POP GOES THE CULTURE
WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE WORLD OF ENTERTAINMENT, AND THAT’S A PROBLEM, WRITES SONNY BUNCH.
WE USED TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE WE KNEW HOW MANY PEOPLE WERE WATCHING TV SHOWS VIA THE NIELSEN RATINGS AND WE KNEW HOW MANY PEOPLE WERE SEEING MOVIES VIA BOX- OFFICE DATA. — SONNY BUNCH
The coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic shutdown in response have sped everything up by about 10 years. Threats once on the horizon are now directly off the port bow, in firing range. And while some of these shifts might seem trivial, their consequences are not.
Consider the death of accurate, concrete data about who is watching what television and movies. These figures might seem like just so much Hollywood business jargon, but they help us figure out how to define our common culture.
Difficulty in determining what, exactly, attracts eyes and drives revenue isn’t exactly new. In his book The Hollywood Economist, Edward Jay Epstein highlighted the emergence of harder- to- parse home video and DVD markets as a way studios massaged the bottom line. A movie that might have been a flop in theatres had a chance for second life in the home video marketplace; for a while, as that DVD revenue flowed in, it was almost hard to lose money on a movie.
When it comes to home viewing, Tivo and the DVR revolution reduced our ability to rely on ratings data. These technologies supercharged a practice that was previously a hassle: time- shifting ( i. e., watching a show after it airs) and advertisement- skipping by recording programs on VHS. Once DVRS were commonplace, live viewership numbers measured by Nielsen failed to be of much use. Now the important metric was live- plus- three, or the number of live eyeballs added to the number of people who tuned in over the next three days.
Add to this already com
plicated landscape the rise of Netflix, which has made TV’S vast wasteland infinite, and competing services, among them HBO Max, Apple TV+, Hulu, Disney+, and Amazon Prime. When they deign to give us data at all, these outlets offer ever- shifting, and rarely useful, information to consumers about who is watching what; Netflix currently defines a “viewer” as someone who watches at least two minutes of a program.
Another tier of services, including Amazon, Apple and your cable and satellite companies, offer pay- perview movies. And while most provide charts with bestselling titles, none of them
explains how many rentals it takes to top the list. And, as a cherry on top, we have little in the way of useful box- office data because we have few big releases in theatres. The companies that distribute the few movies that are playing in cinemas — looking at you, Warner Bros. and Tenet — are giving out dribs and drabs of information, at best, in comparison with the weekly box-office reports that once were standard. Why does this matter? We used to live in a world where we knew how many people were watching TV shows via the Nielsen ratings and we knew how many people were seeing movies via box-office data. We could
decide what to watch and calibrate our discussions about culture accordingly, based on a decent sense of what was popular and what wasn’t. ( Of course, we knew that quality programming on TV and in theatres could trump quantity of consumption.)
But now no one — outside of those few granted unlimited access to user data by Netflix and its ilk — knows who’s watching what or in what quantity or for how long. This lack of transparency doesn’t just affect what we talk about; it’s going to affect when we get new movies and television shows, and how we get them.
Take the scramble to fig
ure out how many people, exactly, watched Disney’s new live- action Mulan. One outrageous estimate promulgated by Yahoo Finance suggested the film took in more than a quarter- billion dollars in video- on- demand rentals just in the United States in its opening weekend. (Even the co-founder of the firm that provided Yahoo Finance with the data responded with the equivalent of “Whoa, hold on a sec.”) This absurd figure was then used as evidence by the theatre- fearful, movie- hungry denizens of Twitter as verifiable proof not just that Tenet should have gone to home video immediately, but that it was in the studio’s financial interest to do so.
A more cautious, almost certainly more accurate, measure by the pseudonymous Entertainment Strategy Guy puts Mulan’s take closer to $ 36 million, suggesting the film — which was available for purchase by Disney+ subscribers only — will generate around $ 90 million domestically. Not quite a disaster for Disney, but certainly not the sort of figure that will encourage it to put the now-delayed Black Widow on the service.
The simple point here is that none of us really knows how well Mulan has done. I think we all suffer as a result.
We need some sort of accountability process, some sort of measuring stick: an industry standard that, like box- office data, provides us all a common starting point for a cultural conversation.
Not only so the hot- take artists like your humble narrator here know what, exactly, to take- hot on. But also, so people who cover the industry can have an idea what exactly is working. So there can be a discussion of whether the megadeals doled out by streaming services to showrunners are worth it. So writers and directors can get a better sense of what people are watching and respond intelligently. So we can have a rational discussion about the fate of movie theatres — a sector of the economy deemed inessential by folks like New York state governor Andrew Cuomo that nevertheless provides 136,000 jobs as of March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — and how important it is to encourage their survival.
Knowing what’s popular isn’t the end of the conversation. It’s the start of many more important ones.