Movie Theaters Are Coming Back
it was March 2020. The NBA had just announced that it was shutting down. The President announced that he had suspended US travel to Europe. And Tom Hanks announced that he was infected with the Coronavirus.
At that point in time, most businesses including movie theaters shut down indefinitely. So many experts and critics predicted that moviegoing was dead.
In September of 2019, the new streaming service Disney+ was launched. Within 5 months the service had acquired more than 50 million customers. It was perhaps, the greatest product launch in all of business since Steve Jobs launched the iPhone back in 2007.
Suddenly the market had changed. Netflix with their over 200 million customers was on top of the Streaming food chain and everyone wanted a piece of the action. Warner Bros. took HBO and their movie studio and created HBO Max. Comcast pooled together all of their assets from NBC Universal and created Peacock, the streaming service that’s designed to mirror a cable experience where you can channel surf. Even Paramount combined with CBS and created Paramount Plus, featuring the likes of the Amazing Race, and South Park.
2020 was one of the worst years in history for US and global box office gross receipts. Production had shut down globally. The future for cinema was bleak.
Streaming was the way of the future. With big screen TV and in-home sound systems even featuring Dolby Atmos technology, the consensus wisdom was that everyone had a movie theater inside their home, so why would you need to go to a traditional cinema with overpriced popcorn and people with germs.
Well it turns that people getting out of the house, no matter how big their TV screen was. And when they get out of the house they want to watch movies with the sole mission of entertaining audiences, all while eating that overpriced, yet always delicious popcorn.
And those movie studios who we all thought had gone all in on streaming. Well they had a few tricks up their sleeves. Paramount had held off most of their best movies during the pandemic to release them when movie theaters had reopened.
The result has been a year filled with box office #1’s from January’s Scream (starring Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, and newcomers Melissa Barerra and Jenny Ortega), Jackass Forever (with all of your favorite castmembers from Johnny Knoxville to Steve-O and more), The Lost City (starring Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, with a surprise appearance from Brad Pitt), Sonic 2 (Featuring the voice of Ben Schwartz as Sonic the Hedgehog along with Idris Elba as Knuckles and starring James Marsden), and then there was the big kicker, Top Gun, the movie of the year, and so far, the movie of the decade, with over $600 million in domestic gross and over $1 billion in global box office receipts.
Somehow a good old fashioned knock-em sock-em action flick managed to win the hearts and minds of both audiences and critics.
The other studios seemed to be in on the strategy as well. Universal had saved Jurassic World: Dominion and Minions the Rise of Gru. Disney released, Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder. Somehow even in the mad dash to move everything to streaming the movie studios still managed to keep a little something in their back pocket to put out once movie theaters got back online.
While many experts have sought to make it a binary choice between cinema and streaming, the reality is that there is probably a place for both of them. Truth is streaming was never designed to replace the movie theater. Streaming was designed to replace cable.
So as movie theaters come back to full strength (e.g. 2019 levels), that’s ok. Streaming can thrive alongside the cinema. There is room for both.
