Idiotic windows

[Mike Blakesley]

Well this is probably more of a rant than anything, but my phone just told me that "Barbie" is coming to home video on September 5. 7 weeks since it hit theaters.

Hey look, it's making a lot of money in theaters, LET'S CUT OFF ITS LEGS!

The day must be coming when any theater will be able to book a movie on the break for one week and be done with it. Otherwise what's the point, given the way the studios love to devalue their content? We're going into week 2 of this movie, and I'm sure the crowd will drop off a cliff this week with this "news" hitting the airwaves. If I'd known about it 2 days ago I never would have agreed to week 2.

It's been obvious for a long time but this kind of thing just underscores the fact that as much as the studios like to kiss our ass and reassure us that "theatrical is important," the only REAL reason we're here is to promote the movies for the home-video market. I just wish somebody would call them on it.

[John Eickhof]

Mike some years back at the conventions how NATO was defending theatres to keep the 6 month windows? it was their contention that it was the theatres opening exposure that drove the video etc. markets but theatres are 'the engine that drives the train' well...looks like the distribs have gone the way of the railroads and think one locomotive can pull the same train as six! unfortunately thats why the wonderful locally owned clean friendly theatres like yours are destined to fade away...quite disheartening! hang in as long as you can!

[Frank Angel]

Well this is probably more of a rant than anything, but my phone just told me that "Barbie" is coming to home video on September 5. 7 weeks since it hit theaters.

Hey look, it's making a lot of money in theaters, LET'S CUT OFF ITS LEGS! [SNIP]

the only REAL reason we're here is to promote the movies for the home-video market. I just wish somebody would call them on it.

Mike, for the last 20 years WE here on FT have been say exactly that, in exactly those words and also in about a thousand other different ways, but the same sentiment. And the reality is that exhibition's roll has been diminished slowly but inexorably as the years go by. From the day the movie industry began Hollywood/distribution and exhibition were one and the same --the studios made their films and showed them in their own theatres, much like a farmer's market. Some say fortunately, some say not, the government stepped in and broke that up. Since then, there was much more of an innate uneasy truce between the two legs of the industry, much more so than you would see in other types of business models -- tool manufactures are usually not at odd with hardware stores. But the studios seemed to be in an uneasy collaboration with exhibition as almost part of the DNA of the two. Before video of economic necessity they had to coexist. But then came the revolution and with video, there was a way to sell product directly to the public. That was only a pipe dream at first because the tech wasn't exactly there yet and neither was the collective concept of how films were to be seen -- in a "movie theatre." But as we all know, that slowly, inexorably is changing with the evolution of the technology and how the public perceives what movies are and how they are watched.

The very concept of "Theatres" (morphed into "Cinemas") evolves with each new generation. Every new one has less and less of its population ever having had what we experienced during the Golden Age of the Great Movie Palaces, They have been conditioned to see very little difference between Hollywood movies, streaming TV, TikTok Vimeo and Youtube content -- it has become homogenized into all the same thing which, as the services like to promote, is a great thing; their content can be seen across ALL platforms, from the big screen home theatre TV down to the hand-held cellphone. Movies have been so devalued that there is little motivation to see one int the brick and mortar movie theatre. Even the theatres themselves are no more the unique and many times majestic structures they used to be -- places that inspired aw just by walking into them -- except of course for the elaborate, massive gleaming glass, neon and chrome concessions islands -- the rooms themselves are drab, dank, utilitarian, assembly-line holes-in-the walls inspiring of nothing and seem almost to be an after-thought to the impressive "food court."

In today's economy of the movie industry, the brick and mortar exhibition arm is merely a tit on a male pig. It will never turn around and become the necessary arm the industry need to function because the studios have pretty much got what they've always want -- what they had before the Paramount Consent Decrees -- the ability to sell their product direct to the consumer, operating their own streaming service and eliminating the need middle man. We who are still partial to seeing movies in a movie theatre like to think the filmmakers can't make it without the brick-and-motars, but that might be wishful thinking. It is a constantly evolving model with lots of disruption to the old way it functioned.

