Denis Villeneuve was wrong about "Dune" and movie theaters—and there’s a lesson in there for people building products and services.
Back in 2020, Villeneuve objected when Warner Bros. decided to put "Dune: Part 1" on HBO Max at the same time it was released to theaters.
The pandemic drove the decision, of course. Warner worried too few people would return to public venues. Releasing it on streaming, however, might pull in more HBO subscribers.
Villeneuve (whose "Dune: Part 2" comes out today) objected on aesthetic grounds. His team spent three years creating a maximally immersive experience. The theater, he said, provided something home viewing couldn’t.
He’s not wrong about the aesthetic argument. But he was wrong from a business perspective.
Pandemic aside, what filmmakers like Villeneuve haven’t registered is that there’s an increasing swath of viewers who simply don’t go to theaters.
It’s not just that they don’t want to leave their homes when it’s just as easy to kick back on the couch. (Although for some that’s part of it. They don't care about the difference in aesthetic quality. They’re just looking for entertainment.)
It’s also that people’s entire experience engaging with video has changed.
Have you ever been at the movies and found yourself reaching for a remote to pause the film so you could look something up—and then found you couldn’t? Or found yourself wanting to rewind, only to realize you were locked in a one-way experience?
And then there’s the phenomenon that not everyone watches a movie straight through anymore. Instead, they might kick back for 20 minutes here, 30 minutes there, making their way through a movie over the course of a few days. The idea of sitting down (in a marginally uncomfortable seat) for a straight 2 ½ hours (the length of "Dune: Part 1") isn’t something they’re up for anymore.
I’ve seen Villeneuve’s thought process inside the heads of product leaders, esp ones who’ve been around a while. They get hung up on legacy ideas of “quality” and fail to understand how their customer’s needs and interests have evolved.
They fail to register the slew of new use cases that have emerged, and that they need to deliver for those use cases, not for their old ideas of what was required.
What makes it difficult for these folks to make this transition is that, as with Villeneuve, they’re not wrong about their quality arguments. Aesthetically, "Dune" is probably significantly better in the theater than at home.
What these leaders fail to realize, however, is that quality—or at least that level of quality—no longer matters to the customer.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that Villeneuve shouldn’t have created the masterpieces in Dune Parts 1 & 2 that he has. I just think he’s wrong to insist everyone should watch them in the theater.
Successful product leaders are ones who keep their fingers on the pulse of where their customers are, and allow their own ideas of what’s required to evolve as their customers do.