This Year in Movie News 2020 - COVID-19 Edition

2020 has been a year unlike any other. To say that it has precipitated a shift in the way the entertainment works is the understatement of the century. 2020 has shaken the industry to its core, and movies will never be the same again.

The year began as most years do. January 2020 had a drop in movie ticket sales from December 2019 as most major blockbusters were released in December. Sony’s Bad Boys for Life was a surprise breakout hit featuring the iconic ‘90s duo of Martin Lawrence and Will Smith. Hollywood does nostalgia very well. At the time, Bad Boys seemed like a feather in the cap of the industry, no the highest grossing film of the year at $204 million, which is a perfectly fine number, but nowhere close to the mega blockbusters that we’ve become accustomed to like Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($936mm) Avengers: Endgame ($858mm) or Black Panther ($700m).

On the note of Black Panther, we’d be remiss if we didn’t bring up the unfortunate passing of Chadwick Boseman. While most known for his role as T’Challa in Black Panther, he quietly built up quite a career of critically acclaimed performances playing such larger than life characters as James Brown, Justice Thurgood Marshall, and Jackie Robinson. His final film Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, has won him great praise throughout the industry and there’s even talk of him being a contender for an Academy Award, which would be a fitting tribute for an exemplary actor whose star burned so brightly but was gone far too soon.

February of 2020 was relatively quiet on the movie going front. Without a major film like 2018’s Black Panther to anchor the month, the month saw films like Birds of Prey and Fantasy Island released which performed under expectations for the studios. The lone bright spot was Sonic The Hedgehog which went on to gross over $146mm at the box office in a big win for Paramount Pictures.

As March came about it looked as though the industry would start to pick up. We had Disney Pixar’s Onward to open the month followed by A Quiet Place II, James Bond in No Time To Die , and Mulan to round out the month. The box office would have been back in a big way.

However, Covid-19 had other plans. In what seemed like a matter of hours, the world stopped. First it began with the NBA having a player from the Utah Jazz, Rudy Gobert, test positive for the Coronavirus. Then we found out that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson had Covid-19 as well. Then there was an Oval Office address from the President of the United States that stopped all travel between the United States and Europe. Within days, entire countries began lockdowns, and campaigns such as “14 Days to Slow the Spread”.

Most major blockbuster films like F9 (Fast & The Furious 9), Jungle Cruise, In The Heights, Black Widow, No Time To Die, Minions 2, Jurassic World: Dominion and more, were pushed back to 2021.

The big shift came in the movies that weren’t pushed back. Those movies went a different path. First there was Trolls: World Tour. The Justin TImberlake and Anna Kendrick fronted animated feature blazed a new trail by releasing both in theaters (which ever ones were open) and as a PVOD.

Prior to 2020, most Americans never heard of a PVOD. PVOD is short for Premium Video On Demand. To access Trolls: World Tour on PVOD viewers had to pay $19.99 to watch the movie during a 48 hour window. No major studio had ever done this before. While grossing a paltry $35mm theatrically worldwide, within the first month, Trolls World Tour had grossed over $100mm on PVOD, which set a new paradigm in the industry.

The digital revolution had just begun.

Disney was able to utilize its newly created Disney+ as a platform to release content. First Disney released Frozen II ahead of schedule in March on Disney+. Then Onward and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker followed suit. Soon other films that normally would have received a theatrical release such as Artemis Fowl found their way on Disney+.

With Disney making moves because of the Coronavirus with its Disney+ platform, the other studios were sure to follow suit. In May, Warner Bros. released its highly anticipated HBO Max. While HBO Max didn’t feature the long-awaited Friends reunion, it did offer existing HBO subscribers to convert to HBO Max free of charge, providing an instant base of users. HBO Max would soon become a landing spot for new release films (more on that later).

Other streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu became homes for new release movies that didn’t have a theatrical release.

In July, Universal launched its own streaming service known as Peacock. Differing from its HBO Max and Disney+ brethren, Peacock features an ad-supported free version of its app, which has helped it quietly amass market share. Building upon the vast resources of Comcast, Peacock was able to create a new home for hit shows such as Saturday Night Live, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, 30 Rock, and popular movies such as Trolls: World Tour, Clueless, and more. As of November 2020, Peacock boasted 22 million subscribers. While shorter than the 73 million paying Disney+ subscribers, Peacock has shown that there is a market for more players in the streaming space.

