Seeing COVID-19 deniers pull up for the vaccine. LET THEM ALL TALK. It certainly wasn't the biggest (or worst) news of the year but the recent announcement by Warner Bros. that the studio would be releasing its entire 2021 slate simultaneously in theaters and on the HBOMax streaming platform has produced no small amount of hand-wringing and outcry. Prominent directors — including Christopher Nolan, whose insistence that his Tenet be released theatrically in the midst of the pandemic may well have heralded the death of the modern moviegoing experience — have mounted the battlements to decry the decision, both in the name of art and of commerce. And rightfully so, if they're being genuine about it. One wonders, though, whether the scramble to renegotiate paydays funded primarily by gross-profit percentages (back-end points) is more central to the backlash than reverence for the medium. Regardless, the movie industry, like so many others, seems to be teetering on the brink of precipitous change. To what that change will finally amount remains unknowable, at least from where I sit. It does seem abundantly clear, though, that things will be different in the not-so-distant future; a great number of people with skin in the game do not like it.