The Suicide of the Movie Business (Addendum)
If you haven’t read my essay on THE LONG SLOW SUICIDE OF THE MOVIE BUSINESS, I (of course) think it’s well worth your time. But much has happened in the (checks notes…) 10 weeks! since I wrote that essay… most notably Disney went to war with Florida and Netflix’s stock price collapsed in the wake of a subscriber loss, after consumers began to realize that… hey, Netflix’s programming kind of sucks!
The crux of my previous essay was that while the streaming model may seem like a smart economic move, it’s actually a trap that the studios are walking right into.
And now we see the teeth of the trap beginning to close.
In Netflix’s statement on the collapse of their stock price they cited many factors, like their decision to pull out of Russia in the wake of that country’s invasion of Ukraine. But the press release also mentioned the sharing of passwords as a contributing factor.
To which I said to myself… “hmmmmmm.”
Almost everyone knows someone who shares passwords to access streaming content. I have at least three immediate family members who do it. Yesterday on Dave Ramsey’s show, a couple who were in studio to do a “Debt Free Scream”’ mentioned that as part of their effort to cut their personal spending, they found other couples with whom they could share passwords. It’s becoming as American as apple pie.
But here’s the thing… by the definition my Mother taught me, sharing streaming service passwords is stealing.
Unfortunately for the movie business, as Florida’s row with Disney has proved, customer satisfaction with (and loyalty to) aggressively Progressive Hollywood is plummeting. Why? Well because, as a Hollywood Executive once said to me… “Hollywood is the only business in the world that actively hates half of its potential audience.”
Why is that a problem? Well for one thing, happy customers don’t steal from the companies they patronize. Value-for-value is a core tenet of Conservatism and Libertarianism, after all. But at the same time the Studios are moving their product from a place (the theater) where that product is very difficult to steal, to a place (streaming platforms) where that product is much easier to steal… they have effectively gone to war with their customers. And so their customers are now much more comfortable with the idea of stealing that product.
And it’s not just the movies… as kneeling for the anthem exploded in the NFL and apologizing for China’s crimes became all the rage in the NBA, entire pages dedicated to illegally streaming NFL and NBA games began to pop up on Reddit. I’m sure it’s difficult to quantify those losses, but I’ll wager that DirecTV in particular, who controls the NFL’s product via Sunday Ticket, are getting crushed.
Will the anger over Disney’s war with Florida affect the world’s greatest entertainment juggernaut? The lack of transparency in Streaming Ratings means will probably never know for sure… but watch Disney’s public statements over the next year… if you hear a lot of Disney spokesholes mentioning an increasing problem with “sharing passwords”, that will be your canary in the cole mine that Disney brass are seeing a slippage in subscriber numbers and are starting to cast about for a solution.
And when they discover one, I can virtually guarantee that it will not involve reaching out to its core customers in flyover country with content that more closely mirrors their traditional American values.
And so the long slow suicide of the movie business will continue.