Movie Theaters are Mostly Dead
Movie theaters, to quote The Princess Bride, are mostly dead.
That means slightly alive, but they’re limping along real hard. This pains me more than most, as a movie theater power user. I saw 120 movies in theaters last year alone and 22 since the theaters reopened earlier this year. But COVID has been the driving force to their inevitable demise. The average American sees four or five movies in theaters a year. After COVID, I’m guessing the average American has maybe gone to the theaters once, maybe, to see Tenet. A family might have seen a few children’s films that have been released since the reopening, but that’s one or two movies at this point.
Disney+, Disney’s new streaming service, hit its five-year subscriber goal in less than a year because of COVID. Amazon Prime, which includes Prime Video, is in 82% of US households. HBO Max, owned by AT&T which also owns Warner Brothers, launched recently as well. Netflix is still holding on, likely buoyed by the pandemic, but is bogged down in tens of billions in debt without the economies of scale Disney, AT&T, and Amazon have to absorb losses. Hulu is owned root and branch by Disney now, due to the 20th Century Fox acquisition, so it exists mostly as an add on to the higher tiers of Disney+ at this point. YouTube Premium mostly exists for ad free YouTube, since its best original show, Cobra Kai, was bought out by Netflix earlier this year. CBS and NBC have their own streaming platforms, but the former doesn’t really seem to know what it’s doing and the latter one is very new.
In a stunning move, HBO Max has decided to release every Warner Brothers film on the slate for 2021 concurrently in theaters and on HBO Max. After the first week, the movies will leave HBO Max for the rest of their theatrical run. Disney released its next Pixar film, Soul, on Christmas Day for free on Disney+ after releasing the live-action remake of Mulan on the same platform for $30.00 earlier this year. NBC Universal, owned by Comcast, released the animated sequel to the smash animated hit Trolls earlier this year for around $20.00 and raked in the cash. Now with its own streaming platform, Peacock, what’s to stop them from releasing the next Fast & Furious movie there? Nothing. As long as American consumers are starved for content, they will cling to the nearest new thing. The Marvel Cinematic Universe shows will start dropping on Disney+ very soon, multiple times a year.
Theaters are done.
As long as the New York state and Los Angeles media markets remain closed, studios have little incentive to keep pushing films they have already filmed, some in the tens of millions of dollars if not more, from making some money. Since movie tickets aren’t a thing on streaming, the entire price of those subscriptions goes right into the studios’ pockets instead of losing half the take to the movie theaters. Movie theaters were already on their last legs before COVID. The pandemic just turned them into dead men walking. Unless Amazon or Google buys AMC or Regal, I don’t see how a lot of movie theater franchisees don’t permanently close all around the country with continued reduced capacity.
…the entire price of those subscriptions goes right into the studios’ pockets…
Someone, somewhere, is paying for all the backbone bandwidth and server farms needed to generate and transport hundreds of millions of video streams. All of the services’ favorite customer is still the household that pays $9.95 every month and watches two movies. And hate the ones that for the same price watch two movies every evening.Report
I heard that Wonder Woman 1984 cleared $10 million domestic ticket sales on its opening weekend, which included Christmas. The studio is happy with the results, and is moving forward on a third movie. How would you even explain that to one-year-ago you?Report
One of the things the pandemic has illustrated for me is that it is very pleasant and desirable to be in a space with a bunch of other human beings doing the same thing. Watching a movie, watching a sporting event, worshipping, and so on. Fighting through the mall, maybe not quite so much, but that too.
So, movie theaters won’t be the same, but I’m not sure they will be dead.
In the meantime, Happy New Year to you all!Report
Some people speculate that the theaters could see a revival this year, following thinking along the lines of your comment. For my part, I’ve been killing so much time watching movies and tv that I’m looking forward to going somewhere there’s not a screen.Report
Happy New Year to everyone.
Yeah movie theaters are dead but the masses want entertainment more than ever and the entertainment producers still need to be paid.
So the money movie theaters flowed to the producers will need to come from somewhere else. Advertising, subscriptions or viewing fees or something else; they money will have to be paid.Report
Dune has been pushed back a year, and the only reason I can see for that is to be in theaters next Christmas season.Report
Theaters won’t die, probably, but any of them that were on the margins are toast. I think we will see a significant contraction of available theaters, especially in rural areas and smaller cities where there just isn’t enough population to fill the seats on a consistent basis.
The nice, big theaters that regularly filled the house and had good concessions, etc. They’ll recover, just because some movies are awesome on the big screen.
And in that vein, I think we will see a lot of movies that are not spectacle going straight to streaming. I’ve never found a lot of added value of the theater for a movie like “Pieces of a Woman”, whereas “WW84” or “Monster Hunter” gains a lot from the big screen.Report
Does the word “movie” retain any meaning at that point?Report
Cinematic spectacle is probably more apt.Report
Yeah, those would still exist, but I was thinking about the rest. People will watch TikTok videos for 10 seconds, and they’ll binge-watch 8-episode seasons of streaming shows. “Movie” just becomes an arbitrary designation for one-shots that are 80-130 minutes long. The only forces maintaining the designation would be convention, the awards system, and those big theater event movies. We could see creators given the freedom to tell a story in however long it takes, with no studio pressure to pad it out or to cut out essential parts that only make it to the director’s cut. If everything’s on streaming services, you can make something that only runs 40 minutes, and you don’t have to negotiate with a separate entity to make a three-part 6-hour product.Report
You’re forgetting a big driver of feature lengths: children. I think there will always be one-offs structured for their unique attention spans and attachment to a particular, condensed story that begins and fully resolves in a single sitting.Report
A single sitting in a theater, mind you.
My kid can binge watch the hell out of a show. You could do longer format kid movies if you brought back the intermission for potty breaks.Report
My son will watch certain shows but I don’t think he’s old enough to understand story continuity across multiple episodes of something. Conversely he’s very much into yet another viewing of the same Disney/Pixar movie we’ve already watched a thousand times.
I’ll be curious to see how Disney et. al. respond. I assume that will be the leading indicator for everyone else.Report