I say things are looking promising for the theatrical experience. Granted fears of the Delta variant of the ‘Rona are currently killing the box office—again—as those vaccines promised to be the way out of this nightmare for all of us have proven far less effective than they said they would be. (The “experts” need to be honest about this instead of moving the goalposts. Yes, vaccines remain the best defense we have against Delta, and if you are vaccinated your chances of getting seriously ill are way lower, but those vaccines were supposed to curtail the spread of the disease, period, and they have failed to do that. There’s no other way to spin that. They failed.)
Disney released BLACK WIDOW to livestreaming on the same day they released it in theaters. And Scarlett Johannsson, whose earnings from the movie are tied to its box office haul, a haul significantly lessened by the livestreaming move, sued the holy hell out of them. I guarantee you they paid off Emma Stone, too, as there were rumblings that she would also file a lawsuit over CRUELLA, and now all of a sudden Disney is saying they figured out a way to “fairly compensate” their stars and news of a CRUELLA sequel has emerged. Read that one between the lines.
THE SUICIDE SQUAD, available to livestream, underperformed at the box office, while this past weekend saw FREE GUY, exclusive to theaters, do rather well. The bottom line is, the big studios are seeing that movies just won’t make as much money if they’re not made exclusive to theaters, nor will top stars put up with simultaneous releases to livestreaming as it cuts into their earnings.
Horror movies are less affected by all this, as they tend to be lower-budgeted affairs, but there will be some trickling down. Theatrically exclusive releases are more financially viable for studios. And that is a very good thing for cinephiles.
