When the history of this is written, the decision of the studios to get in bed with streamers--which have zero interest in a healthy moviegoing economy--in holding a hard line against writers and actors will be seen as one of the biggest bonehead moves of the 21st century entertainment business.
Just noting that the big new movie opening next weekend that is going to snap the bad box-office streak is...nonexistent. There is none, because of the strikes. Every Hollywood-in-trouble story between now and the end of 2024 should contain the sentence, "They did it to themselves."
At exactly the time when Barbie and Oppenheimer were burning up the box office, the studios thought "Nah, we won't need any new content for the theaters next year".
Disney thinking they’d blow over fast enough to get the desperate MCU reshoots in. And when that failed, hey, no worries, Wish will have families coming to theaters into spring, just like Frozen did! Kids love Disney sort of princesses right?
How did they not see that times had changed? The writers had just broken the talent agencies with a nearly two year strike, and coming off of that, why did they think it would go better for them? UPS was smart, fold without a strike, accept that after decades of bearing the workers, that was over.
Studios & streamers have almost nothing in common, didn’t so much as share email strategies until the last 2 weeks of the writers strike & were incentivized by Wall Street to retrench streamers with write offs. The real issue is that the streaming model is a failure outside of Netflix & they knew it
Streaming was a failure for Netflix too at first. They had to be propped up by Wall Street for years before they reached critical mass.
Now they can raise the price twice a year and the habit is so ingrained people don’t care or notice.
True but Netflix is now the global behemoth that wags the studio and TV financier dogs. Short of Disney merging with Comcast there’s no escaping the Netflix near-monopoly and the guaranteed price raising for a couple of decades to come
Oh wow I hadn’t really looked at the summer release schedule until now. Holy shit. What a fiasco. (And that’s to say nothing of the movies that were almost certainly impaired by the strike in other ways — subpar scripts that couldn’t be punched up, casting hampered by the post-strike rush, etc.)
Isn’t it also an issue of film distributors not moving with the times and responding to the rise of streaming? Cinema attendance would still be high if it was affordable but seeing one film (that could turn out to be rubbish) costs the same as a whole month’s Netflix.
Well, maybe but the point I was making was that a speculative cinema trip (which I used to do regularly) is now at the same price point as a month of varied, high end content. I used to not mind seeing things on a whim and wasn’t too bothered if sometimes it turned out to be crap but not now.
I kinda wonder, too, how much the improvement of home viewing plays into this.
Nowadays, it's possible to own a pretty large screen with a decent sound system so, while not being as "grand" as a cinema experience, it can come a lot closer to it. All while staying home.
Speaking of new movies - I let out a wistful sigh when I saw a new Edgardo Mortara movie is out…was still holding out hope for a certain other version…
I'm reading a final draft of this book to blurb, and I genuinely think it will truly help us understand what "policy' at the various studios has been the last decade+: www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520...
