Studios: Starving the theater industry out

[Mike Blakesley]

From The Hot Button....
STARVING THE BOXOFFICE: The Next 6 Months
by David Poland

Link: https://davidpoland.substack.com/p/t...office-the?s=r

The Batman is doing nicely. Uncharted has grossed over $100m.

By this date (March 10) in 2019, 5 films that would gross over $100 million domestic had been released. The Upside, a dramedy remade from a movie with virtually no US footprint. Glass, a thriller, a sequel for 3 Shyamalan original thrillers. Lego Movie 2. How To Train Your Dragon 3. And Captain Marvel.

The domestic box office is not only not back to normal… it is still in a rather desperate position when it comes to supply chain.

By this date in 2019, there had been 23 wide releases (over 1000 screens). This year, just 16.

You say, because you have been reading people who don’t really research the memes they repeat, “But families aren’t going to the movies! Three of those $100m+ movies were animation!”

I say, how do you know whether families are going to the movies when there have been no family films, especially animation, in 2022? The last animated movie to open wide was Sing 2, which has grossed $154 million to date and has never fallen out of the Top 7 since its release on December 24. Before that, Encanto, which got a very softly marketed release by Disney on November 24 while being promoted as a Disney+ television release on December 24. In spite of this poor handling, Encanto did $94 million domestically, $153 million internationally and spawned a massive hit album.

How do you know if families are going to the movies if you only have 2 releases targeting that audience in 3.5 months?

Answer: You don’t.

Disney is giving Turning Red a streaming-only release in a family movie market that hasn’t had an entry in over 2 months.

So what do things look like moving forward? Will the movie industry give exhibition any chance to regain its full footing?

This month has had one wide release. None on this, the 2nd weekend. Only one more this month from a major studio (The Lost City from Paramount), plus 2 horror movies listed as wide, Umma (Stage 6) and X (A24).

March 2019 had 11 wide releases, not only with Captain Marvel and Us, but Dumbo and Wonder Park, both on over 3750 screens. Plus 2 Focus releases, 2 Lionsgate, an A24, a Neon, and a Pure Flix wide release on 1516 screens.

April? Closer. Nine wide release movies currently on the schedule. 11 in 2019, including Avengers: Endgame. Perhaps we will still see Dr Strange 2 move into the last week of April. As it stands, we have a fair number of bigger budget movies coming in April, including Morbius, Sonic 2, and Fantastic Beasts 3. We also have the first animated movie since Sing 2, The Bad Guys, from Universal. And Ambulance from Michael Bay, his first film in 5 years.

May starts with Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, ends with Top Gun: Maverick and now that Warners has abandoned the month, has only Downton Abbey: A New Era in between. Empty spaces!

2019 had an insane 16 wide releases in May, led by Aladdin, John Wick 3, Pokemon Detective Oikachu, and Godzilla: King of the Monsters all scoring over $100m domestic. Plus Rocketman, Ma, The Hustle, Long Shot, The Intruder, Booksmart, Poms, and Ugly Dolls… showing a full range of titles. Too many titles, to be honest. No month really needs more than 3 wide releases a weekend for 5 weekends. But 3? Like this May now has. A horror show, even with a big Marvel movie leading the parade.

At least June has 4 wide releases. Nothing the first weekend of the month, apparently in fear of Tom Cruise, but big titles like Jurassic World 3, Lightyear (the 2nd animated wide release of 2022), and Elvis, plus The Black Phone, which feels like it could be a hot title. I expect Universal to have its widest theatrical window in over 2 years for Jurassic 6. Less so for Black Phone. Hard to trust Disney around animation now, but we will see. And Elvis is clearly for adults with a chance of capturing teens.

June 2019? 10 wide releases. One mega-smash in Toy Story 4. A disappointing sequel in The Secret Life of Pets 2 (after the original overperformed extravagantly). 5 franchise efforts that came up short: X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Men in Black: International, Shaft, Child’s Play, and the most relatively successful, Annabelle Comes Home. Plus, movies for adults in Late Night and Yesterday, the second of which did pretty well, really.

The 5 weekends of July are suddenly overloaded. Four franchise movies with Minions 2, Thor: Love & Thunder, Jordan Peele’s Nope, and DC League of Super-Pets (the 3rd wide release animated film of 2022… in July) taking the spot where Black Adam was supposed to land with The Rock. Plus a clear franchise hopeful in Bullet Train, a comedy/action movie with Brad Pitt and a loaded supporting cast. And a title-cinfused animated reboot of Blazing Saddles, which if it holds will be the 4th animated wide release of the year.

July 2019 offered up two massive titles with Spider-Man: Far From Home and The Lion King, a big adult hit with Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood, and 3 mid-rangers with Midsommar, Crawl, and Stuber.

