whenever I think about how a movie's financial success has been reduced to essentially it's first weekend in theaters, I am reminded there used to be a thriving economy based on months-long schedules, rentals, VHS and DVD sales, regional theaters, syndication on TBS, and international release dates
I spent like, 18 months trying to become an entertainment and business reporter in 2018 and it was already apparent how much the movie business had radically changed. There's no room for word-of-mouth to build or for a film to have a second shot at recouping costs via rentals and VHS or DVD sales.
There isn't even as much incentive for stuff like behind-the-scenes documentaries or commentary from cast and crew. The viral one of Ben Affleck perfectly criticizing Armageddon was from 1998.
There will never be something like Shawshank Redemption just constantly playing on TBS, or the equivalent of that movie playing on FX and TNT. And Shawshank initially bombed at the box office? Now the movie is so beloved the town where the jail is located turned the site into a museum.
It is also incredibly awful how the overfocus on first-weekend sales determines a movie's long-term success or whether the general public wants more of that subject matter. I didn't see Barbie until weeks after it came out.
I am sure film people are like "Karen is saying nothing new" but it's also especially apparent due to the 25th anniversary of so many films from 1999. So many of the conditions that allowed those movies to be incredibly successful and impactful are gone. Fans of Ted Lasso can't actually own it.
The other thing to mention about the movie business is seeing media about it essentially become 1) non-critical influencers at premieres, 2) freelancers who make almost no money, and 3) a rapidly dwindling number of actual reporters mostly at trade pubs, esp after the implosion of alt-weeklies.
One example from '99 is Man on the Moon, which flopped theatrically in what was a wildly crowded Christmas stretch but had a long tail on cable/DVD - the younger end of Jim Carrey's fanbase couldn't see it theatrically (it was his first R-rated film as an A-lister) but caught up with it then.
There are many, many streaming series where the final sentence would be true, but surprisingly, it's not going to be true for Ted Lasso for much longer. It's releasing on Blu-Ray and DVD at the end of July. 9to5mac.com/2024/05/07/t...
All studios care about is shareholder reactions, and shareholders have attention spans measured in nanoseconds.
If they could see the bigger picture, I bet we’d have longer runs and more risk, but all they see is opening weekend numbers as a measure of success/failure 😕
Genuinely curious how most people even find out what movies are hitting theaters when these days. I saw a lot more movies in theaters when I had a local (paper) newspaper subscription and saw the showtimes listed every week.
My local multiplex has recently been showing the new big release on the IMAX screen only for the first week - "Civil War", "...Planet of the Apes", and this weekend "Furiosa".
I imagine many people don't want to pay that premium, and will wait for it to move to one of the regular screens.
This is mildly embarrassing to admit, but everything about being a teenager is AT LEAST mildly embarrassing so I'm putting it out there. A not insignificant portion of my 7th-8th grade humor was based on Austin Powers movie marathons on TBS in the mid-00s.
There's always an exception to the rule. EEAAO made half mil in its opening weekend, less than half a per cent of total box office. Compare that to Oppenheimer which made 8.5% total when it opened, it's crazy. EEAAO had an insane box office run.
But this is the exception. This never happens anymore.
Pixar's "Elemental" is another exception - after a disappointing opening weekend and many articles about "Pixar has lost its touch", it ended up being pretty successful (~$500m worldwide) after word-of-mouth kept it in theaters.
Remember when there were multiple versions of a DVD? Like, you could buy just the movie that had scene selection, trailers, deleted scenes and foreign language subs/dubs. Or you could buy the deluxe version that had all of the above plus actor and filmmaker commentary, behind the scenes stuff...
Sometimes there were even mini documentaries, depending on how culturally important the movie was. My sister and I used to watch this 30-45 minute doc that was a special feature on our Wizard of Oz DVD EVERY SINGLE TIME we watched the movie.
