Have Hollywood studios blown it with the streaming glut? They can’t say they weren’t warned
Should Marvel and Star Wars fans be starting to get worried that the Disney mea culpas are coming quicker and faster? It was only in February that the mouse house’s CEO, Bob Iger, told shareholders that the mega-studio needed to get “better at curating” franchise content for Star Wars and Marvel because of the extraordinary expense of creating it. Now, in the middle of the company’s worst box office slump in years, Iger this week told CNBC that Disney would be both “spending less on what we make, and making less” in the years to come.
It’s a response to movies such as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Pixar’s Elemental and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny all struggling to put bums on seats for various reasons. Each of these films falls under the Disney mantle via its various sub-studios (Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm), as the company has hoovered up so many of its rivals in recent years. That all creates fabulous material for Disney +, but also means there’s an everexpanding need for more and more movies and interconnected TV shows to keep all the sofa-bound, slavering content-hounds happy.
You might think it would be rather unwise to let all those subscribers know they can expect a lot less new material coming through in future. It doesn’t feel like a week goes by without one of my favourite Amazon Prime shows switching to a channel that requires an extra subscription fee, but the streaming site is hardly shouting this to the rooftops. Iger, on the other hand, almost seems to be blaming Disney+ for causing all the studio’s issues.
“We would have liked some of our more recent releases to perform better,” Iger told CNBC. “It’s reflective not as a problem from a personnel perspective, but I think in our zeal to basically grow our content significantly to serve mostly our streaming offerings, we ended up taxing our people way beyond – in terms of their time and their focus – where they had been.”
“Marvel’s a great example of that,” he continued. “They had not been in the TV business at any significant level. Not only did they increase their movie output, but they ended up making a number of television series, and frankly, it diluted focus and attention. That is, I think, more of the cause than anything.”
How this works is beyond me. Were the few extra licks of creativity plunged into She-Hulk and Ms Marvel really responsible for Quantumania’s listless storyline and unfocused script? Have Pixar’s recent ventures into episodic streaming content somehow made Elemental less of a box-office event?
The latter seems more likely. There has been much industry talk of audiences failing to get excited about turning up to the multiplex for a new movie that they would most likely have had the chance to catch at home during the Covid-19 lockdown. And this is something, to be fair, that distributors have been warning about for years. Anyone recall 2013’s Best Buy system, which would have allowed the 1% to purchase new movies on the same day as they turned up in cinemas for $500 a pop on top of $35,000 in set-up costs? Then there was start-up Screening Room in 2016, which followed a similar business model. Distributors fought tooth and nail to keep first-run movies in cinemas, claiming that a shift to the small screen would put multiplexes out of business and lead to a degradation of the film-going experience.
Iger’s comments seem to suggest that they might have been right, although the future has panned out somewhat differently to how many imagined. A huge element has been the pandemic, which sent a glut of high-profile new movies straight to people’s homes because multiplexes were unable to open.
Cinema chains are struggling, with Cineworld at one point entering bankruptcy. But rather than pile on more streaming misery, giants such as Disney seem to be waking up to the possibility that this brave new world of home content has the potential to cause problems for the entire industry – including themselves. Who knew that convincing audiences they no longer need to go to the cinema would torpedo a blockbuster movie model that’s been in place since the mid-1970s? Well you can’t say nobody warned us.