Even the idea that th system still needs the theatres to stimulate sales is probably less and less every year that passes because the studios can now reach their customers in so many ways that were not available just a decade ago. For example, everyone points to the Barbenheimer explosion of popularity and how that portends a healthy rebound. But it wasn't because people those movies in theatres lined up around the block and that is how the buzz was generated; the buzz was totally an internet-created phenom. They didn't need theatre play to generate that demand. And sure, it was nice that there were still theatres running for people who caught the buzz could go see it in them, but there sure are a hellofalot less of them today than there were just 10 years ago and a MASSIVE amount gone that were here 20 yeas ago. Soon there will be generations that have never seen a movie in a movie theatre and won't understand why anyone would want to. As disheartening as it may be to us who know what it was like when we were growing up, the reality is, our great great grand children more than likely won't miss it at all because it will an era that has Gone With The WInd.

[Mike Blakesley]

I can't disagree with any of that -- but what I was talking about was how the studios keep going on and on about how they need us, but then they turn around and stab us in the back with early video releases when a movie is still doing great business. WHY can't they look at how well movies with longer windows have done and you know.... do that?

[John Eickhof]

Mike, I think to sum it up is...they are too greedy and dont want to share the profits witn ANYONE!

[Steve Guttag]

The problem is, while stabbing us in they back the stab through themselves to us and wonder why it hurts so much! It is in the cinemas that they make their money...not on streaming. At best, a title can add subscribers or retain subscribers and for how long, in either case. It isn't going to have the direct financial impact that the revenue generated from cinemas will have. They need to wipe the belief that content will be available for streaming in just a few weeks from the patron's mind. Make it clear that movies will not be available to stream for 6 months (or a year on big titles). It isn't like it won't hit the home but make sure you've got every last drop out of the cinemas first. And, guess what...with longer release windows, you'll get a secondary cinema market again and solve yet another problem. Namely, the perception that cinemas are too expensive. Subrun theatres provided a valuable function of allowing a night out without breaking the bank for those that don't need to see things on the break. Everybody wins...including the studio that STILL gets to get whatever streaming revenue the title will bring.

One thing is for sure, if you put a $300M movie next to It's a Wonderful Life, it is no more valuable than It's a Wonderful Life, for that moment in time forward. It was only the value of the budget while it was in cinemas.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Mike, I think to sum it up is...they are too greedy and dont want to share the profits witn ANYONE!

And they can make more profit and not have to share it if they send it out via streaming, and Blu-Ray release.

[Mike Blakesley]

And they can make more profit and not have to share it if they send it out via streaming, and Blu-Ray release.

Well apparently they CAN'T, because all their streaming services are losing money. They need the theatrical run to give the movies more of a "brand," but once we have done the heavy lifting of brand creation by promoting the movies on our screens, they race right to the video toilet and hit the Flush button.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Mike, I think to sum it up is...they are too greedy and dont want to share the profits witn ANYONE!

Actually, not quite true John. A movies profits are often shared contractually with the top actors and the director. Or anyone else that is contractually obligated to receive a piece of the cake. Look at the wealth of some actors... They either get paid millions one time, or they take a lesser sum and a part of the profits. It can go on for a predetermined amount of time, or for ever. Taking a piece of the cake for ever guarantees them income for life in a lot of cases. George Lucas did things differently with the Star Wars films. He took little to no film profits and instead took ALL the merchandising rights. He made billions that way.

[Bobby Henderson]

Hollywood studios are famous for their creative accounting practices. The movie stars who are willing to sign onto a movie project for a percentage of the box office gross usually have some kind of "producer" role. Otherwise they're gonna get paid up front. Eddie Murphy famously coined the term "monkey points" to describe the value of being paid via percentage points of the box office. Nah, he preferred to get paid millions up front before the damned cameras started rolling. At least that money was dependable.

I've bitched about it here many times. I just don't know what kind of drugs the media company executives are doing that makes them think shaving the theatrical release window down to nothing makes any kind of business sense. It's not 1999 anymore. The movie studios have DE-VALUED the home video market.

Hardly anyone gives too shits about "home theater" and building up a movie library anymore. So many of us consumers learned our lesson about buying lots of DVDs and Blu-ray discs only to watch them gathering dust on shelves and wasting valuable living space. We built up our movie collections mostly with "classics" released in prior decades. Of the present day movie discs we bought: too many of them wound up in the category of watched once or twice and then left to gather dust. Buying "digital" download movies seems even less valuable. The video and audio quality is, at best, questionable. The movie may not waste space on a media shelf. But if you download a copy of the movie it will waste a good chunk of space on a hard drive. Or you can stream it every time you watch it. But beware. If that studio's "movie store" goes defunct so do all your movie purchases. Anyone buying that shit might not even miss it if the store went bust; too many new movies these days can be forgotten in less than a year or two.