But July is really the first month I can see topping the pre-pandemic numbers, with two films with the potential to top $250m domestic and 2 more with the potential to be over $150m domestic.

I see August as a 3-weekend month, generally. There are occassional films that break that rule of thumb.

But even with just 3 weekends to discuss, 2019 had an insane 10 wide releases in its first 3 weekends of August. The mostly disappointed. But there were a lot of at-bats. F&F: Hobbs and Shaw managed “only” $174m domestic. It was the only $100m grosser that month. Good Boys, Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, and Dora & The Lost City of Gold were the 3 that got past $50m domestic.

This August, there are currently only 4 wide releases scheduled in the first 3 weekends of August. You probably haven’t heard of any of them yet. Secret Headquarters, Easter Sunday, The Man From Toronto, and Beast.

We are a long way from August, in marketing world. So, who knows?

But in 2019, there were at least 2 brand titles and 10 wide releases aiming high.

89 wide releases from the start of 2019 through the 3rd weekend of August. This year, 2022… 46.

And now the chorus… “but people don’t want to go to the movies!!!!”

And now the irony… as the streamers fatten themselves up like pigs to the slaughter of endless indifference, some expect the theatrical business to return to its former glory (2019 was the 2nd highest grossing year in box office history… 2018 was #1) with about half the number of titles being released to wide theatrical.

Some think that families won’t go back to movie theaters… but there are only 5 animated releases in the first 8 months of the year.

Some claim adults would rather sit at home… but won’t take into account that dramas and comedies are being rerouted to streaming without the chance to draw a paying audience, assuring the outcome they imagine to be truth.

Disney will release just 4 movies to theaters first in the first 8 months of 2022. All will be franchise titles. They are committed to theatrical like Elizabeth Taylor was committed to her first husband.

And Warners is no better.

Mind you, this is 2/3 of the year.

Universal - 11
Sony - 7
Paramount - 7
Disney - 4
Warner Bros. - 4

How will theatrical end? Not with a bomb, but with a withdraw of content.

Until tomorrow…

[James Wyrembelski]

Sometimes I wonder if the idea of singles (and twins) rising back up are not too far off the mark.

[Frank Cox]

My routine used to be that I had a show at 7pm and a different show at 9pm, so at least two movies every week. Sometimes midnight shows on the weekends, and sometimes I'd change from one show to another on Monday. So I pretty much always had at least two and maybe 25% of the time I had three different shows every week.

There was never any shortage of movies to play.

Now I'm only allowed one at a time for a full week and sometimes it's difficult to find something that's actually worth playing.

[Mike Blakesley]

[quote[]Sometimes I wonder if the idea of singles (and twins) rising back up are not too far off the mark.[/quote]

I have thought the same thing. Maybe the 24's of the world will turn into 6's, and they can lease out the space from the other 18 screens for other businesses.

Disregarding 2020, our 2021 was down from 2019, but not to near the extent of the industry at large. It's pretty easy to fill a single screen. This is the first time in my theater career that I've been thankful to be a single screen, although having a second to throw 3rd-week titles onto would definitely be handy.

[Bobby Henderson]

Even in the era of single screens and twins there a lot more content flowing into cinemas. It's a different world now.

If the movie distributors really want to starve commercial cinemas of content, and then perhaps push them over the edge into oblivion, they will cut off their own noses to spite their faces. They'll screw themselves and end up becoming much smaller. Without theaters the movie distributors will just be TV companies selling TV shows and made for TV movies. I don't think the media companies understand the complexion of the situation. I have the impression the people making the decisions don't even set foot into commercial cinemas at all.

There is still a plausible argument the distributors aren't slow-walking theatrical releases to push cinemas out of business. Life is still very far from back to normal. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is still in progress, despite it not dominating headlines lately. Now we have that asshole in Russia creating a whole new chapter in the soap opera. Fuel prices are spiking now and it won't be long before the costs of other essentials (which require fuel to ship) will rise right along with it. That's going to equal a lot of people cutting back on things. Those obvious conclusions could spook distributors into slowing the pace of content to cinema screens and shifting more of it to TV. But to what end? To make less money? IMHO the distributors need to have the guts to return the flow of content to cinemas back to a normal pace ASAP. Otherwise they're going to end up with streaming to home TV screens as their only release platform in the future.

[James Wyrembelski]

I agree with the sentiment that being a single right now is pretty nice. Even with the drawback of content at large, it really has not affected what we would normally play. If we were in the era of singles during the 40's and 50's it might be different. I have plenty of old advertisements for our theatre and most titles never played longer than three days, with titles changing even during the early part of the week before they changed again come the weekend. But booking practices have not been like that for decades anyways and the film reels needed to make the circuit.

Small titles were always booked here to bridge the gap, so the fact that there's less now really doesn't make much difference anyways. Just makes it easier to spot which one will most likely do the best.

