The Long Slow Suicide of the Theatrical Movie Business
We are witnessing the greatest self own in Media history
Rememeber when a little indie movie called SWINGERS came out and for a couple of years it seemed like every American under the age of 30 decided to take up swing dancing? Remember when Philadelphia erected a statue of a boxer who never actually existed? Remember when four actors started a restaurant franchise called PLANET HOLLYWOOD and every new opening was bigger than the biggest movie premeire and dominated international news? Remember when JFK caused the Congress to re-open the investigation into the Kennedy assassination and the record was changed to reflect that he was probably killed by a conspiracy?
Yeah that was all a very long time ago…
When observed superficially, which is the only way Hollywood does anything, the streaming movie model makes perfect sense.
If you’re a movie studio in 2022 all you need do under the streaming model, the theory goes, is convince your audience to click “auto-renew” on a relatively low 10-15 dollar monthly fee, once a year. As long as you provide them with enough content so that they never have to leave their couch, your chance of getting those renewals remains high, because your subscribers will always be able to convince themselves that they’re getting more than their money’s worth per month on what used to be the cost of a single movie ticket.
Contrast that with the theatrical model where, 52 times a year, you must convince your audience to get up off the couch, take a shower, put on actual pants (underwear still optional), leave the house (quelle horreur!) drive to the theater and spend upwards of a hundred dollars (gas, parking, tickets, food) every single time, to see a movie that might suck like a Dyson.
Be honest… if you were an entrepreneur with a million dollars to invest and a gun to your head, you’d pick Option #1 seven days a week and twice on Sunday.
But if we look at these two competing models in a slightly different way, it starts to look an awful lot like the studios created a trap for themselves and then walked right into it.
For a hundred years, under the theatrical model, the studios had their customers trained to expect no more than one piece of content a week, almost always on Friday nights. And sometimes, during the dark Winter months for example, not even as often as that. In February, a major studio might only have one or two major releases during the entire month. What this arrangement bought the studios was time and space… time to develop good product and space to make sure it was good before unleashing it on the market.
But under the streaming model, all that time and space is gone. Developing great movies can take years, and steamers don’t have that kind of time. Streaming custmers expect new product constantly… not just on Friday nights… they want it at 3AM on a random Tuesday and 2 o’clock in the afternoon on Easter Sunday. A constant firehose of content aimed right at their face is what streaming customers demand, and they’re paying a fraction of what they used to pay at the theater while they demand it. A theater-goer was lucky to get a single movie ticket for 15 bucks… now they get all the content they can swallow in 30 days for the same price.
The result is that Studios are now slaves to the schedule… Disney + subscribers expect a constant stream of new feature film content, especially the stuff branded by Star Wars and Marvel. Their parents might have been fine with one Marvel film per year or one new Star Wars trilogy per decade, but today’s Disney + customers are most assuredly not.
And it’s not just Disney staring down this existential dilemna… ALL the services, old and young, from Netflix to Apple to HBO Max and Paramount + know that their customers are ravenous for titles, for franchises… for anything that will differentiate their product, or elevate their firehose of content above all the others. The word “original” has become a slur in Hollywood… you’d have a better chance attracting vampires to a garlic farm than selling anything truly original (meaning not based on a property already well-known by audiences) to a movie studio in 2022.
The studios are starting to feel the strain of this dilemna as they begin to run out of available titles, while simultaneously finding themselves forced to pay more-and-more for those few titles that remain. Amazon paid $250 million for the rights to LORD OF THE RINGS… That’s two hundred and fifty million dollars… and all before they’d written a single script, hired a single actor, or shot a single frame of footage. I have no doubt that this particular investment will ultimately pay off handsomely, but I’m much less certain about the financial outcome of some of the more recent eye-popping purchases… like Netflix’s $450 million dollar deal for two KNIVES OUT sequels or Universal’s $400 million commitment to make three EXORCIST movies.
Ouch!
But that’s the thing about scarce resources… they are expensive. That’s how it works. Anyone who has tried to buy a used car over the last six months knows this very well. Right now, known titles are extremely scarce, and so the studios are paying a premium for the ones that remain… and not all of them are going to be worth the price.
While all this is happening in the background, the Studios are making things worse by willfully devaluing their own product. What used to be a lifestyle brand… “The Movies”… is now just another offering on the same cluttered “home screen” as reruns of TAXI and WKRP IN CINCINATTI. Part of the reason why Tiffany diamonds are so valuable is because you can only get them at Tiffany’s. Hollywood has done the marketing equivalent of selling Tiffany diamonds at Target.
The Studios have forgotten that theaters were once the sizzle that sold the steak… the blue bag the diamond used to arrive in. Everything about the threatrical experience, from the ticket you held in your hand, to the excited crowds waiting to rush for the best seats, the THX and Dolby sound systems, the previews, the wide comfortable seats, the sturm and drang of rising curtains and lowering lights all helped to make the movies themselves feel more special. There’s no doubt that comedy audiences laugh harder when surrounded by a crowd of laughing people just as there’s no doubt that horror movie fans scream louder when surrounded by other folks who are also shrieking in terror. The communal experience is the icing on the cake, and it generates better audience reviews and more repeat business.
