Will the pandemic drive movie theaters to extinction?
Streaming services amending distribution
Will moviegoing survive the pandemic? The question sounds both trivial — there are surely graver matters to worry about — and unduly apocalyptic. Movie theaters, after all, have reopened in many parts of the country, and some people went to see Tenet last month — but not as many as Warner Bros. had hoped for, and few enough to start the fall film season under a pessimistic cloud.
Lately, the news has become only grimmer. On Oct. 5, Regal Cinemas, the second-largest exhibition chain in the United States, announced it would temporarily shut its more than 500 theaters. Studios have pushed most of their high-profile 2020 holiday releases into 2021 — for now. And last week Disney let it be known that the new Pixar feature, Soul, originally scheduled to open in theaters in June, would debut on the Disney+ streaming platform in December, bypassing multiplexes altogether.
That news was a teaser of sorts for the corporate blockbuster that arrived Monday: the announcement of a restructuring at Disney that would, in the words of the chief executive, Bob Chapek, involve “managing content creation distinct from distribution.”
“Our creative teams,” Chapek’s statement explained, “will concentrate on what they do best — making world-class, franchise-based entertainment
— while our newly centralized global distribution team will focus on delivering and monetizing that content in the most optimal way across all platforms.”
Those words don’t exactly pronounce a death sentence for theaters, but they do express a bottom-line indifference about their future. Whether cinemas survive, Disney will find screens and viewers. Netflix, which is sprinkling some of its 2020 releases into theaters, has built a subscription empire on the belief that people would just as soon stay home and surrender to the algorithm. Those two companies together control an ever-larger share of the global attention span, and their growing reach can’t help but raise troubling thoughts in a movie lover’s mind.
What if the pandemic, rather than representing a temporary disruption in audience habits and industry revenues, turns out to be an extinction-level event for moviegoing? What if, now that we’ve grown accustomed to watching movies in our living rooms or on our laptops, we lose our appetite for the experience of trundling down carpeted hallways, trailing stray popcorn kernels and cradling giant cups of Coke Zero, to jostle for an aisle seat and hope all that soda doesn’t mean we’ll have to run to the bathroom during the big action sequence?
The specter of empty movie houses was haunting Hollywood long before the COVID-19 plot twist. In most recent years, ticket sales were flat or declining, a malaise masked by seasonal juggernauts like episodes in the Avengers saga or the chapters of the third Star Wars trilogy — by Disney’s mighty market share, in other words. And even the periodic triumphs of nonfranchise, or at least non-Disney, products — Get Out, Joker, Bohemian Rhapsody and American Sniper — were faint puffs of wind in the sails of a becalmed schooner, or teacups of water bailed from the hull of a listing liner, or some other suitably disastrous nautical metaphor.