![]() ![]() The Holdovers Is a Cozy ’70s Throwback With One Big Difference.The Marvels Is Mixed-Up, but It Might Hold the Key to Saving the Marvel Universe.Marvel Just Had Its Worst Box-Office Weekend Ever. (Subsequent digital releases like The King of Staten Island are the kind that would have done much of their business outside of theaters anyway.) Disney kept a few of its tentpoles in place, converting Mulan into a premium Disney+ add-on, and even moved up the filmed version of Hamilton as an enticement to subscribe, creating the rare streaming debut with a monocultural footprint the size of a theatrical blockbuster. 2020’s case studies have shown that it’s possible to make a sizable chunk of change renting new releases at first-run prices, but also that it’s nothing compared with the amount they could have made in theaters: Universal’s Trolls World Tour took in an estimated $95 million, but that’s almost $60 million short of the original Trolls’ domestic haul, and while the studio’s profit was roughly the same, the experiment clearly wasn’t enough of a success for it to rethink its decision to kick the next Fast and Furious sequel to 2021. (Roughly a dozen will be released this Friday alone.)Īs is always the case at the top of the food chain, the Wonder Womans of the world will find a way to make the system work to their advantage. Even with the limited social interactions I’ve had over the past several months, it feels like every other conversation I’ve had has involved someone asking me why there aren’t any new movies coming out. (There are movies in my Netflix list I’ve been meaning to get around to since 2009.) In 2020, many of those movies are still being released in one form or another, but unless you’re a hardcore movie buff, you probably have no idea. On a purely practical level, theaters act as a filter, a way of separating out a small handful of the hundreds of movies released every year, and although the system by which they end up there is riven with biases and blind spots, on balance, the movies that end up there are better than the ones that don’t, and their limited runs create a sense of occasion and urgency that the boundless availability of streaming can’t match. By now, you’ve read a million paeans to the magic of sitting in a darkened theater, but it’s not just the evanescent experience of the silver screen that’s been whisked away. (They’re not in good shape, but then none of us is.) But the past eight months have given Americans a glimpse of what a world without movie theaters would look like, and frankly, it sucks. Without a firm date for a widely distributed vaccine, let alone a return to whatever version of normal we might be able to achieve, it’s too soon to opine on whether movie theaters are dead or not. Send me updates about Slate special offers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |