Not exactly a list of movies that I would've been happy to pay money to see in theaters...
Say what you will, but in a non-pandemic time, Army of the Dead probably cleans up during nicely over maybe a Presidents Day weekend or something at the very least. Luca almost definitely would've been a pretty big success, too. Without Remorse and The Tomorrow War were both pretty bad, but both had the star-power and Without Remorse specifically had a great trailer so I could've seen that doing some solid enough business.
I just picked 4 random, high-profile films from this past year. To look at another movie, Coming 2 America is a film that probably was probably better off on streaming. It got a huge amount of viewership over the first weekend on Amazon, but as far as theaters go, even for a sequel, I never bought into this being something that people were really clamoring to see, especially something that needed a Christmas release date like it originally had for theaters.
I can flip an argument around though and say something like Free Guy would've never been as big of a hit on streaming as it was in the theaters. Say they did what they just did with Vacation Friends and released Free Guy on Hulu in the US and on Disney+ Star internationally. You're reaching a large audience, yes, but Disney+ isn't fully rolled out worldwide yet, so that's going against it, and also, a movie like Free Guy just seems to have benefited from word of mouth and being the only movie in theaters whereas on streaming, a new movie comes out every week and streaming movies are quickly forgotten about (so in this case, I understand Jenkins' argument more).
It all goes back to me saying - why does it have to be one or another? Some movies are great popcorn movies that are good movies to be that new movie every week on streaming, but if you're aiming to be more than that, than that's what the theaters are for.