Movies used to differentiate themselves from TV shows by the fact that they didn’t appear on the small screen for months (sometimes years) after their theatrical release. Now that you can get them anywhere anytime, including on your phone, often on the same day as their theatrical release, is it any wonder that people care about movies less and less? It’s economics 101… scarcity increases value. If something is easy to get, the human brain tells us that it must not be worth having.
And just like plane crashes, where disasters never happen because just one thing goes wrong, but are always the result of a long chain of catastrophic events, these things are happening to the movie business while another critical change is occurring…
The charge of the Woke Brigades…
Years ago Hollywood decided to try and appease the Social Justice warriors and racial grifters, thinking that if they did so, the crazies might leave them alone… but as we all know by now, you cannot appease a hungry alligator, the best you can hope for is that the alligator eats you last.
And that is exactly what has happened in the movie business. Sooner or later, the alligator comes for all.
The whole thing really started to accelerate during the #OscarsSoWhite campaign of 2016 which led to a series of changes in the way people are invited to join the Academy, the methods by which movies are nominated and voted upon, racial quotas as a requirement for Best Picture consideration, and even on what kinds of Academy Awards show hosts are acceptable for TV (the answer turned out to be none, and for several years now the show has gone on without a host). As a result, the greatest free advertisement for Hollywood’s product, a three hour show that used to command an entire weekend of the world’s attention and the eyeballs of a billion people around the world, is a shell of its former self. Hardly anyone watches the show anymore and it’s reasonable to assume that within a decade it will no longer be on the broadcast schedule at all… much like the Golden Globes which have gone from an exclusive booze-fueled event Hollywood elites once climbed over each other to attend, to nothing more than a glorified ListServ.
Like Gozer demanding the Ghostbusters choose the form of their destructor, the Woke Scolds have issued a similar demand to Hollywood… and Hollywood has dutifully chosen theirs… Not J. Edgar Hoover, or the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man this time, but a monster called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
The Woke Scolds have been given permanent veto power over Hollywood’s end product, and as a result, DEI has rendered whole swathes of Hollywood offerings unsuitable for American eyes.
I’ve detailed a lot of this in my essay on the Library of cancelled films I’ve been building, but the problem runs much deeper than old movies about which nothing can be done. The Woke-ificiation of Hollywood will have dire consequences for the future of content as well.
Disney, in particular, is banking much of its future on a gigantic list of legacy titles that they are desperate to exploit downrange. The problem is, much of that legacy is tarnished by what have become highly “problematic story elements”… in the parlance of our time… and in some cases, reworking these stories to avoid those problematic elements would create a story so far removed from those audiences already know and love, that the whole purpose of rebooting these legacy titles is rendered moot.
The current kerfuffle over the Dwarves in Disney’s reboot of SNOW WHITE is a stark warning. It’s interesting to note that in the case of SHOW WHITE, the woke scolds skipped right over Disney’s not-so-humble-brag about the hiring of the first Latina actress ever to play Snow White and went straight for the throat on Disney’s continued exploitation of dwarfism... And now Disney has cancelled the movie altogether, which only goes to show you can never win with these people and it’s a waste of time to even try.
But it’s not just family movies that suffer… it’s everything. The constant bitching about whether or not James Bond should be so toxically masculine, or so white, or even so male… does nothing to make the 007 movies any better. Just as debating whether or not the STAR WARS cast is diverse enough or whether or not Indiana Jones ought to be replaced by a woman does nothing to make those movies any better. Even worse, for the Studios who need these franchises to continue delivering audiences for years to come, it does nothing to extend the useful shelf life of their most valuable titles… note that for all the focus on increased diversity in STAR WARS, the once-reliable Star Wars movie release schedule has ground to a halt that appears to be permanent. It appears that while they were busy making sure their casts were diverse, they forgot to make movies people actually want to see.
Not only that, but the ridiculous idea that “The Movies” are foundationally racist and/or sexist, to say nothing of the ugly slur that audiences are so racist that they will reject any movie featuring non-white stars, completely ignores the reality of Hollywood’s “blockbuster era.” Hollywood is more woke now that it’s ever been, even going so far as to actively discriminate against white writers, directors, and actors, and yet it hasn’t been able to produce another Eddie Murphy or Will Smith. I think Idris Elba is a fantastic actor, one of the brightest stars in the business right now, but in terms of raw star power, he’s no Denzel Washington… hell, he’s not even Danny Glover, Wesley Snipes or Carl Weathers.
This has nothing to do with Idris Elba and everything to do with an industry whose product has become so devalued, its audience so fractured and diffused, that it can no longer create transcendant stars the way it used to… white, black or none of the above.
Movies, for all sorts of unfortunate reasons, occupy a smaller and smaller space in the pop culture universe with each year that goes by. I don’t know if anything can be done to reverse that trend, but as a guy who loves movies and who moved to Los Angeles 30 years ago to get into the movie business, I think it’s worth considering the fact that many of the things that are killing “The Movies” are own goals, and that Hollywood could do much to stop the slow death of their business simply by getting out of its own way.
But I’ve worked here long enough to know that this outcome is highly unlikely. Fortunately, for people like me who still love “The Movies”, there is one obvious benefit of the streaming model, and that is the fact that a hundred years of classic films are now available to us with a single click.
If you need me, I’ll be over here watching THE GODFATHER… again.