Despite growing up in a small town that worshipped hockey (the local hockey arena was more important than two hall, any of the schools and all the churches) I was a soccer player. And as long as I can remember, people were always telling me that soccer was destined to become the most dominant sport in North America. A combination of shifting demographics and economics were going to push the world’s most beautiful game to the top of the professional sports totem pole and leave the NFL, NHL, MLB and NBA in the dust. Everyone agreed it was inevitable and for years, the day of soccer’s eventual ascendency was always just around the corner. It was gonna happen any day now.
Except it never did.
For the past two months or so we’ve all seen predictions that the theatre industry was at an end. The COVID-19 pandemic had brought the once powerful industry to its knees. While plenty of headlines begged the question “How can movie theatres survive?” everyone became economists and experts in movie distribution overnight.
Studios didn’t need the big screen anymore, they proclaimed. Content producers were simply going to sell their product straight to the consumer via video-on-demand and streaming services instead. Theatres were an obsolete dinosaur destined for extinction.
Almost as weird was seeing how many people were getting their dancing shoes ready to dance on the theatre industry’s grave as soon as it was buried (no matter how many people were thrown put of work as a result).
The success of Universal’s Trolls: World Tour-distributed solely on VOD services last month-seems to have cemented that certainty. The death of the movie theatre was just a matter of time and everyone was lining up to deliver final rites.
Except none of that will happen.
First, let’s take a look at Trolls success. While plenty of people will have you believe that the estimated 100 million dollars Trolls raked in during it’s first three weeks was a smashing success, it may not be the home run they’d have you believe. Even by the most conservative estimates (and including it’s advertising and promotion budget) Trolls set Universal back at least 150 million greenbacks. Even if the studio gets ninety percent of that 100 million (studios get a larger share of VOD distribution), Universal could still be in the hole and odds are if it had a traditional theatrical opening we’d be talking about the two or three hundred million Trolls had collected worldwide by now.
You’ll also notice that we haven’t heard anything about Trolls and it’s groundbreaking financial performance for the past three weeks, which may mean that it’s numbers aren’t been inspiring cart wheels.
While it’s quite possible that Trolls 2 breaks even or turns a modest profit after all is said and done, there’s two things that people aren’t talking about. No matter how Universal tries to spin it, Trolls should have made far more. This was a big budget animated feature starring Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake, bursting at the seems with music and released during the middle of a pandemic that saw millions of school kids cooped up at home and desperate for entertainment. The fact that it was dropped on Easter weekend and cost between twenty five to thirty dollars a pop (more than twice as much as your typical 3D admission) means it should have easily been a bigger success.
If anything, Universal should be kind of worried it didn’t do better. And one thing the studio isn’t bragging about is the other films they sent to VOD, all of which bombed on the direct to consumer service.
(The truth is everyone will be watching Warner Bros’ Scooby-Do animated feature Scoob! when it comes to VOD later this week).
Not that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s take a look at all the times the death of the movie chain has been predicted before anyone heard of Coronaviruses and Wuhan and worldwide lockdowns.
Forty years ago, the invention of the VCR and subsequent rise of video rental chains like Blockbuster and Jumbo Video were going to kill theatres. Now the only place you can find a VCR is in the Smithsonian and there’s one lonely Blockbuster left on the entire planet. Then it was HBO and cable movie channels that were going to drive a stake through the movie theatre’s heart. Until they didn’t. Fifteen years ago the DVD market was red hot and Blu-Ray had just emerged as the preferred new format in home move watching. Surely these would be the death knell of the multiplex. Now physical media is a mere fraction of what it was a decade ago.
When the global economy collapsed in 2008, the line of people predicting the death of your local theatre stretched around the block. But theatre chains thrived while the service and tourism industries staggered on the verge of collapse (even though people couldn’t afford a week at Disney world or a vacation in Europe, they still needed an escape and the movies provided an affordable one).
The haters and the doomsayers were gifted another sizeable bullet when streaming services became a fact of life. Surely these would finally slay the theatre Goliath. Yet despite the fact that Netflix has over 167 million subscribers spread across 190 Countries, movies still grossed over 42 billion dollars at the box office last year with nine joining the coveted billion dollar club.
The point is, like soccer’s “inevitable” conquest of North America, the death of movie theatres has been predicted over and over (and over) for the past forty years. It’s ironic since movie theatres themselves were supposed to spell the end of live theatre, with plays going the way of the dodo as a result. Except stagecraft remains a billion dollar industry a century after it was supposed to go belly up.
This isn’t to say things will stay the same. Change is inevitable and it will probably be years before we realize how much. There’s a very real, almost certain possibility that the movie-going experience may not be the same ever again. And no doubt, there is going to be some pain. Some theatres will disappear and people will lose their jobs. It sucks, but it is unavoidable (and those losses will inevitably wet the appetites of the doom sayers).
We’re also about to find out how agile the corporate minds who run the world’s biggest movie chains truly are. How will they balance the needs to run their business with the mountain of new and necessary safety precautions they will have to observe? How will they lure movie goers back and how will they deal with the inevitable ones who refuse to comply with the world’s new rules?
If there is one thing you can bank on right now, it’s that the big movie theatre chains are adjusting and protecting themselves. AMC and Regal theatres (among others) have remained closed despite the (possibly premature) relaxing of lockdown orders in a number of American states. Both AMC and Regal responded to Universal’s recent announcement that they would release movies to both theatres and VOD simultaneously by banning Universal flicks on their screens across the globe. (With other theatres likely to join the boycott, expect Universal to blink first. There’s no way Fast and the Furious 9 makes a billion dollars next April if it can’t be shown on AMC’s 11,000 international screens). AMC may even find itself a part of the Amazon juggernaut when all is said and done.
Yes, things will change and there will be some pain. There always is. But whenever COVID-19 is relegated to a chapter in the history books, theatres will still be here. And despite whatever they look like, they’ll be thriving.
Image via delta-optimist.com
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