Editorial: Warner Bros. And Disney Are Engaged In A Cinematic Civil War

 Recently, movie studios have made a release date for an upcoming movie far more than just a typical date. Oh no, it's as essential as any other part of the film, with studios grabbing release dates far, far in advance in order to give their film the best possible advantage financially. Studios have always been eager to pick the best release dates possible, but recently, two studios have been using it as a way to compete with each other on a massive scale.

Disney has got to be the studio to beat right now, with everything really just coming up daisies for the studio in recent years. PIXAR is a relentless hit-maker, Walt Disney Animation Studios got its groove back, Marvel Studios is unstoppable and starting in 2015, Star Wars movies will be a yearly fixture of their schedules. That's a financial powerhouse like no other in Hollywood, and one particular studio wants a piece of that success more than anything else in the world; Warner Bros. Starting next year, they'll be imitating Disney to a tee in the hopes of garnering their spectacular success.

The most obvious way they'll be aping Disney is by trying to turn Man of Steel into a massive DC Cinematic Universe, with 2016's Batman V. Superman starting a new plan to release two films based on DC Comics properties a year. It's hard to tell at this point how that plan will fare (Was Man of Steel really that beloved to warrant being the starting point for untold amounts of sequels and spin-offs?), but Warner Bros. is certainly going gung-ho with this approach, going so far as to schedule DC Comics films all the way into 2020.

Another interesting way Warner Bros. will mimic Disney is in their fantasy live-action/CGI adaptations of popular fairy tales. Since 2010, Disney has turned the stories of Alice in Wonderland and Maleficent into box office powerhouses, and plan to turn Cinderella and The Jungle Book into movies similar to the two aforementioned features (PG rating, dark action, tons of VFX, lots of well-known actors) in 2015.

Warner Bros. is also going after this approach, even going so far as to adapt fairy tales that are at the center of extremely beloved animated Disney features. In July 2015, they'll begin this new phase of moviemaking with a gritty look at Peter Pan that currently has no title, but has a cast that contains the likes of Garrett Hedlund, Amanda Seyfried, Rooney Mara and Hugh Jackman as Blackbeard. In 2016, they go into overdrive, with new adaptations of Tarzan from David Yates, the director of the last four Harry Potter films (Samuel L. Jackson and Christoph Waltz are in that one), some new King Arthur film (which is the inspiration for my one of my least favorite animated Disney films, The Sword In The Stone) and a movie called, I'm not making this up, The Jungle Book: Origins.

Oh man, it's fun to see Warner Bros. trying to ape Disney in this manner, though in their defense they don't have that high of a bar to clear in terms of quality if they wanna outdo the likes of Maleficent. But even more fun than that is watching Warner Bros. try to start fights in terms of choosing release dates. A great example of this is whenever Warner Bros. moved up Batman V. Superman to May 6, 2016, a date already occupied for a long time by Captain America 3. Ah, Warner Bros., never change. You're too much fun to watch when it comes to choosing release dates. Even if the films they greenlight in order to ape Disneys output wind up lacking (though I hope not, considering the talented directors that aren't Zack Snyder that are in charge of them), at least this kind of release date tomfoolery will provide plenty of entertainment.