The various streaming services are hemorrhaging red ink. So what do they do? Raise subscription prices. We're seeing it with Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, etc. This new "paradigm" of pay TV is feeling a lot like the old cable TV version. Having half a dozen streaming service subscriptions is no different than signing up for all the premiums in a cable TV package. Nevertheless, people are cord-cutting and they're cutting back on all these damned subscriptions. Netflix has been taking big hits to its subscriber base lately. The broader economy and how people who aren't rich are getting financially squeezed by basic living costs is having an effect on this.

From the day the movie industry began Hollywood/distribution and exhibition were one and the same --the studios made their films and showed them in their own theatres, much like a farmer's market. Some say fortunately, some say not, the government stepped in and broke that up. Since then, there was much more of an innate uneasy truce between the two legs of the industry, much more so than you would see in other types of business models -- tool manufactures are usually not at odd with hardware stores.

I can agree with that to a certain point, but disagree with it on others. The Paramount Consent Decree was enacted in 1948, a few years before the widescreen movie revolution. Still, one could argue movie theaters were better funded and maintained back when movie studios operated them. Yet theaters appeared to do pretty well showing movies in the 1960's, 70's, 80's and 90's.

IMHO, the arrival of the Internet and the DVD platform is what got Hollywood studios blindly fixated on eliminating the theatrical release window. I think the movie studios had a good thing going when the theatrical release window was at least 6-9 months long (if not longer). The studios couldn't live with that. They wanted all that money from both theatrical and home video platforms much faster. Fighting "movie piracy" was always a bullshit ploy. The whole thing was really about speeding up the cash flow life cycle of a movie. In the early days of the home video revolution (when VHS was the main platform) one movie could stay relevant in the public Zeitgeist for 2 or more years. The theatrical release (first run, second run/bargain, revival) could go on for more than a year. There was a whole separate marketing campaign to push the VHS tape release months later. The window was very long for selling things like toys and other merchandise.

Today: all of that shit is abbreviated to only a few weeks. I am not kidding when I say a major Hollywood movie can be released in theaters, go to home video and then be completely forgotten by the general public in less than a calendar year. Even if it's a good movie! The Barbie movie was a big hit. But how many people will be talking about it in 2024, months after it goes to MAX to die?

These fuckers at the movie studios have totally forgotten what it takes to sell a movie to the public.

By the time these idiots wake up and realize the commercial cinemas are the only thing giving them any real money anymore the damned cinemas are going to be on the brink of ruin. I kind of support what the WGA and SAG are striking about. But they're going to hurt brick and mortar cinemas far worse than they hurt any douchebag media company executives.

[Mike Blakesley]

I am not kidding when I say a major Hollywood movie can be released in theaters, go to home video and then be completely forgotten by the general public in less than a calendar year.

A calendar year?! Two or three months is more like it.

In the "longer window" days, if we missed playing a hit movie on the break, it would still do fairly well when we played it -- usually 4 or 5 weeks off the break, sometimes a bit less. A typical film would do maybe 50 or 60% of the business it would have done on the break. The exception has always been movies that skew older.

Now, with the windows shrunk to next-to-nothing, the bloom falls off the rose much faster. We just recently played "Barbie." THE BIGGEST HIT MOVIE OF THE YEAR, in its fourth week of release. We had to book it for two weeks. The first week did good-but-not-fantastic business, a bit above our average, but less than I expected, but still enough to warrant another week. The second week was the eye-opener: It saw a huge drop, much more than the typical 50%-ish? Why? Well, because they announced on Tuesday, while our first week was still in progress, that the movie was coming out on video in a couple of weeks.

After "Barbie," we played "Oppenheimer" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem," and both did less business than expected. Even our booker was surprised how weak they were. But it's because the public has now been trained that movies come out on video within a month or so. EVEN IF THAT'S NOT ALWAYS THE CASE, it happens often enough that people think that's the way it is all the time.

