A glut of streaming titles and shorter theatrical windows could lead to multiplexes reasserting the big screen as an arbitrator of event movie status.
For those so inclined, Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead opened last night for a one-week theatrical run before its May 21 debut on Netflix. This marks the biggest nationwide release for any Netflix streaming flick, around 600 theaters thanks to participation from Cinemark, America's third-largest multiplex chain. I do not know whether we'll get box office grosses for the semi-wide release (I'm guessing not). However, the release could pave the way for more high-profile/prestige streaming flicks to debut in theaters before streaming, even outside the award season. Army of the Dead (which is very good) got a splashy theatrical release while Joe Wright's Woman in the Window (which is very bad) gets essentially dumped onto the streaming this morning with last-minute critical pans and little buzz. One cannot help but see a skewed future where, even in a streaming-dominated entertainment world, theaters become a kind of marker for prestige amid the streaming clutter.
I don't know what Woman in the Window looked like before the poor test screenings, rewrites and reshoots, but the movie as it exists is a nothing-burger of a non-thriller. Yes, the cast is stacked, and Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore and Wyatt Russell (among others) do their share of heavy lifting. But the film barely exists as a "motion picture," with most of the storytelling offered via present-tense and past-tense exposition, often repeatedly, to the point where it could be entirely digested via Netflix's "audio only" option. That's a surprise since Joe Wright's films, the good (Atonement) and the bad (The Soloist) all tend to look gorgeous. Spending $150 million on Pan may have been a terrible idea, but the money is up there on the screen. Moreover, personal pet peeve alert, but (like the comparatively superior Shutter Island) the film starts on such a note of "unreliable narrator" ambiguity that it's impossible to believe a single onscreen moment.
Conversely, Army of the Dead is a polished and confident blast. It works as a zombie shoot-em-up but primarily concentrates on being an ensemble heist flick (about folks breaking into a zombie-invested Las Vegas to steal $200 million) led by an always-engrossing Dave Bautista. You get your fill of R-rated carnage and visually dynamic action. You also get some bemusing in-jokes (Garret Dillahunt's concerns about a zombie tiger implies that the tiger saw Burning Bright), meta-riffs (Omari Hardwick cheerfully acknowledges that the set-up feels cribbed from Inception) and hat-tips (Snyder shot the film himself, but Larry Fong gets his due). Moreover, the cast (including a retroactively inserted Tig Notaro) is both offhandedly diverse and appropriately eclectic. The 148-minute movie takes its time, making us care about the characters before the body count kicks into gear. Aside from some unnecessary franchise-building, it’s precisely the kind of "line drive to center field" winner that Netflix has been promising from its original movies since 2015.
Netflix picked up the hot potato Fox/20th Century release from Disney. It was tempting to view the sale of The Woman in the Window at the time as another example of Disney casting off anything that didn't fit into the "four-quadrant, family-friendly, nostalgia-tinged IP" box. In 2017, I was hopeful that Disney was buying Fox at least partially for its value as a studio that released "big movies for adults" and the obvious IP value in Simpsons, X-Men and Avatar. But Fox's 2018 slate (filled with diverse, grown-up, original and/or "just a good movie" theatrical releases) whiffed, with only Deadpool 2 and Bohemian Rhapsody striking gold. Hence, it wasn't a massive surprise that Disney eventually started stripping the Fox legacy (even the still Oscar-winning Searchlight) for spare parts. However, The Woman in the Window is closer to The Cloverfield Paradox; another "studios didn't want this terrible movie" offering positioning Netflix as the modern-day "direct to video" downgrade.
Yes, you can argue that such a scenario no longer applies on the regular, thanks to acclaimed/buzzy "was supposed to be in theaters" gets like Paramount's The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Sony Animation's spectacular The Mitchells vs. the Machines. However, those films would have played theatrically and possibly been solid hits absent the conditions created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Conversely, many/most of the big studio films sold off over the last year (The Happiest Season, Finch, Greyhound, American Pickle, Without Remorse, My Spy, The Lovebirds, Cinderella, The Tomorrow War, Infinite, etc.) were old-school "just a movie" offerings. They did and (even more so in a post-Covid era) will struggle theatrically with audiences no longer going to the movies to go to the movies. Hence, they ended up on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple and HBO Max. But once the storm clears, I'd like to think that the "next" Trial of the Chicago 7 doesn't get sold to a streamer.
We're already seeing the promise of an old-school theatrical release used as a carrot, which is why Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon ended up at Apple TV+ (with a pre-streaming theatrical release courtesy of Paramount) instead of Netflix. This weekend's theatrical release for Army of the Dead may be more about free media than actual theatrical revenue (Covid-curve notwithstanding, my theater wasn't exactly packed last night). Still, it does sell the idea that the R-rated zombie actioner is a big-deal movie and a Netflix original (not an acquisition) that works as a "could have been in theaters" flick. The highest compliment I can pay to the $90 million, franchise-friendly, "zombie heist caper" flick is that it's one of the few Netflix "mockbusters" that looks, feels and plays like a real Hollywood biggie. Even with a visual style that emphasizes close-ups, it still features an expansive canvas and a scale appropriate for a stereotypical "big" movie.
So, yes, I do expect to see more streaming biggies get some nominal theatrical release either before or concurrent with their streaming premieres. It's an easy way to help multiplexes fill in the gaps as Hollywood gets back to some sense of normality. It's a permanent solution if Hollywood reacts to the pandemic by making even fewer "old school movies" and thus fewer films destined for theatrical in a given year. It's that catch 22. Theaters can't necessarily survive on just straight-up tentpoles (especially if some of them flop), but studios need global theatrical releases to make money on those tentpoles. When theaters opened last August amid a promise of post-Tenet biggies that got delayed, the likes of Apple's On the Rocks and Netflix's Rebecca helped fill in the gaps. Sure, some Netflix biggies in the past (The Irishman, Mowgli, etc.) had limited theatrical releases, but usually not at your nearby multiplex or drive-in.
I also expect that the shortened theatrical window, now 17 for Comcast to 45 days for Warner Bros., Paramount and Disney, will make a week or two of theatrical exclusivity less of an issue for a "hot" streaming title. If Universal can throw The Croods: A New Age onto PVOD after 21 days of theatrical release (while keeping it in theaters, natch), then even major theater chains may not complain too much if Netflix offers up a 1-3 week theatrical release for Rian Johnson's Knives Out sequels or Millie Bobby Brown's Enola Holmes 2. In practice, it won't be that different from when Warner Bros. threw Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase into AMC theaters in March of 2019, a couple of weeks before its VOD debut. A theatrical release will A) build word of mouth, B) further entice theatrical purists and C) potentially provide a new revenue outlet for theaters and for streamers dealing with subscription plateaus.
This hypothetical (and optimistic?) scenario positions multiplexes in a curious position. With shorter windows and shareholders more focused on streaming profits, a conventional theatrical run could become something akin to a pre-release sneak preview, something to earn a nominal amount of money while building word-of-mouth and buzz before the streaming debut. Now it's not the same for every movie and every studio. Universal still expects Jurassic World: Dominion to make $1 billion worldwide in theaters, but Netflix didn't spend $200 million on the Russos' The Grey Man for theatrical glory. The trade-off would be simple: Folks wanting to see something in theaters would have to do so very quickly, but there'd be more variety of theatrical content at any given theater. In a skewed irony, the streaming wars will have created such a tsunami of feature film content that movie theaters may once again become the differential separating the wheat (Army of the Dead) from the chaff (Woman in the Window).
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May 14, 2021 at 11:40PM
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How Movie Theaters Could Win Big In The Streaming Wars - Forbes
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