When Taylor Swift announced that she would be releasing a taping of her wildly popular Eras tour in theaters across the world, studio heads were pretty pissed. The singer-songwriter worked directly with AMC and Cinemark theaters to broker a deal for her tour’s release, cutting traditional distributors out entirely and wreaking havoc on an already set Hollywood release schedule.
Of course, I’d be pretty mad too if someone showed up out of the blue and made it abundantly clear that my pandemic-reactionary release strategy was a tremendous mistake that was killing my bottom line and subsequently destroying the theatrical model in the process. Doubly so, if that same person were to show up months later to announce that no traditional streamer would be getting a piece of the pie (yet) and they would instead be releasing the film on Video on Demand (VOD).
Which is exactly what Taylor Swift did this week.
The thing is, while Taylor Swift is certainly a musical genius with business acumen to spare, she’s not doing anything fundamentally new or different here. She is literally just releasing Eras via the pre-pandemic distribution model. Y’know, the one that used to make people money?
I’m not here to bore you with theatrical window gobbledygook. Instead, we’re going to talk about a simple truth: people aren’t going to the movies the way they used to anymore. There are a myriad of small factors that contribute to this, from the fact that two movie tickets in a major market will run you about 50 bucks amidst a staggering economy all the way down to some people simply still aren’t comfortable in crowded spaces with continued COVID concerns. But the biggest reason we’re seeing the box office falter is that audiences have simply become used to movies being available on streaming almost immediately after their theatrical run.
Cruel Summer
Ok, it’s been a cruel year (several years). Disney won’t close 2023 with a billion-dollar movie. Boohoo for them, right? They’re the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the world. Surely they can afford to lose a few bucks. The thing is, they’re not the only ones floundering at the box office. We just notice it the most because for as long as many folks can remember, Disney (and Marvel and Star Wars) has been consistently untouchable.
2023 has been rife with box office flops that would have, in previous years, been surefire bets. Dungeons and Dragons should have cleaned house; The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes will ultimately do fine but had the lowest opening of the franchise by a considerable margin; Wish, an animated feature, opened on Thanksgiving weekend and tanked; The Marvels aggressively underperformed at opening, and the dire truth is that this list could keep going on and on.
Folks are quick to blame things like “superhero fatigue,” but the Disney+ numbers don’t support that. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness was viewed for 1.43 billion minutes the week it premiered on Disney+, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was the most viewed film on streaming, period, the week it debuted, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 walloped both box office and streaming charts alike.
Let’s look outside of the superhero sphere for argument's sake! The Little Mermaid was one of the highest-viewed premieres on Disney+ ever. Meanwhile, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny also cleaned house on digital ahead of its Disney+ release. As you’ve probably guessed by now, The Haunted Mansion dominated over Halloween. (And yes, I too wish every analytics company and streamer would agree on a metric of measurement.)
All You Had to Do Was Stay
Taylor and her army of Swifties aren’t the only proof that the extremely short window between the theatrical and streaming release pipeline is hurting film performance. Despite negative early reactions out of the Cannes Film Festival, Elemental shocked box office pundits everywhere when it proved to be the first film in ages to have legs. Weekly revenue was never staggering, but it held strong with low-to-middling performance for months. One week it would grow, the next it would drop, then grow, then drop again.
Pete Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer, spoke to The New York Times about this “new” phenomenon, acknowledging that Disney had “undercut Pixar as a big-screen force by using its films to build Disney+.”
And, lo and behold, when Elemental didn’t magically show up on Disney+ as audiences were trained that it would, folks gradually made their way out to theaters to check it out. And as they said nice things about it and word spread, the film continued to grow its revenue.
Two key takeaways? Movies can succeed at the box office if you let them, and don’t premiere your animated feature at prestige film festivals.
Bad Blood
There’s currently a three-way tug-of-war happening between studios, theaters, and consumers. (I don’t know how a three-way tug-of-war would work, that’s not the point.)
Studios want money, theaters want to stay open, and consumers are split between “preserve the theatrical experience!” and “I want to be able to enjoy from the comfort of my home!” And, while it might be a little annoying, none of those parties are technically wrong in their needs. The extremely frustrating fact of the matter is that all of these statements are true at once:
- Studios have to make money to fund art.
- Theaters have to stay open for the theatrical experience to survive.
- Theaters are astronomically expensive. But they make very little from ticket sales.
- Millions and millions of people rely on both studios and theaters for work.
- Streaming offers a level of accessibility to film that many disabled folks were unable to experience previously.
- Studios putting their films on streaming so quickly after their theatrical window is actively dismantling the theater industry.
We’re not going to dive into every one of these aspects today, but they are all symptoms of a growing problem.
One that, yes, Taylor Swift has largely shown studios how to solve. Studio execs may have been salty because one pop star went rogue, but in becoming the studio herself, Swift worked out a lucrative deal that benefited her and her teams and the theaters alike. She will now continue to rake in the cash by skipping the direct-to-streaming approach and offering a VOD option to her fans.
Again, nothing new here. Literally just the distribution model of old with the studios left out of the process. But in this case, “old” really just means like six years ago.
We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together
So, the bigwigs have a problem, and a pop star has shown them how to solve it. But the question now becomes whether or not studios can get back to where they were before, or if they even want to.
Now, I hear you: “Of course they want to get back to where they were before! They’re hemorrhaging cash.” And you’re right. The thing is, if there’s one thing that’s valued as much as money in the entertainment industry, it’s pride. A whole lot of very rich people have thrown their weight behind the streaming model, and to admit that it’s destroying certain revenue streams is to admit defeat.
How long will the people who bet the farm on this new model be able to pretend that it’s helping them in its current form? There are still one-off hits like Five Nights at Freddy’s… it could all work out! Except Five Nights at Freddy’s has a rabid fanbase who has been clamoring for a movie for nearly a decade, and remains basically the only day-and-date release (meaning it hit theaters and streaming at the same time) to do anything noteworthy so far as the box office is concerned. We won’t see another weird success like it for some time.
Worse still for the studio-owned streaming services like Disney+ and Paramount+ is the fact that Wall Street and other investors have stopped valuing subscriber count (something usually solved by a free trial here and there) and are now reasonably putting all of their attention on revenue growth.
Maybe TayTay will find a solution for the Hollywood execs in that respect, too.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
The bad news is that things are going to get worse before they get better, and consumers are likely going to be the ones who pay for it. While studios scramble to find a way to make both streaming and theatrical models successful, prices are only going to get higher. We’ve already seen hikes across the board in 2023, and viewers can probably expect them to continue in 2024.
The simple answer might be to just put it all back in the box and go back to the way things were in the Before Times™, but that aforementioned pride is likely going to continue to bite everyone in the butts, including those of us who didn’t make the decisions that got us here in the first place. But, prices can only raise so much before audiences start to bail entirely. Here’s hoping executives swallow their pride and realize Taylor Swift’s lead might be worth following.
Until then, all we can do is continue to vote with our wallets both in theaters and at home.