And the studios are still insisting on two or three weeks of playtime. (Or four, if your movie has Taylor Swift, Star Wars or Avatar in the title.) The list of movies we didn't play this summer is just awful. We had to leave so much money on the table, thanks to other movies sucking up the whole calendar with long minimum playtimes. And they make us wait 4 or 5 weeks (or more) before making movies available for one week. But, if we wait that long, the grosses are going to suck... and some studios STILL charge first-week percentages when you play late.

I long for the day when studios will let US, their customer, decide how long we want to play their movie. We would make more money and the studios would make more money too, because we'd play more titles on the break.

[Frank Angel]

XsnipX These fuckers at the movie studios have totally forgotten what it takes to sell a movie to the public. By the time these idiots wake up and realize the commercial cinemas are the only thing giving them any real money anymore the damned cinemas are going to be on the brink of ruin. XsnipX

And therein lies the rub -- in those days, a single studio put it's name at the front of a movie and those studios were not run by democratic committee; they were run by strong-armed, autocratic heads who lived and breathed the movie industry. Today there is a long list of investing companies whose unknown logos open nearly every film, and these companies are not run by dominant movie-minded individuals who have the health of the industry as their concern -- they are run by investment companies and hedge funds whose managers more than likely have never stepped onto a movie set or even into a theatre (no doubt they have the best home theatre setups money can buy). Their interest in what goes on the screen and how it gets there or WHAT screen it gets on or in what order is not what they are passionate about or even concerned about -- their singular passion is about what kind of return shows up on the bottom of the investment statement and please dear money gods, make it gargantuan.

If someone convinces these investment firm managers that they will get the fastest, highest return on the buck by opening simultaneous with the theatrical run -- a concept that for some erroneous reason has been giving distributors wet dreams since AV (After VIdeo) -- that will be what will motivated them to invest. regardless of will it hurt theatres and the health of the industry as a whole, yay or nay, that will barely be an after-thought. The movie makers of yesteryear -- the Louie B. Mayers, the Darryl Zanucks (the Daddy of WideScreen) or the Jack Warners -- they knew what they wanted and they lived and breathed movies.

Yes,I know, it was a different time with a vastly different economic model, but I doubt that those guys wouldn't see how detrimental choking out brick and mortar theatres is to the overall industry health; they weren't that short-sighted -- and after all, they all once owned theatres!

[Frank Angel]

XsnipX After "Barbie," we played "Oppenheimer" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem," and both did less business than expected. Even our booker was surprised how weak they were. But it's because the public has now been trained that movies come out on video within a month or so. EVEN IF THAT'S NOT ALWAYS THE CASE, it happens often enough that people think that's the way it is all the time. XsnipX

But Mike, that is the crux of the problem, it's the PERCEPTION, not only of how long before the public can access content, but of the significance of the content itself. MOVIES, even as far back as the silent era, were perceived by the public as special, exciting events to anticipate and then participate in...to be come a fan of, and to savor long after they were gone from the screen. The successful ones had enough pull-power to be released more than once and even years after their original runs. But as you put it, the bloom has long gone off that rose. Films for any number of reasons, not the least of which has been the studios' inability or probably lack of incentive to market films as that unique and valuable entertainment, movies have become akin to what fast-food restaurants are to fine restaurant dining. I have no idea if or how that perception can be changed, other than the whole streaming service business collapses under it's own weight over the long haul and economically it really can't sustain itself and the only content that they can afford to buy is schlock reality shows with quality films simply not making it to stream but only to theatre screen first and to long runs. Maybe it will to change that perception and realize they are not oging to get instant gratification and movies aren't going to play three weeks after theatrical release. Perhaps that is what it would take for the public to see films as something special again as more and more the only place that can see them would be in theatres. But of course that would require studios and the movie investors to understand that cheapening the product in order to make a quick buck in the long run won't work.

Of course this is fantasy given how things are now as it looks like the investors are making enough to keep them happy enough not to change the status-quo. That said, I always would muse that I was born too late...if only I had been born 20yr earlier when everything was in the doldrums and they thought the ENTIRE industry was going to hell in a hand-basket and everyone -- the studios and the exhibitors actually worked together to make movies more exciting and to woo the public back. Imagine being in the booth when you outfitted the projectors with selsyn motors and ran THE HOUSE OF WAX in 3D for the first time, and even with interlock stereo soundtracks. Then came CinemaScope with the monster B&L or Superscope anamorphics and mag penthouses, then Perspecta Sound. I mean, those must have been amazing times with new and improved equipment coming on line all the time, but best of all, you knew the public still LOVED going to the movies -- their perception was that it was of a high value.

