Nothing like a hit to change the conversation.
A few weeks ago, it remained an open question whether people would ever return to theaters and whether VOD would kill theatrical.
Now it’s a debate for data nerds to pick apart how much value you get from a new sub versus second-weekend box-office gross, minus the split.
All sorts of ways that argument might sort itself out. Windows! Price points! PVOD/SVOD! Plenty to haggle over. But that debate is a long way from the suicide pact on the edge of the abyss of a few weeks back.
So where are we now? Take it away, takeaways!
• You can break your brain trying to figure out how much Disney lost on the weekend fall-off versus how much it gained on subscriptions. And everyone seems determined to break their brain on that. But to take a few giant steps back, we’re in a land of hits again. We don’t have to call a COVID-era Gentleman’s C a success anymore. More important: There’s a data point now, even if the definition of “data” is still up for review, of success on multiple platforms.
Could Disney have better maximized squeezing every cent out of this? Maybe? Probably? Who the hell knows. But that’s a minor point in the face of celebrating wins while the sun doth shine.
• Ankler Rule #1 (a hit changes everything) prevails again. Build the giant crowd-pleasing spectacular, and they will come. We now have three big data points to prove it. In the journalism business, you can sell a trend piece with just two (and sometimes, one).
• Suddenly we can now see that when you’ve got the giant crowd-pleasing spectacular, those windows arguments suddenly shrink in importance. Maybe you’ll lose some on one side and gain some on the other, but basically, if you’ve got something that tons of people really want to see, there will be tons of people who want to see it in lots of ways.
• From this vantage point, the windows debate of the past decade—even predating Netflix—was trapped in a zero-sum, death spiral mindset, all that talk about dividing spoils in a diminishing universe. Maybe we can turn a corner now, into a conversation where everybody looks for ways to grow their audience—and increase the value of whatever their part on the supply chain is—rather than just bicker about rationing the last drops of water in the canteen.
• One thing in common about the re-opening era hits: Giant crowd-pleasing spectaculars are born on the backs of giant, crowd-pleasing marketing campaigns. You don’t keep a Marvel operation afloat via a card on the home screen. You don’t create a cultural event by using the algo to push out a few email blasts.
The zero marketing budget dream of the tech world is fine to direct the firehose in this or that direction, but in terms of building durable IP—the bedrock of an industrialized entertainment producer—zero marketing gets you a zero event (and zero in enduring assets) when you turn the firehose off.
• On the flip side, with the collapsed window and the dawn of the streamers, you don’t have to spend $40 million three to six months down the road to remind people that the movie they heard about awhile back still exists.
• The fact that Marvel is able to create a summer monster hit around a low-key supporting character who has already died and which takes place in a little niche 15 films ago shows what a juggernaut this has become. (Also: Hopefully it doesn’t point to Marvel’s direction moving forward.)
• Disney and Netflix now represent wholly opposite theories of what entertainment is becoming. With Netflix, the platform, the wires, and the subscription are everything. The titles, the “content”—those are the things it crams in. At Disney, the IP is all, and it builds out to distribute the IP. Disney has a machine where every single employee knows what the brand is and works to execute to that. Netflix has a machine where the service is all, and filling and maximizing the pipes are the all-consuming, data-devouring obsession. A “Netflix show” or a “Netflix film” has no meaning the way a Disney production does, but The Service itself has immense power.
• So who ultimately wins that debate? We know which side the investment world casts its votes. But when you look at last weekend and how a film like Black Widow—far from Disney or Marvel’s biggest property—could swoop down and rewrite the rules, I wouldn’t write the creative community’s obit just yet.
• To take a smaller but still potent example: Raya and the Last Dragon. A very well done addition to the Disney princess canon, it was simultaneously released in theaters and for the $30 at-home premium last March, with little fanfare and even less marketing. It opened at the height of shutdown to a disastrous $8 million theatrical. But it kept chugging away on the big screens that were open, and by this point, it’s taken in a very respectable (pandemic-adjusted) $54 million domestic, $120M international. Last week, it was the No. 1 most-streamed film in streamingdom by last week’s Nielsen’s tally, beating the entire Netflix phalanx.
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