Hollywood's dreams go up in smoke
Cinemas are shut and the film release schedule is in tatters. Can the industry ever recover and, if so, in — what form?
Readers of a squeamish disposition should turn the page now.
The following article sets out, in blood-curdling detail, Hollywood’s impending Texas Chainsaw moment.
I say impending.
In fact, it’s already begun. The carful of innocents has pulled up outside the dilapidated homestead and, even now, one is shouting through the unlocked front door to see if anyone’s around.
Of course, what the audience knows with mounting agony is that these poor schmucks’ chance of safe escape has long passed.
The existential threat isn’ ta family of misshapen cannibals, but the Covid-19 pathogen — or rather its wildfire spread, which could bring about the end of the industry as we know it.
Although this week’s blanket shutdown of cinemas and film sets around the world is, of course, unprecedented, the industry has found itself forced to rebuild a handful of times in its 100-year history: at the end of the silent era, again at the fall of the Golden Age studio system in the mid-Sixties, during the blockbuster-fixation of New Hollywood in the early Eighties and, most recently, after the post-9/11 retreat into a comfort blanket of cinematic universes which offered an escape into worlds other than our own.
Now we’re about to witness another great reshaping, playing out as a kind of meta disaster movie in real time.
To quote an immortal horror tagline: who will survive, and what will be left of them?
Over the next 12 months, we’re going to find out. Idle scaremongering?
Far from it.
Last week, The Hollywood Reporter estimated that coronavirus has already cost the
industry $7-billion at the box office, with a further $10-billion likely to evaporate even if business resumes in the next two months (should the crisis continue beyond May, “all bets are off,” the magazine adds).
How much is $17-billion in moviemaking terms?
Well, it would eliminate the combined global takings of last year’s 21 most successful English-language releases, from
down to
Avengers: Endgame via such worldwide
Shazam!, smashes as
The Lion King, Joker,
Toy Story 4, Star Wars IX, 1917
and
Detective Pikachu.
It’s worth noting 2019 was the most lucrative year in box office history, in which five of Disney’s releases alone each grossed more than $1-billion worldwide.
Yet because of the peculiar shape of the film business most of its eggs piled teeteringly high in a very few dependable baskets — once you discount those 21 winners, you instantly hit flops.
The next biggest release of 2019 was Tim Burton’s
Dumbo remake, whose $353-million global takings fell around $150 million short of the film turning a profit.
And that was from the seemingly invincible Disney.
Outside the 21, Sony’s bestperforming release was
Men in
which fell
Black: International, an estimated $50-million short of breaking even; while Paramount’s
Terminator: Dark
ended up more than $100million
Fate in the red while still being the year’s 34th most popular release.
The many-eggs-few-baskets business model has been functioning fine — ish — for more than a decade, but it’s not much good when a giant goat materialises out of nowhere and eats all of your baskets.
This is why coronavirus has been able to wreak such extensive havoc in a short space of time. Not only has it thrown into chaos the release of major new films that would have been among 2020s top performers, including Mulan, the new James Bond film No Time To
Die, Peter Rabbit 2, A Quiet
Place Part II, Fast & Furious 9 and Black Widow.
It has also derailed the production of forthcoming films for 2021 and beyond, among them
The Batman, Jurassic World: Dominion, The Matrix 4, Mission: and the live-action
Impossible 7, remake of
The Little Mermaid.
Nor is it just a matter of downing tools for six months.
That Hollywood Reporter piece put the cost of pausing a blockbuster mid-shoot at anything up to $350,000 a day.
Even once the shutdown ends, the entire cast and crew will somehow have to be reassembled around their other work commitments - which you can bet, thanks to industry panic, will be as flexible as concrete.
Worse still, because each of these enormous properties needs the best chance possible of making back its enormous budget, their opening weekends have to be staked out years in advance: Disney currently has 24 as-yet-untitled blockbusters parked on release dates between now and Christmas 2026.
