Over the past year and change, I’ve spent a lot of my time at The Hilltopper writing about the ongoing changes happening within the film industry. They say to write what you know, and cinematic storytelling has been a passion of mine since I was six years old. I’ve been obsessed with film from then on, and since then have always wanted to write my own, and with all that the global pandemic has wrought on the media industry lately, there’s no better time to write about it. With so much happening in the world, I know there’s a lot of people who might be interested in all these changes but not be taking the initiative to seek out that information, so I hope my efforts can continue to be beneficial.
Movies are profitable because millions of people pay to see them in tightly-packed theaters across the world. To make a movie in the first place, it takes a tight-knit crew of sometimes thousands of people on set day after day, practically (and often literally) tripping over each other to make sure everything goes smoothly in a business where time is money -- as in some of these productions literally cost thousands of dollars per second just to finance the insane level of talent, crew, and resources in play. My point is that it takes a village to get these things produced and a whole lot more people end up watching them. Needless to say, it was not an industry that adapted easily to the global pandemic. Sure, with strict Covid testing regulations and the limiting of numbers on set, plenty of projects were still able to film last year and continue under the current conditions. The challenge comes with the fact that people are not rushing back to the cinemas to watch these things in the way many box office analysts might have hoped.
I’ve talked a lot about that in these articles: the way movie theaters are hurting and the way many studios are subsequently redirecting their efforts toward streaming services. Audiences may not be rushing back to theaters, but plenty of them seem happy to watch new films and tv shows from the comfort of their couches. The rise of Netflix had already prompted most major studios to start pursuing their own streaming platforms pre-pandemic, but Covid has only strengthened the success of Disney+, HBO Max, and others, as well as those companies’ priorities in said services. While Disney dropped several high-profile films like Cruella and Black Widow both in theaters and at a jacked-up thirty-dollar price tag on Disney+, Warner Bros. released their entire 2021 film slate on streaming for free. Disney certainly made more box office money while Warner was able to bolster its Max subscriber numbers, but this streaming focus has meant less box office growth across the board.
Of course, that’s mainly due to the audience size being significantly diminished by the ongoing pandemic, but there is an element of incentive to be considered here. By offering major new motion pictures on home platforms, these studios have made it so only the real movie theater fans are going to ignore the streaming option and head out into the pandemic-ridden world. Conversely, films like Free Guy and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings have done significantly better at the box office within the past month purely due to being theater exclusives. In areas like Needham where vaccination rates are high and theaters have Covid protocols, there are a lot of people who are perfectly happy to go out and see movies on the big screen if there isn’t a tempting, lazier option at home. It’s something that’s sure to incentivize studios to keep their films in theaters so long as people keep getting vaccinated and there are enough customers to fill those seats. Still, less revenue across the board means less funding to produce more movies, and that’s causing some studios to have serious thoughts about making big changes.
Paramount Pictures, a 1910s-era studio that’s been a staple of Hollywood for decades, announced on September 10th that they would be shifting away from larger theatrical productions and more towards smaller STREAMING experiences. They even hired a new CEO. The key detail there is not that Paramount is shying away from big blockbusters, (which Hollywood will still see plenty of) but that the studio is recognizing the volatility of the traditional film industry and trying to do some much larger restructuring toward directed streaming content. While there could certainly be a lot of good to come of this change, it’s potentially the end of a long era for a classic Hollywood studio, and not everyone is happy with this direction.
With other major studios reportedly considering similar courses of action to Paramount, it has become apparent that there is a clear separation between those trying to uphold the traditional film industry and those trying to supersede it. Christopher Nolan -- the famous director behind movies like The Dark Knight and Inception -- is certainly a member of the first camp. Nolan ended a nearly twenty-year-long relationship with Warner Bros. after they announced that they’d be simultaneously releasing their entire film slate on HBO Max in addition to theaters during 2021. Just a few days ago, it was announced that he’s taken his next project to Universal Studios, and he had some very particular demands. A lover of cinema, Nolan has been one of the chief creators in the industry to combat this shifting away from the theatrical experience, and so for his next project focus on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s role in the development of the atom bomb) has demanded total creative control, twenty percent of first-dollar gross, and a blackout period wherein Universal can’t release ANY other movies in the three weeks before and after this project. After causing a lot of trouble for Warner last year during his attempts to keep Tenet in theaters during the height of the pandemic, it’s clear that Nolan is not backing down from his wishes to preserve that theatrical experience.
I’ll be honest, I’ve always been Team Nolan in that I’m a proponent of true cinema experiences over just watching something on my couch at home. There’s a magic to the theater experience that has kept audiences invested in this practice for about a century. Nevertheless, the fact is that the pandemic isn’t the only reason things are trending digital. Technology is ever-evolving, and at the end of the day, film is a business. If something can be made cheaper and faster for a digital platform, that’s the direction Hollywood will trend. It doesn’t necessarily mean the end of movies as we know it, but it does mean that the next few years will be very telling for where the visual entertainment medium is headed in our lifetime.