I'm not even that old, so I feel weird waxing poetic about this bygone era of movies and home entertainment that I wasn't even able to fully participate in but damn it's just sad, isn't it?
it's kind of disgusting that US distributors have done that when for a lot of films and TV those do exist, especially for older titles, and they get packaged in releases by foreign distributors that can't even legally be played on US players
As an aside to the subject, I popped in a DVD release from the 2000s and was taken aback by the interactive menus, extensive special features, and just general production value (they shot an entirely new intro just for the menus). I'd forgotten how invested studios could be.
See you’re actually tragically wrong here: there’s a huge market for this stuff but it’s podcasts. Dozens and hundreds of podcasts. Podcasts by fans, by the actors, by critics.
The Wire and the Sopranos went off the air 15 years ago but there are thousands of hours of poorly organized content
Sorry, but podcasts will never, and I mean ever ever, be a substitute for what Karen is referencing, particularly bc organization (and often, content quality) is bad. Most folks aren't interested in embarking on a quest for on-demand, sketchy radio-esque recordings related to movies they watched.
Looks like you said "Tragically you're wrong" though, not "Tragically podcasts are where that market is now" - which is still incorrect. Podcasts do not and will not have the appeal, scope, range, or access capacity that previous movie release structures did. At best, they're supplements for fandom.
Hmmm you'd be the expert here. IMO the VHS days also didn't have social media or streaming services on which movies were instantly discoverable. Also - & this is admittedly anecdotal - *I* buy the 4K Blu-rays of movies I support
The thing is that many of the movies or shows I love and would absolutely continue streaming even after buying physical copies are never even released on physical media because Disney, Netflix et al. don’t want me to be able to see them anywhere but on the streaming platform.
I think that's the case for many streaming releases, but AFAIK just about all *theatrical* releases also get physical copies. I don't have any data though
I’ve been ranting about how bizarre it’s been that Hollywood threw out a perfectly solid model: 90 days in theatres, then a release on physical disc for those who want to buy or rent, then a release on streaming channels weeks later. Money is made, everybody wins.
There were so many movies I couldn't go see in theaters as a kid but I knew that the DVD release was ~5 months after the initial theatrical run, which meant it would end up in my local library ~6-8 months after its initial run.
That just doesn't happen anymore. And I'm an adult who CAN afford to go to the movies now! (Granted, my moviegoing is usually limited to matinees or arthouse theaters, but I think my 14-year-old self would be surprised at how many times per year I set foot in a theater.)
From about 2010-Covid, my partner, friends, and I had the perfect movie watching plan:
Sunday
- 9ish food / drinks
-1030/11am movie
- out by 1-2pm
Because it was matinee, tickets were dirt cheap and by time you added in breakfast / drinks it was the same cost as pm showing with all the trimmings.
And now I'm basically running around trying to find out when a movie is going to be released on blu-ray; stores that used to keep physical media in stock are now bending to the whims of streaming and keeping less in-store stock.
They didn't just throw it away though. After 2007 (physical media's peak year) physical media sales dropped like a stone. Now obviously in the last few years those numbers accelerated as physical media is being phased out but it was was pretty dire even before that.
But they didn't drop fully organically, they dropped because of a coordinated effort to monetize (and monopolize) a new mode of delivery in streaming (low pricing, running at a loss) against the backdrop of a foolish alignment behind a difficult to produce and expensive physical format in bluray.
Netflix definitely did that. Even tanked their own rental service on purpose. They'd also like to kill off theaters as well. Either way, people stopped buying physical stuff because a more cost effective alternative came about (even today streaming cheaper). ugh, all of this is so shortsighted.
It was a good model, but much against it - huge flatscreen tvs, streaming at home right away and theaters overcompensated with their audio and its painfully loud.
Good movies find audiences, but the money cycle is different. Maybe streamers make more, but they also fund movies too.
Streaming at home right away is entirely the doing of the studios! They only started it because they all have their own streaming services with huge gaping content maws to fill. If it were still just Netflix and Hulu (and Crackle, I guess?) things would still be fine.