So when one of these behemoths has to move, there’s nowhere for it to move to. By acting quickly, Bond found a halfway-hospitable slot in midNovember, a week after Marvel’s The Eternals, and the same weekend as
Godzilla vs Kong.
A week later,
Peter Rabbit 2 was able to scurry into a justabout-adequate space in early August in the US, though in the UK a date still has to be pinned down.
But just three days after that, when decided
Fast & Furious 9 to shift, the best slot it could find was in April 2021, almost an entire year later than planned.
Meanwhile, at the time of writing,
Mulan, Black Widow, A and Joe
Quiet Place Part II
Wright’s
The Woman in the are all still drifting
Window dateless.
Yet even successfully moving a film entails taking a serious financial hit.
For Bond alone, which had reached the saturation phase of its ad campaign, around $200 million in publicity costs have effectively been lost.
But with the enforced closure of cinemas in China, France, Italy and Spain, Britian [and SA], the likely loss in ticket sales would have been immeasurably greater.
Disney could yet push the nuclear button, bypass cinemas entirely, and release directly
Mulan on their new streaming platform Disney+, which conveniently launches in the UK next week.
To do so would give their subscriber figures an instant, Everest-sized bump - but it would also forgo the potentially history-making profits
Mulan was set to make at the Chinese box office, after the film was expressly tailored to that market’s tastes.
More humiliatingly, it would also concede that Netflix had been right all along.
The streaming service’s policy of releasing films online and in cinemas simultaneously has long been decried by Hollywood’s old guard as suicide for the industry.
Now it might be the only thing saving it.
While titles large and small have been pulled from the schedules this week, video on demand (VOD) is already there to be embraced, and the industry will surely hit the tipping point between pride and pragmatism fast.
Some income is better than none at all, after all.
What good does it do to have finished products fester on the shelf indefinitely, when they could help tide over your business during an unprecedented slump?
In other words: to VOD or not to VOD?
That is the question that will have been asked in hundreds of conference calls this week - at Disney, regarding Mulan, and everywhere else.
An interestingly-phrased announcement on Tuesday from the British distributor Altitude said the company was “working to get” their April theatrical releases, and
Rocks Les Misérables, “to audiences as soon as possible”.
And right now, “soon” means at home.
Universal have already jumped. In the UK all of their current theatrical releases, including
Emma, The Invisible
and have been
Man The Hunt, made available to rent on demand from Sky Store.
They’ll be followed next month by the new DreamWorks animation
Trolls World
Tour, which will launch online on the day it was meant to open in cinemas. Meanwhile, the UK independent cinema chain Curzon has opened its Home Cinema streaming platform to fellow boutique distributors including Mubi, whose latest release, the surreal Brazilian thriller launched on
Bacurau, the service last weekend.
That smashing sound you just heard was the shattering of the closely guarded “theatrical window”, which traditionally obliges distributors to hold a film’s home release for 16 weeks until its cinematic lifespan has expired.
Post-pandemic, cinema operators will scramble - unsuccessfully, I suspect - to board it back up.
Those who are left, that is. Whether multiplex or singlesite independent, a cinema is a high-cost operation: there are rents, rates, wages, heating and utility bills to pay, regardless of what’s showing and how much or little money it makes.
Things we love are going to change.
Some will disappear. What will rise from the rubble?
Fewer eggs, more baskets. Aside from Netflix and Amazon, arguably the only futureproofed operation in Hollywood today is Blumhouse Productions, the company behind
the Insidious
Get Out, Whiplash, and Purge series, and indeed Universal’s The Invisible
and both now
Man The Hunt, coming to a laptop near you.
Blumhouse’s high turnover of low-budget and nimble projects, with minimal creative fiddling, means their hits (which are substantial) more than cover their misses (which are rarer than you might think).
When it’s safe and right to start work again, others will hopefully follow their lead.
The great irony at the heart of all this is, we’ve rarely been in more urgent need of cinema’s power to uplift us. — The Daily Telegraph