A slight turn from the fire and brimstone in this issue to a more wonky discussion.
The big question on the table is no longer when will we get normal back. That question has been answered: no time soon.
Once you swallow that, the focus should not be on when but what? As in: What comes back? In what form?
The Second World War wasn’t fought over women’s fashions, or urban migration, or corporate administration, but by the time you got from one side to the other, all that had changed and so many of the things that had been the lynchpins of society had been washed away. When you have a great disruption that forces people to stop doing much of everything, whether it’s the point or not, that’s going to change everything.
Which brings us to moviegoing. Even if the desire for seeing a movie in a theater returns, the entire apparatus that delivers that experience is screwed up beyond belief. The thought that whatever is still standing when we get to the other side is just going to reconstructed status quo ante is hard to believe.
For the past few months, Hollywood—mostly Universal—has been doing an experiment in whether Premium Video on Demand (PVOD) is the path forward for movies.
For years, PVOD has been dangled by many analysts as the great pot of gold Hollywood was too stuffy and hidebound to snatch up. Money, it was said, was just sitting there waiting to be handed to us at no cost.
And worse: What kind of business fails to give its customers what they so clearly want? The future of entertainment was streaming at home. The future of movies was streaming. Theatrical was a relic of an industry and by holding onto it instead of going all-in on streaming, Hollywood was cutting off its own future.
Thanks to the plague era, we’ve now had a few experiments going all-in on the streaming model, conducted at a moment when much of entertainment is actually closed. There’s no theatrical to compete with, but neither is there sports, concerts, or barbecues in the park. A good percent of America is trapped in a room with the device used to purchase Premium Video on Demand. So whatever the results are here, this is an optimal conditions test drive.
So given all that, bring on the takeaways:
• As in all entertainment, not all PVODs are equal, even during a pandemic. Some are born Trolls; others made to be Scoobs.
• In terms of sheer dollars, there is and will be no comparison. If Trolls World Tour had made $100 million at the worldwide box office, it would have been a disappointment.
• But all dollars spent are not created equal. It’s all about the split with the theaters. So $100M for Trolls online is equal to $200M in theaters, which approaches a reasonable return.
• That said, when is a movie ever again going to have as clear a cultural landscape and captive audience as Trolls did?
• Trolls, however, was the beneficiary of not just the clear field but also benefited from being the sequel to a successful family film, and—most important—came in under the steam of an old-time theatrical marketing campaign which was already on the books when the lockdown struck, with tens of millions spent to create an “event” out of this launch.
• A huge portion of the audience was likely forking out for a PVOD for their first time. So Trolls can also be seen as an investment in building up a new ecosystem.
• We’re still too locked into ways of thinking from our golden days for big studio theatrical and closed universe of TV networks. We search for what the entertainment of the future will look like and want one simple answer: “People will still go to theaters” or “Paid subscriptions” or “Kids are going to watch make-up tutorials on YouTube and nothing else.” The Netflix revolution has led us to believe that a new monolithic business will replace the old one. The irony of the moment is that as the tech world encroaches and we’re all in on the streaming wars, we’re building for a future that involves less options than ever before, even if we’re momentarily dazzled by the array of programming on one particular service.
But isn’t the future with all its devices and formats likely to bring a greater multiplicity of choices at every level?
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