Covid, Netflix : the crisis of the movie theaters

Will moviegoing survive the pandemic?


Will moviegoing survive the pandemic? The question sounds both trivial — there are surely graver matters to worry about — and unduly apocalyptic. Movie theaters, after all, have reopened in many parts of the country, and some people went to see “Tenet” last month. But not as many as Warner Bros. had hoped for, and few enough to start the fall film season under a pessimistic cloud.

Lately, the news has only become grimmer. On Oct. 5, Regal Cinemas, the second-largest exhibition chain in the United States, announced it would temporarily shut down its more than 500 theaters. Studios have pushed most of their high-profile 2020 holiday releases into 2021 — for now. And last week Disney let it be known that the new Pixar feature, “Soul,” originally scheduled to open in theaters in June, would debut on the Disney+ streaming platform in December, bypassing multiplexes altogether.

That news was a teaser of sorts for the corporate blockbuster that arrived on Monday: the announcement of a restructuring at Disney that would, in the words of the chief executive, Bob Chapek, involve “managing content creation distinct from distribution.” “Our creative teams,” Chapek’s statement explained, laying on the poetry, “will concentrate on what they do best — making world-class, franchise-based entertainment — while our newly centralized global distribution team will focus on delivering and monetizing that content in the most optimal way across all platforms.”

Those words don’t exactly pronounce a death sentence for theaters, but they do express a bottom-line indifference about their future. Whether cinemas survive, Disney will find screens and viewers. Netflix, which is sprinkling some of its 2020 releases into theaters, has built a subscription empire on the belief that people would just as soon stay home and surrender to the algorithm. Those two companies together control an ever-larger share of the global attention span, and their growing reach can’t help but raise troubling thoughts in a movie lover’s mind.

What if the pandemic, rather than representing a temporary disruption in audience habits and industry revenues, turns out to be an extinction-level event for moviegoing?
What if, now that we’ve grown accustomed to watching movies in our living rooms or on our laptops, we lose our appetite for the experience of trundling down carpeted hallways, trailing stray popcorn kernels and cradling giant cups of Coke Zero, to jostle for an aisle seat and hope all that soda doesn’t mean we’ll have to run to the bathroom during the big action sequence? The specter of empty movie houses was haunting Hollywood (and the press that covers it) long before the Covid-19 plot twist. In most recent years, ticket sales were flat or declining, a malaise masked by seasonal juggernauts like episodes in the “Avengers” saga or the chapters of the third “Star Wars” trilogy — by Disney’s mighty market share, in other words. And even the periodic triumphs of non-franchise, or at least non-Disney, products — “Get Out” and “Joker”; “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “American Sniper” — were faint puffs of wind in the sails of a becalmed schooner, or teacups of water bailed from the hull of a listing liner, or some other suitably disastrous nautical metaphor. Still, the ultimate catastrophe seemed unthinkable, and for good reason. The history of cinema is in part an anthology of premature obituaries. Sound, color, television, the suburbs, the VCR, the internet — they were all going to kill off moviegoing, and none succeeded.

Cultural forms, and the social and private rituals that sustain them, have a way of outlasting their funerals. How many times have we heard about the death of the novel? Of poetry? Painting? Broadway theater? Rock ’n’ roll? The arts in modern times can resemble a parade of exquisite corpses. What if, now that we’ve grown accustomed to watching movies in our living rooms or on our laptops, we lose our appetite for the experience of trundling down carpeted hallways, trailing stray popcorn kernels and cradling giant cups of Coke Zero, to jostle for an aisle seat and hope all that soda doesn’t mean we’ll have to run to the bathroom during the big action sequence?

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Disney’s Pivot to Streaming Won’t Change Hollywood

Mulan, Tenet, and the Future of Going to the Movies

When you’re the highest-grossing studio in Hollywood, it’s hard to imagine you wouldn’t always want to do the thing that you’re immensely good at: making movies and showing them in theaters. And yet, it’s 2020 and nothing is predictable, and as such, this week Disney announced plans to—for lack of a better way to put it—pivot to streaming, a move that could shift the entire landscape for movie and TV distribution. Or maybe not. You see, under Disney’s new plan, the company says it is looking to streamline its direct-to-consumer business by enlisting a new division, the Media and Entertainment Distribution group, to decide how the content made by its studios—Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, etc.—goes out into the world. Some of those studio offerings will still go to theaters, of course, but CEO Bob Chapek told CNBC this week, “We are tilting the scale pretty dramatically [toward streaming].” It’s a bold move, and one that shows just how big an impact outfits like Netflix have made on Hollywood.


But it's not a move that every other studio is likely to mimic, nor should they. Why? They’re not Disney. eading Monday’s news about the new plan at the Mouse House, the first thing that sprung to my mind was my colleague Brian Barrett’s story about the 2019 launch of the company’s streaming service.

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A few days ago, Seth Rogen made a joke. Not entirely surprising—the man does comedy for a living—but this one had a sharper ring of truth than the average zinger. . Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Rogen noted that as he and his production partners attempt to navigate filmmaking during Covid-19, they’ve been following one, um, tenet: “'WWCND' is basically what we're saying at all times 'What would Chris Nolan do?'” Rogen said, referring to the director. “For a while, it seemed like the answer was to kill his greatest fans. But that's not the answer of today, it seems, so that's good. But we have no idea. We don't want to be the first to rush into anything.”

On the day of Rogen's interview, Warner Bros. had just announced that it would be releasing Nolan’s movie Tenet internationally on August 26, and in US theaters where it's safe to do so on September 3. The studio previously planned for an August 12 release date, but that seemed increasingly likely to expose American moviegoers to the coronavirus—hence Rogen's quip about Nolan and his fans. Rogen recently released his own new film An American Pickle on HBO Max instead of giving it a theatrical run, and his is just the latest film to find its way to streaming as many US cinemas remain closed amidst Covid-19 lockdowns. For a while, it seems, many Americans are going to have to see new releases at home.

This point became exceptionally clear on Tuesday when Disney made the somewhat jarring announcement that its highly anticipated live-action reboot of Mulan would premiere on Disney+ in the US on September 4—for $30 a pop. Meanwhile, the movie will be released internationally in markets where Disney+ is not available and where theaters are able to operate safely. In a conference call with investors, Disney CEO Bob Chapek called the move a “one-off,” adding that the company believed it was important to “find alternative ways to bring [Mulan] in a timely manner.” In other words, Disney may not pull this same trick with other delayed films like Marvel’s Black Widow—but if new coronavirus cases in the US keep climbing, they might have to.

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