And ever since someone flicked the light switch, we've been pretty much back to normal since mid December when we opened Ghostbusters barring the disaster that was Moonfall. But, you can't hit a home run every time. As long as you have large event titles coming down the line with maybe some smaller hits to help bridge the gap (Dog is doing very well at small locations and Uncharted was a welcome relief after Moonfall) we'll be here. My only concern is the shortage of family titles right now.

TV series making big moves in the past decade really isn't such a bad thing either as you had films born out of it such as Downton Abbey come out after a 5 season run on BBC. Maybe not the best example but it pulled unexpected numbers, had a pretty good run overall, and did very well for singles and twins (that were allowed to open on the break ) Worldwide gross of 200 million from a 13 million budget. Not bad....

[Martin Brooks]

One of the problems is that regardless of the reasons (short theatrical windows, more than enough alternative media being available at home, home theater, personal finances, COVID, people not 'dating', etc.), few are showing up for the serious films intended for adults. The audience that used to inhabit the houses that played those "quality" films, seems to have disappeared. Maybe it's because today's "adults" either want to see the same comic-book movies that younger people want to see or they don't feel the need to go to the movies at all.

There were some fine films released in 2021 (some still in theaters) such as The French Dispatch, Last Night in Soho, Belfast, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, but I saw them all in near-empty auditoriums, which is pretty sad considering just how small most auditoriums are today.

I have to believe that at some point, audiences will even lose interest in this plethora of comic book / superhero movies, because they will repeat themselves one too many times. And then what happens?

TheNumbers.com is projecting 2022 domestic box-office at $6.2 billion. It was $11.35 billion in 2019. So far this year (10 weeks), box-office is 36% ahead of a pro-rated 2021, but 45% behind a pro-rated 2019. Weekly admissions are almost half what they were in 2019, even with The Batman.

So if the industry doesn't find a way to get patrons back into seats, it's going to be in big trouble. Even 2019 wasn't that great a year. AMC lost $149 million in 2019. I've been predicting that we see half of the theaters close over the next five years. I hope I'm embarrassingly incorrect.

[Steve Guttag]

I think the "serious" film goer will return but not until they feel "safe" from catching something deadly. They've been scared to return. You have a dilemma too...some people don't want to watch movies if required to have a mask. Some, still, don't want to come to a theatre that doesn't have a masking requirement. The age group for the serious films is also nearest the most vulnerable to COVID so the concern is understandable. That is where I think the serious film goers are...afraid to sit in a theatre after they've been told that they are particularly dangerous (despite lacking any evidence to that).

We'll see how C19 plays out with the variants and how people continue to react to them and adjust to the varying (and seemingly lessening) seriousness of the variants.

[Mike Blakesley]

I have been a subscriber to Entertainment Weekly almost since it began. One thing about it that always made me feel good was, in their reviews section they always had Movies first - then TV, then Music, and then (sometimes) Live Theater.

Ever since they shifted to a monthly, they have combined it all under one heading called "Watch" and..... TV is now first.

Yeah yeah yeah, I get that there are far more TV watchers than moviegoers (there always have been, since TV has been in every house) but they have downgraded the importance of movies. Although I guess it's true that most of the really good stuff is on TV anymore. That's a sad development. But the market goes where it goes, I guess.

[Bobby Henderson]

TV shows don't have the production budgets of 2 hour theatrical feature movies. But TV shows are not confined to a 2 hour format and they're are not as bound to the "Save the Cat!" template formula as theatrical movies.

So many movies that play in cinemas are now hobbled by various disadvantages. The money people demand the productions stick with various formulas to guarantee success not just in North America, but also overseas in markets like Europe and China. That translates into movies that are bland, not original and very predictable. "Grown-up" dramas and comedies fall victim to this. For one thing it's far more difficult to make comedy translate well to overseas audiences, not unless you make the comedy broad and stupid. Investors aren't interested in supporting content that can only play well to people in North America and parts of Western Europe. More and more movies and other shows made for grown ups are getting pushed to streaming services and premium cable networks.

Theatrical releases, at least in North America, are also limited in how "adult" their content can be. Many theater chains still won't book anything with a NC-17 rating. Quite a few newspapers have refused to run ads for NC-17 rated movies, but in recent years movie ad activity in newspapers has gone into the toilet. Premium cable networks like HBO can produce original content that would be instantly slapped with NC-17 ratings. Streaming services like Prime Video and Netflix have carried NC-17 and "unrated" movies. I heard Netflix has a Marilyn Monroe biopic coming out that is rated NC-17.

40 years ago the cinema was the primary place where one had to go to see the most edgy, grown-up dramas, comedies, action movies, etc. TV was far more limited then, even premium cable networks. Now the premium cable networks and streaming services have more dramatic freedom with their content than Hollywood studio have with productions for commercial cinemas.

