Wednesday, December 02, 2020
Studios Will Continue to Put Movies on Streaming in 2021
Variety: In Hollywood these days, the only certainty is that nothing is certain.
Already, the coronavirus pandemic has been responsible for some shocking developments in the film world: “Tenet” keeping its release date, “Wonder Woman 1984” debuting on HBO Max and “Mulan” eschewing U.S. theaters for Disney Plus, to name just a few.
As the new year beckons, one thing is clear: Don’t expect the tumult to end in 2020.
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3 comments:
There is a huge difference between movie theaters being open and movie theaters being accessible during a pandemic. The reality of the situation is, you don't really need to go to a movie theater to watch a movie. Even before the pandemic, movie theaters have been at risk of becoming obsolete with the major progressions of netflix, hulu, HBO, Disney Plus, etc. The logic that 70% of movie theaters are open so we should make our movie available in theaters and do a normal timeline for release is ill-advised. Even though from a broke college student consumer perspective, I kind of hate this, but from a financial point of view, I think that Disney plus's release system of paying extra to watch the movie on the streaming device right when it comes out is rather smart or the company. They did this with Mulan, and of course I did not buy it, but I'm sure a quarantined parent with their 10 year old most definitely did.
Is Hollywood really at a crossroads though? I think the prospect of sending studio movies to streaming services is a really odd and interesting thing to be considering for these companies. And I find this article somewhat disappointing because it’s not saying anything new about how the pandemic is altering things. The movie/film entertainment industry has been dealing with this for the past year now, this is not anything new for them to contemplate and they’re actually still making money, compared to live entertainment companies. However, I find it wildly interesting to consider the distribution landscape of entertainment because the pandemic may change distribution chains forever. We may lose going to the movies forever because of the coronavirus. I wonder if streaming platforms like Netflix, which were doing very poorly pre-pandemic are going to exist forever, now, because of the pandemic. Nonetheless, very interesting to explore and learn more about as the pandemic continues.
This seemed to be a problem in this movie industry way before this pandemic. Movie theaters seemed to be moving into a once in a while treat for most people rather than their main way to watch movies. Streaming was more convenient to peoples busy lifestyles and had a lot more choice. Movies seemed to be more popular and doing better when they were released straight to a streaming service and that streaming service would receive and influx of subscribers as well, kinda like what the movie BirdBox did to Netflix. During this pandemic these streaming services definitely did see a boom and more services were being released left and right. I actually think these streaming services pose a greater threat to cable companies once this pandemic is over rather than the mainstream movie industry. Ultimately people love the experience of going to see a newly released movie on a really big screen but currently doing so is unsafe. I believe the movie industry will just be in the "turmoil" while this pandemic is going on and it seems like they are finding solutions to keep their industry a float. Cable companies should be the ones truly fearing streaming services.
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