[Bobby Henderson]

I fear the movie studio executives and their media company bosses aren't going to learn any lessons about the value of movie theaters until many of them have disappeared.

Quite a few theaters have been closing. It certainly seems like more cinema locations are closing than new ones being built. A bunch are shutting down due to financial reasons. The terms the movie studios are dictating to cinemas are just bullshit. Then you have some theaters that do get enough foot traffic due to having a great location. But then the damned landlord decides he's not renewing the lease. It's usually because some other developer is offering a lot more money to put a "luxury" apartment tower there or something else that makes more money than a cinema. That's one reason why Manhattan has lost so many theaters.

This shit is a severe problem. The movie studios had better take notice. Commercial movie theaters use a lot of specialized equipment that isn't used many other places. D-cinema projectors, cinema processors, types of speaker systems and all sorts of other stuff is only made for the cinema market. There are fixtures all over commercial cinemas that are made only for cinemas. All of that stuff has to be manufactured at scales of many thousands of units. None of this gear can be produced a few units at a time. Suppliers will shut down product lines if there isn't enough theaters to make those product lines profitable.

If enough movie theaters shut down the rest of the platform will die off entirely, permanently.

A calendar year?! Two or three months is more like it.

You're right about a lot of movies. I was mainly talking about the movies that qualify as being global box office hits. But, yeah, there is a great deal of other movies that play briefly in theaters. A few weeks later the movie studios will run a few cursory TV ads to market the "digital" download version. Then the movie gets dropped into the walled garden of a streaming platform where it gets lost in a pile with many other movies.

All sorts of movies have been released this year and I've forgotten about them. A specific movie might be available on a streaming service I have, but I may never get around to watching that movie ever. I've gotta have time to do that first of all. And there are so many other things to watch on TV. Half the time I'm just watching some sports program (such as the US Open this afternoon). And that's while I'm multi-tasking on my computer. Even when I fire up that movie/TV streaming app, it's literally a slot machine style gamble for that particular movie to show up in one of the rows of movie choices to watch.

20 years ago movies still had a great brick and mortar marketing presence. They had far more retail visibility. There were still dedicated stores that sold movies and music on disc or even books. There will still dedicated video rental stores. When all of those things disappeared it took away a great deal of marketing visibility that movies had. The rows and columns of a streaming app are no replacement for that. So, yeah, today new movies can be completely forgotten very quickly.

And therein lies the rub -- in those days, a single studio put it's name at the front of a movie and those studios were not run by democratic committee; they were run by strong-armed, autocratic heads who lived and breathed the movie industry. Today there is a long list of investing companies whose unknown logos open nearly every film, and these companies are not run by dominant movie-minded individuals who have the health of the industry as their concern -- they are run by investment companies and hedge funds whose managers more than likely have never stepped onto a movie set or even into a theatre (no doubt they have the best home theatre setups money can buy).

I could go off on a rant about how much I hate "private equity firms" and what they've done to hollow-out so many American companies. I'll just say I think they're worse than many government-based bureaucracies. The firms are often helmed by men with highly inflated egos who have no idea at all how to run the companies they're buying. They have little more than utter contempt for the employees of those acquired companies. That makes them totally unprepared to handle an exodus of talent when the private equity bosses start throwing their weight around.

The movie industry has been infected by the same mindset. And it's just so stupid. It doesn't take a genius to figure out the factors that were in place 20 or so years ago when both the cinema industry and home video industry were raking in record amounts of money. Or if the executives became aware of those factors (such as a longer theatrical release window) they're too full of their own stubborn pride to abandon the "plan" they currently have in place. They're literally going to kill off the cinema platform and reduce the big movie studios down to small departments of a streaming service before ever admitting they were wrong. The really hilarious thing is they're going to make far less money doing things their way.

[Mike Blakesley]

How is it that all of us "regular guy" type Film-Techers know more about how the industry works than all these highly paid "experts?"