No major studio has ever released a movie as big as Wonder Woman 1984 straight to streaming before, and it will be months or years until we know exactly how successful this experiment of putting the movie in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously was. Just three days after the movie premiered, though, Warner Bros. is already announcing their plans for a third Wonder Woman movie, which they claim will “conclude the long-planned theatrical trilogy.” Both star Gal Gadot and director Patty Jenkins are attached to return as well.

The official press release announcing the new project boasts that Wonder Woman 1984 grossed $36.1 million in worldwide theaters over the weekend. That’s better than Tenet’s $20.2 million when it opened in theaters back in September, but that’s well behind the $103.2 million the first Wonder Woman earned in its opening weekend in U.S. theaters along back in the pre-coronavirus days of 2017. WW84 has earned more than $85 million worldwide to date, and earned a B+ from CinemaScore. (The original film got an A.)

As for demand on HBO Max, Warner claims that “nearly half of the platform’s retail subscribers” watched the movie on Christmas. The service overall saw “more than triple” its normal total viewing hours on Friday compared to a typical day the previous month. (I’m not sure we can credit all of that to Wonder Woman. It was Christmas, after all, with a lot of families sitting at home because of the pandemic.)

The announcement does make it clear they ended Wonder Woman 3 to close out a “theatrical” trilogy of Wonder Woman movies. That would require movie theaters to still exist in several years, of course, and Warner Bros. still plans on releasing all of its 2021 movies to HBO Max.

Gallery — Movies With Baffling CinemaScores:

 

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