As the summer went on, movie theaters went through a series of stops and starts. First movie theaters would be opening back up by May. That didn’t work. Then AMC, Cinemark, and Regal announced that they would be opening movie theaters starting the end of June to prepare for the releases of Warner Bros.’ Tenet and Mulan.

As not enough movie theaters were able to open, particularly in the markets of New York and Los Angeles, studios were reluctant to release content theatrically for fear of disappointing box office results and losing their investment in those films.

This led to a time for choosing. Either studios could put their content in movie theaters and face the consequences or they could monetize the content themselves on their own streaming platforms.

Warner Bros. chose to release content in movie theaters, offering the Christopher Nolan suspense thriller, Tenet. This was a bold movie and cheered by many in the industry. Disney chose a different option. They chose to release Mulan as a “Premier Access” movie on Disney+ which required users to pay $30 to be able to access the film on Disney+. Unlike Trolls: World Tour, Mulan did not have a 48 hour window, and could be viewed for the life of a user’s subscription to Disney+.

Mulan didn’t perform they way the many in the industry had assumed it would, with Disney being somewhat evasive on the movie’s performing offering up platitudes like ‘it met their expectations’ and ‘it did quite well’. To date, the industry doesn’t know if Mulan grossed $100mm or $100.

Tenet went on to gross over $50mm in the US box office, but over $300mm globally. While that may seem like a financial success, Tenet was projected to gross somewhere between $650-850mm with optimistic figures as high as $1 billion. From that perspective, Warner Bros. took a major blow to resuscitate an industry that many have left for dead.

After the release of Tenet, there was not a stream of high-quality in-demand content in movie theaters. It was Tenet and then everything else. Most of the content that is being released theatrically now is either lower budget content or content that studios have been holding on to for years and didn’t know what to do with it.

That not to say that any of the movies being released now are not very fine movies. It’s just to say that they were produced with lower budgets and therefore the studios carry less risk by releasing them during the pandemic.

The financial stress has pushed movie theaters to the brink. There was talk of AMC going into bankruptcy earlier this year. Things got so bad that AMC reluctantly agreed with Universal Pictures to reduce the exclusive theatrical window from 60 to 17 days, a measure that the industry had been fighting off for many years. In exchange, AMC would receive a share of the movie’s digital revenue. CInemark subsequently agreed to a similar deal with Universal Pictures, with Regal being the lone holdout of the big 3 cinema chains in the US.

As the year went on, there were movies that still clinged on to hope that movie theaters would reopen. Black Widow and Disney Pixar’s Soul had both moved into November release dates. No Time To Die was schedule for Thanksgiving. December was still holding firm with Coming 2 America, Wonder Woman 1984, Dune, and West Side Story.

As October went by so did all of those release dates. Black Widow, West Side Story, Dune, and No Time to Die all moved to next year. Soul would now be released on Disney+ on Christmas. The biggie was Wonder Woman 1984.

Even in late November, no one knew what was going to happen to the movie. Then the announcement hit. Wonder Woman 1984 would be simultaneously released in movie theaters and on HBO Max on Christmas Day.

It’s one thing for a movie like Artemis Fowl or even Soul to move to a streaming debut, but for a movie that could have done $1billion in gross with its eyes closed in a normal theatrical movie market, this is a game changer.

While earlier in the pandemic, movie theaters like AMC and Regal were upset that a movie like Trolls: World Tour would debut on digital, at this point movie theaters are happy just to have something to draw audiences back to cinemas, even if that movie is also available on HBO Max as well. The idea is that these are unusual times and that unusual times call for unusual measures.

A year ago it would have been unforeseeable to have a major billion dollar movie open on both a streaming platform and a movie theater. A year ago it would have been unforeseeable to have movie theaters go along with something like that. A year ago it would have been unforeseeable to think of movie theaters as going extinct after 100+ years. Yet here we are. Will the world be content with watching movies on a small screen? Who knows.

The reality is that watching a movie isn’t about the movie, or the screen size, or the sound system. It’s about community. It’s about the experience.

For some its a good excuse to get out of the house. For others it is the only form of affordable out-of-home entertainment. Watching a movie at home is nothing like the movie theater. When you watch a movie at home you check your email, look at Facebook or Instagram, maybe even pause the movie to go to the bathroom or do something else for a while.

It’s not like that at a movie theater.

For about 2 hours, the world stops. You are magically transported along with the others in your group into another world with interesting characters and shared experiences. That’s what you get out of a movie theater.

You may not have received that in 2020, but then again, there’s always 2021.