Finally it's easy to notice the sheer amount of content being made available on these TV-based platforms. Only so many movies play in theaters at any one time. The amount of TV content is overwhelming. I don't have time to watch even a tiny fraction of all that stuff.

It's no wonder Entertainment Weekly is leading with TV content and making theatrical features play second fiddle to that.

[William Kucharski]

I'm not so sure; I'm unaware of any streaming service that has been willing to show full NC-17 content; though their programs are "unrated" I'm unaware of any showing content beyond "hard R" despite what the article above states.

[Bobby Henderson]

I've seen a decent number of NC-17 rated and "unrated" movies carried on both Amazon Prime Video and Netflix. I'm not talking at all about porn either. There have been many non-porn Hollywood movies whose original cuts received NC-17 ratings or X-ratings prior to 1990. Most were trimmed to get an R-rating. Some productions chose the option to "surrender" the MPAA listing and be released "unrated." And some productions over the years chose to keep the NC-17 rating.

One of the really funny things is back when video rental stores were still thriving it was common for theatrical releases that were edited down to an R-rating to offer the "unrated" cut on VHS, DVD and Blu-ray. That was a hint of things to come about the bland-ness of cinema releases versus what one could see on the TV screen at home.

[Martin McCaffery]

One reason for the theatrical R v uncut Video situation is that many multiplexes had rental agreements that forbade them showing anything stronger than an R. Likewise many newspapers (remember them?) would refuse advertising for the same reason. And then there were the studio contracts that demanded films be between PG and R.
It's all about the money.
I'm sure plenty of film makers put things in their films just so they would have something to cut to please the raters. That Hollywood would find a way to monetize it is hardly surprising.

[Bobby Henderson]

The situation is pretty damned stupid, and stupid on multiple fronts. The MPAA (or "MPA" now) is at the center of it.

It's true some theater chains strictly would never book a movie with anything harder than a R-rating. Carmike was one example. Likewise, quite a few newspapers would not carry ads for such movies either. Today that's not as much a problem since most local newspapers are pitiful, tiny shells of what they used to be. Movie studios and theater chains buy very little in the way of newspaper advertising anymore. They may still buy big ads in big publications like the New York Times. All our local paper gets to run is tiny postage stamp ads showing the theater's name and phone number ("call for show times") -and that's if there is any cinema-related ads at all.

Both the policies of theater chains and newspapers were influenced by the MPAA's own choices of how it would rate movies. The big one was the MPAA's refusal to draw a clear line between dramatic movies and porn. Any idiot could figure out the difference. It's not subjective, the difference is physical. In porn they're not acting; they're really doing it in front of the camera. Duh. The introduction of the NC-17 rating in 1990 turned out to be a big waste of time. At first we thought the porn people were going to have the X-rating to themselves and the NC-17 would be for non-porn adult movies. The MPAA ruined that by letting porn productions apply for and get NC-17 ratings on some of their videos. MPAA head Jack Valenti refused to draw a line between "art" and "porn." That ended up making the NC-17 rating just about as toxic as the X.

For many years the MPAA has adopted public stance that they're just trying to protect the little children and families. These days any kid hauling around a smart phone is only a few clicks away from being able to see hardcore pornography in any kind of extreme genre. They can even see footage of real life graphic violence and death. Parents have far more to worry about than any simulated sexual content their kids could be exposed to in a commercial cinema. In most theater locations the staff will try to prevent unaccompanied kids and young teens from sneaking into R-rated movies, much less something that's NC-17. Parents aren't getting as much help from third parties when it comes to content viewed on a computer screen or smart phone display.

The MPAA is only going to remain partially relevant while cinemas are still in business across much of the nation. If times get too tough for cinemas and too many are allowed to close the MPAA's own existence is going to be threatened. The TV networks and streaming services can all use that TV-MA thing for adult oriented content. They don't need the MPAA for that.

[Mike Blakesley]

The MPAA ruined that by letting porn productions apply for and get NC-17 ratings on some of their videos. MPAA head Jack Valenti refused to draw a line between "art" and "porn." That ended up making the NC-17 rating just about as toxic as the X.

How are you going to draw that line, though? Some people think that any nudity is porn. I'm sure lots of porn producers think their productions are "art." The real problem of course is various parents all having vastly different ideas of what they do or don't want their kids to see. One person's R-rated near-porn is the next person's fun for the whole family.

As far as I'm concerned these days, the R-rating doesn't serve much purpose for the reasons you stated; for us, it's more about keeping misbehaving kids out of the movies. Unless an R-rated movie has a lot of fast-paced, lowbrow humor like "The Hangover," kids will get bored and start screwing around.

I am quite glad to not be raising any kids today... the notion that there's really no use in trying to protect them from basically ANYTHING is scary. I wouldn't be surprised if parents of teens have higher blood pressure than the norm.