No time to live for the cinemas starved of blockbuster releases
The decision to delay the new Bond film might be the final nail in the coffin for the sector, writes Robbie Collin
‘History is moving pretty quickly these days,” Ian Fleming wrote in Casino Royale, “and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.” What, I wonder, would he have made of his most famous creation’s evershifting role in the coronavirus crisis? Throughout the leanest six months that British cinemas have known, the prospect of a new James Bond film in November looked like a lifeline. But with the news over the weekend that MGM had decided to postpone it until April 2021, 007 may just have killed off the sector for good.
The consequences of MGM’S decision have been swift and cataclysmic. Only 24 hours after the announcement, it emerged that Cineworld, the multiplex chain, was preparing to close all 128 of its theatres in the UK and Ireland as soon as this week, leaving 5,500 staff facing redundancy. At the time of writing, it remains unclear whether the Cineworld-owned Picturehouse group will also be affected, but other operators will surely be forced to follow suit.
Blockbusters keep British cinemas ticking over. We can rue the cultural implications of this, lament the fact that we ever allowed the market to tilt so heavily in their favour, and envy countries such as France, Japan and South Korea, where it isn’t the case. But there’s no denying it is the case, even outside of a pandemic. So when studios collectively refuse to release those blockbusters, because they are unable to make pre-pandemic profits, mass closures and job losses will inevitably follow.
What’s more, as the available screen count drops, the incentive for distributors to release anything at all will fall away in tandem. Wonder Woman 1984 and Dune, both
It’s as if pubs had been told that they could reopen, but weren’t allowed to serve beer
scheduled for December, will almost certainly be pushed back to June and October of 2021. Peter Rabbit 2? Well, the bunny always has next Easter. As for Pixar’s Soul and Disney’s Death on the Nile, Disney+ premium releases await, providing the economics don’t prove ruinous – and on streaming platforms, where films can be pirated flawlessly and instantly, this is by no means a given.
Kafkaesque doesn’t do it justice. Cinemas have been Covid-proofed with extraordinary diligence and are raring to go, yet are being deprived of the only product that will bring them back in sustainable numbers. It’s as if pubs had been told they could reopen, but weren’t allowed to serve beer until next spring.
In their statement, MGM said the delay was to ensure that No Time to Die could be seen “by a worldwide theatrical audience”. (It was initially scheduled for release back in April, but moved to November as lockdown loomed.) Yet cinemas almost everywhere outside of the US are open for business. In South Korea, whose track-and-trace system has been meticulous from the start, the number of outbreaks traced to a cinema is zero.
Meanwhile, the one major studio production to have been released since lockdown, Warner Bros’s Tenet, has taken $285 million (£220m) worldwide to date – a sum that, under the circumstances, seems miraculous, and is largely down to relatively strong turnouts in the UK, Europe, Australia and the Far East. Tenet might well have taken at least twice that amount if it had been released 12 months earlier, but the way things are going, it might be double 2021’s wildest dreams.
Could this all be some dastardly ploy by Hollywood to drive theatres out of business so they themselves can buy them up at rock-bottom rates? The repeal in August of the so-called Paramount decrees – a long-standing US law that prevented studios from also owning cinemas – certainly makes it possible. But two seismic changes are under way that would seem to make it barely worth the effort.
First, the films that the studios haven’t deigned to release at this make-or-break moment for the industry are approaching the end of their natural shelf life. The original trailer for No Time to Die was released almost a year ago, and we’ve already weathered two full publicity pushes for each of its intended release dates. When the machinery creaks back into action in a few months’ time, the pervasive sense of “not this thing again” will be hard to dissipate.
Secondly – and more dangerous still – the studios’ once-enormous audience is simply learning to live without them, and finding it easier with every passing week of no-shows. Outside of the industry, the reaction to the first Bond delay was shock and disappointment; the latest, I sense, has provoked something closer to exasperation. Hollywood is changing the entire cinematic ecosystem as we watch. I wonder how hospitable it’s going to find the new one.