FROM TINSEL TO DUST

Hollywood may survive the effects of the coronavirus crisis, says Robbie Collin, but not as we know it

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. The wildfire spread of the Covid-19 could bring about the end of the industry as we know it. Although the recent blanket shutdown of cinemas and film sets around the world is unprecedented, the industry has had 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-60s, during the blockbuster-fixation of New Hollywood in the early 80s 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. 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.

Disappearing billions

Idle scaremongering? Far from it.

Last week, the Hollywood

Reporter estimated that the coronavirus has already cost the industry $7bn (R120bn) at the box office, with a further $10bn likely to evaporate even if business resumes in the next two months (should the crisis continue beyond May, “all bets are off”, the magazine says).

How much is $17bn in moviemaking terms? Well, it would eliminate the combined global takings of last year’s 21 most successful English-language releases.

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 $1bn 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 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.

Derailed productions

This is why the 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 2020’s 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’s also derailed the production of forthcoming films for 2021 and beyond, among them The Batman, Jurassic World: Dominion, The Matrix 4, Mission: Impossible 7, and the live-action 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 midshoot at anything up to $350,000 a day. Even once the shutdown ends, the entire cast and crew will have to be reassembled around their other work commitments.

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

The peculiar shape of the business means most of its eggs are piled teeteringly high in a very few dependable baskets

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 halfwayhospitable slot in mid-November, 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 Fast & Furious 9 decided 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 Quiet Place Part II and Joe Wright’s The Woman in the Window are all still drifting 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, about $200m in publicity costs have effectively been lost. The likely loss in ticket sales is immeasurably greater.

Bypassing cinemas

Disney could yet push the nuclear button, bypass cinemas entirely and release Mulan directly on its new streaming platform, Disney+, which launches next week. To do so would give its 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.

Titles have been pulled from the schedules this week, but 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.

In other words: to VOD or not to VOD? That is the question that will have been asked in hundreds of conference calls — at Disney and everywhere else.

Universal has already jumped. All of its current theatrical releases, including Emma, The Invisible Man and The Hunt, have been made available to rent on demand. 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.

Post-pandemic, cinema operators will scramble to board it back up. Those who are left, that is. A cinema is a high-cost operation: there are rents, rates, wages and utility bills to pay, regardless of what’s showing. For many small cinemas there might be a survival period of weeks rather than months.

For sure, 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 future-proofed operation in Hollywood today is Blumhouse Productions, the company behind Get Out, Whiplash, the Insidious and Purge series, and indeed Universal’s The Invisible Man and The Hunt, both now coming to a laptop near you.

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.

Netflix’s policy of releasing films online has long been decried by Hollywood. Now it might be the only thing saving it