How to Save a $70B Business We Don't Know What To Do With
Theatrical is about to have its worst year in memory. But we can recover
Now, the 100-plus-year-old experiment with industrial entertainment known as The Movies enters its dark valley. Thanks to a diabolical concatenation of misguided decisions and fate, we enter into a man-made wasteland. The list of villains has been amply recited — short-sighted theater owners, Wall Street, the streamers, which often seemed to regard legacy theatrical as an annoying elderly relative to be humored; the strikes, and the studios’ half-year failure to end them; consolidation; and let us not forget the pandemic and a total shutdown in production and exhibition.
It’s quite a list and it’s amazing we’re still alive to talk about it. A mixture of bad planning and bad luck. At the center of the challenges ahead: Fighting our way out of the consequences of very poor decision-making and leadership.
Somewhere around the time the Streaming Wars took hold, Hollywood’s great studios stopped seeing themselves as entertainers and started seeing themselves as cogs in some gigantic financial mechanism.
Now our battered, confused film industry is staring down the barrel of a release calendar that looks like a First World War battlefield just before Armistice Day.
Problem with the apocalypse scenario is that someone forgot to tell the audiences it was all over.
Everywhere genuine entertainment emerges, the public still turns out for it. A dead medium doesn’t produce Barbenheimer. It doesn’t even produce Anyone But You.
Ankler Rule #1 — this is a business of hits — applies not just to individual slates, but the business as a whole. As bleak as things seem overall, a business that can create hits will attract people wanting to make some. This remains an enormously attractive business to be in if there’s still oil to be found in them thar hills.
Larry Ellison might have made astounding breakthroughs in database software and cloud computing systems revolutionary enough to make him the third richest man in the world. But his children want to make movies. Just like the children of the wealthy 100 years ago.
If we can keep the spark alive, the money for everyone will come back. Paramount may or may not make it through, but there will be others.
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The question here largely is: Can this giant, inward-looking, self-obsessed, lumbering, bureaucratic, misdirected business get out of its own way and stop treating theatrical — a $70 billion business in 2023 — like an orphan wandered in off the street that we have no idea what do with.
Doing that is going to require taking some really bad habits and thought patterns by the thread and strangling them to death. Not easy for fun to do, but we can see now, it’s just the survival of the industry on the line.
As the fate of film hangs in extremis, here are some habits we need to kick yesterday if we’re going to see this to the other side.
Stop Blaming the Streamers
At last week’s Netflix unveiling event, content chief Bela Bajaria had some pretty definitive words on the long-running hope that Netflix was going to go down, or try out or maybe dip a toe in a theatrical model. She said: