Are Out This Weekend—With a Catch

With The Batman scoring the second-highest opening weekend of the pandemic, it feels like the theatrical experience has finally come to life in 2022 after the omicron variant caused low returns and led several movies to shuffle their release dates at the beginning of the year. (Please, Sony Pictures, stop giving us Morbius blue balls.) Given that resounding success, two major film releases seemed set to double down on the industry’s box office rebound this coming weekend: Turning Red, the latest animated feature from Pixar, and The Adam Project, a sci-fi blockbuster that reunites Ryan Reynolds with Free Guy director Shawn Levy. There’s just one problem: Neither of these movies is coming out in theaters across the country.

As Disney announced in January amid the omicron surge, Turning Red, which follows a 13-year-old girl who discovers that she morphs into a giant red panda when she gets emotional, would bypass a traditional release and instead debut on Disney+. (For international markets in which the company’s streaming service isn’t available, the film will be released theatrically at a later date.) Turning Red is now the third consecutive Pixar production to go the straight-to-streaming route, following Luca and Soul. The Adam Project, meanwhile, was eyed by Tom Cruise and Paramount Pictures all the way back in 2012 before the project became mired in development hell and was ultimately acquired by Netflix in 2020. As Netflix is wont to do, The Adam Project has a limited theatrical release that coincides with its debut on streaming—where the vast majority of people will catch the movie.

But while Turning Red and The Adam Project took very different paths to land on their respective streamers, their fates—coming off an excellent opening weekend for yet another Batman adaptation—speak to larger shifts within the industry, and what kind of films are even afforded a chance at box office success. The pandemic has pushed major studios to favor IP-driven projects more and more, but as a result, there are fewer avenues than ever before to crafting and sharing original stories on the biggest possible screen, while audiences are left to settle for an increasingly myopic landscape.

Netflix’s handling of The Adam Project, a time-traveling caper in which a pilot from the future has to team up with his younger self to save the world, is hardly surprising. With the notable exception of buzzy Oscar hopefuls like The Irishman and Mank, the company doesn’t put much stock in theatrical engagements. (And even in those rare cases, the theatrical rollouts are brief and limited to major markets.) But the fact that The Adam Project—an original blockbuster-esque production starring Reynolds, Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldaña, and Jennifer Garner—landed on Netflix to begin with is indicative of how major studios have continued to prioritize existing franchises. “I’m grateful that Netflix has a commitment to making movies like this, original stories based on nothing more than an idea,” Reynolds told The Hollywood Reporter in February.

The Adam Project isn’t just a movie big on spectacle and led by a proven star, though—it’s also…