Pixar's pandemic films are heading to theaters. Other studios should follow suit

2020 is a forgotten year at the movies. Namely because the movies and, more specifically, movie theaters barely existed. After Trolls: World Tour broke the dam for movies to bypass theaters and go straight to VOD, the words “day-and-date” emerged as a new form of distribution. Movies would simultaneously go live on streamers and in theaters, and it was the right thing to do at the time. Seeing Tenet wasn’t worth adding to the already catastrophic losses. Today, unsustainable trends like “day and date” release structures have mostly gone the way of “social distancing.” Movie theaters are back open, and surprisingly, movies devoid of superheroes and multiverses are making money.

But, following six months of strikes, studios are running low on movies for theaters to show. Maybe they should do what Disney is doing and dig into their orphaned pandemic content. This Friday, Soul, the two-time Oscar winner from Pixar, is getting its first proper theatrical run. It’s not alone. Throughout the year, Disney is giving all of its forgotten Pixars their flowers. Turning Red and Luca will also get the opportunity to make some money in theaters as opposed to languishing on Disney+. There’s never been a better time to do it.

Because studios refused to budge on writers’ and actors’ demands that they inevitably agreed to some months later, no studio movies were produced last summer or fall. This means a dearth of releases in the first half of 2024. As a result, January looks even worse than Januarys of years past, when studios hid embarrassing releases on weekends too cold to go to the movies anyway. This month’s biggest release is Mean Girls, a studio musical that Universal is terrified will be discovered as such. Other than that, it’s I.S.S., starring Ariana De Bose, who is doomed to never star in a decent West Side Story follow-up.

Next month isn’t much better, with the release of Matthew Vaughn’s twisted Romancing The Stone riff Argylle, and Madame Web, the first of four superhero movies being released this year. Down the line, Warner Bros. indefinitely delayed Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to his Best Picture winner, Parasite. While studios screwed themselves and fans by letting the strikes run so long, they’re fortunate to have a backlog of movies that never got proper releases during the pandemic.

The place to start is at Warner Bros., a studio that always needs a little money. Why not re-release their final Christopher Nolan film, Tenet, in theaters and on IMAX? Sure, its reputation, particularly among Peloton instructors, isn’t so hot, but could that be because people watched it in an inferior format? There’s no way to know until WBD puts the film back on big screens. It feels all the more relevant as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer prepares to collect a host of Oscar nominations and remains primed as the frontrunner. Couldn’t Warner Bros. generate some cash off of the filmmaker they scared away with their day-and-date nonsense?

This shouldn’t only apply to $200 million sci-fi action movies about time travel. Oscar winners from 2020 and 2021 feel like relics of another time. We never got to see Nomadland, Minari, or Sound Of Metal in theaters. It could be a good opportunity to extend the lives of the so-called best films of those years with theatrical releases. We understand that Nomadland, CODA, and, yes, even, Mank probably won’t get a theatrical showcase because they’re made-for-TV movies distributed by streamers. Still, we champion their re-release all the same. Why? Because there’s nothing else coming out. We might as well get to see the inky blacks of Mank’s Academy Award-winning cinematography in an actual theater as opposed to homes awash in sunlight.

When movies make it to movie theaters, they mean more. In a theater, audiences must bend to the movie’s rules, the theater’s time schedules, and the crowd’s will. It’s time we were forced to bend to Tenet’s will and see a temporal pincer movement the way Christopher Nolan intended.