Photos: Everett Collection, Warner Bros ; Illustration: Dillen Phelps

Next weekend, Mortal Kombat II opens in theaters everywhere, and is expected to hit a franchise record with its opening weekend. It wouldn’t be the first time that a Mortal Kombat movie has overperformed (or, in the words of the Mortal Kombat: Annihilation poster, “destroy[ed] all expectations”). The previous installment, 2021’s Mortal Kombat, emerged in the early days of movie theaters being fully reopened after the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic with a surprisingly robust opening weekend.

However, the reboot also fell off quickly, and wound up making only slightly more than Annihilation, which, after all, destroyed expectations in the wrong way after its own first weekend. This may have been because the 2021 version was a Mortal Kombat movie that seemed to be about preventing Mortal Kombat from occurring at all costs. Or, given how it became the most successful film ever launched on HBO Max, it may have been because anyone with a subscription to that service could have watched it immediately at home, with no gap between its theatrical and streaming bows. For Warner Bros. movies in 2021, those two dates would be one and the same in a tactic the industry calls “day-and-date.”

The brainchild of then WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar, it was code-named Project Popcorn., and it was supposed to serve as an intersection point between multiple, ultrazeitgeisty vectors: There was the pandemic itself, which had nuked most of 2020’s big theatrical releases, leaving movies either delayed for months-to-years, or shunted off to streaming in hopes of goosing subscribers during their captive-audience era, and now seemed to be easing with the introduction of a vaccine, leaving theaters hungry for new product and nervous that reopening their doors might not be enough. There was the rising of streaming itself, accelerated by the pandemic but well in the works before the early days of 2020, and companies desperate to pump up their shareholder value by seeming to embrace this new form of consumption (even if the numbers didn’t quite add up). Also predating the pandemic: the rising pressure on movie studios to provide big-ticket theme-park-style experiences, at the expense of more modestly budgeted programmers that have been a valuable part of the movie ecosystem for somewhere in the vicinity of a century.

The Warner Bros. solution: Take a promising 14-movie slate, featuring franchise entries, awards hopefuls, star vehicles, and genre plays, and give it to theaters and streaming, both at once. It would boost HBO Max subscriber numbers AND give theater owners what they needed. It would up streaming numbers, and also the other kind, where there’s actually money attached. It would ease safety concerns for anyone cautious about returning to the movies while give those itching to get out of the house something to do. What could go wrong?

At first, in those low-expectations early days, very little. The first three Project Popcorn titles (plus Wonder Woman 1984, which arrived at the end of 2020) came out before theaters were fully reopened, so the fact that Tom & Jerry did any business at all felt like a nice bonus on a movie that probably wasn’t worth holding hostage for another half a year. Godzilla vs. Kong stomped into theaters for a grand reopening, when pretty much every major city was showing new movies again, and it was, indeed, the biggest box-office hit since early 2020. Maybe it even boosted its eventual sequel through its simultaneous small-screen availability.

Mortal Kombat was next, and after that strong opening, it set the pattern for most of the remaining Warner Bros. releases: Opening that might have been soft in the before times, looked quite good in the context of COVID, and absolutely collapsed after weekend one. The third Conjuring movie followed almost the exact same trajectory. So did Space Jam: A New Legacy. And those were the bigger movies of the bunch; The Suicide Squad outright bombed. On it went, until Dune bookended Godzilla vs. Kong as a genuine $100 million hit.

In some ways, the combination of too much faith in streaming and too much money spent on crappy movies made the low returns a little cathartic. Mortal Kombat was shockingly dull! Space Jam: A New Legacy was downright contemptible! To hell with Tom & Jerry co-starring Colin Jost! This is what you give starving moviegoers and theater operators in their time of need?!

But the truth is, plenty of good stuff got lost in the Project Popcorn shuffle, too. In the Heights, from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s acclaimed Broadway musical, opened OK, got great reviews, and received an “A” CinemaScore, so its failure to find legs was, in retrospect, a chilling warning sign about the woeful box office fate of Steven Spielberg’s terrific West Side Story. James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad was a massive improvement on its same-named predecessor, and one of the best DCEU movies yet; no one went. Reminiscence, a big-budget original sci-fi movie with Hugh Jackman, and Malignant, a lower-budget original horror movie from James Wan, posted incredibly low numbers; both are well worth seeking out for fans of their respective genres. The failure of Clint Eastwood’s gentle-spirited Cry Macho caused short-sighted Warner Bros. brass to bury the enormously entertaining and accessible Juror #2.

Warner bounced back, flopped around some more, and bounced back again. The fact that they’re currently in the process of being sold off to become a division of Paramount, a show business tragedy of its type, probably isn’t directly attributable to Project Popcorn; the studio had a knockout 2025, and, for that matter, had their biggest-grossing movie ever in 2023 with Barbie. They got sold off anyway. That’s what guys like David Zaslav are there to do. The truth is, corporate consolidation happens regardless of whatever the consolidated companies still have plenty of potential independent life to them; that’s what makes it so insidious. You could even point to the Project Popcorn titles as necessary evidence that simply putting every movie out on a subscription streamer isn’t a path toward profitability just because it might temporarily impress shareholders, or whoever that was supposed to benefit.

For a year, though, a fairly diverse and adventurous studio slate was mashed into a sort of streaming slurry, from which only Godzilla, Kong, and the Dune gang emerged. Some of these movies might have flopped anyway, no matter how worthwhile. But what was intended as a forward-looking initiative now comes across more like blurred vision: Did the Warner Bros. brass at the time even understand the difference between a theatrical release, a streaming movie, and mindless content?

HBO Max probably wasn’t quite ubiquitous enough in 2021 to blame them for a Netflix-style collapsing of content barriers, and the COVID situation wasn’t unambiguous enough to deny Warner Bros. some benefit of the doubt. (Disney was also putting its movies on streaming right away in mid-2021, albeit for a rental fee rather than on their subscription service.) And hey, plenty of Project Popcorn alumni, some of them likely unwilling, seem to be doing fine: More Godzilla x Kong, Dune, Conjuring, and Mortal Kombat awaits. James Gunn was hired to run DC Studios despite his movie’s financial problems. The creator, cast, and director of In the Heights have all flourished. Clint Eastwood may well make some more movies in his 90s, an unprecedented feat in modern Hollywood. Paramount swears up and down that its newly fused company will maintain two studio’s worth of theatrical features annually. Just don’t be surprised if Project Popcorn re-emerges under a less catchy name with a simpler initiative: Make huge, uncontroversial, IP-supported event movies for theaters, and forget the rest.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Mortal Kombat on HBO Max