Tag: movie

Why Disney wants $30 for ‘Raya and the Last Dragon’ when ‘Soul’ was free

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Disney fans who spent the Christmas holiday streaming the Pixar feature Soul for their kids via Disney Plus may be a little confused this weekend. Disney Animation’s latest film, Raya and the Last Dragon , which is out March 5 and is about a Southeast Asian warrior princess on a quest to find a dragon that will unite her people, will also be on Disney Plus, but subscribers will have to pay an additional $30 to see it, at least right now. This summer, the film will be available to all Disney Plus subscribers for free. There’s one additional wrinkle: Raya is also being released in theaters. Well, some of them. Cinemark, the third-biggest movie theater chain in the United States is refusing to show the film, reportedly because Disney’s financial terms were too onerous for a movie that is also being released on streaming.   Consumer whiplash? Just a tad. This is a phenomenon that points to how entertainment conglomerates are still very much in experimentation mode when it comes to settling the streaming vs. theatrical debate, particularly when it comes to kids’ films. It also underlines just how many kinks still have not been worked out (i.e., with theater chains). For a sense of how chaotic and unresolved it all is—and how there is truly no single, settled-upon formula—consider that on March 4, Paramount released The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run exclusively on its new streaming platform, Paramount Plus, as well on premium video-on-demand rental platforms for $19.99 . A week earlier, Warner Bros. released Tom & Jerry both in theaters and on HBO Max (at no extra charge).   According to Paul Dergarabedian , senior media analyst for Comscore, this is the new world order wrought by the pandemic that has wreaked havoc on the theater exhibition business. “‘Are you going to go streaming or theatrical?’ That used to be the question, and there were two answers,” he says. “Now there are 10, 15 answers and permutations of how you can release a movie.”   Raya ‘s rollout mirrors Disney’s release of the live-action Mulan last summer, an approach that confused consumers—as well as generated ire . Thirty bucks when subscribers were already paying $7 a month for Disney Plus Read More …

Why Paramount Plus is betting on sports to get you to subscribe to another streaming service

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Up until now in the streaming wars, live sports were something of a tantalizing appetizer. Mouthwatering and exciting, sure, but not the real reason you signed up. It was great that, say, Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming offering, was set to stream the Olympics last summer (they were postponed because of COVID-19), but fans were primarily interested in bingeing shows such as 30 Rock and The Office . And Netflix, of course, has been emphatic that it has no plans to stream live sports. Even pure sports streaming apps such as ESPN Plus have largely been sold as “complementary” and “additive” services to their linear siblings. There are a couple of reasons for this: One, viewers—and advertising dollars—still flow to traditional broadcast and cable networks, particularly for spectacles such as the Super Bowl, major college football games, and the NBA playoffs. Two, the rights for the most attractive sports content are still tied up with legacy networks, and for the last several years, at least, there’s been some uncertainty that the economics of streaming premium sporting events makes sense. Into this environment comes Paramount Plus , Viacom’s new entry into the streaming playoffs, which launches March 4 and costs $10 a month. (An ad-supported version is set to launch in June for $5 a month). Paramount Plus is seeking to flip the logic that’s put sports on the streaming sidelines. Rather than selling itself primarily as the home of Nickelodeon kids’ shows and big Hollywood movie franchises such as Mission: Impossible —it has those, too—when Viacom laid out its streaming plans last week, it led with a sports pitch. “Paramount Plus will be the leader in live sports,” CBS Entertainment Group head George Cheeks said bluntly. “Bottom line, everything sports fans love on CBS . . . all of this will be available on Paramount Plus.” That means live soccer: Paramount Plus is the exclusive home of UEFA soccer in the U.S., which includes the Champions League and Europa League, and it will air National Women’s Soccer League matches. Read More …

How a tiny startup is reinventing the DVR for the cord-cutter era

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The rise of cord cutting and streaming video was supposed to render the digital video recorder (DVR) irrelevant. In theory, you shouldn’t need to record anything when services like Netflix and Amazon Prime make everything available on demand. But now that every big media company has its own streaming service, all that instant gratification has come at a cost. Watching TV now means bouncing between a dozen different apps, each with its own separate menu system, catalog, and watch list. Read More …

How Disney Plus is winning by ripping up the streaming playbook

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Earlier this month, Netflix sent out an email announcing titles on its service for that week. The flurry of personalized (for the subscriber) titles included its teen romance hit To All the Boys: Always and Forever ; the Nickelodeon series iCarly ; and War Dogs , a Netflix original movie starring Bradley Cooper. There were also promos for recent Netflix originals: Bridgerton , Shonda Rhimes’ buzzy period drama; the teen film We Can Be Heroes ; and George Clooney’s sci-fi film The Midnight Sky . Disney also sent out an email that week announcing what it was touting on its streaming service, DisneyPlus. Most prominently featured was Cinderella , the 1997 TV adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical starring Brandy. Less space was given to a single episode—number six—of the Marvel series WandaVision , a DisneyPlus exclusive, and High School Musical: The Musical: Series , another Disney Plus show that debuted in 2019. As streaming services duke it out and woo subscribers—the latest, Paramount Plus , debuts on March 4—Disney is snubbing its nose at the streaming playbook pioneered most meaningfully (and aggressively) by Netflix. It is not promising a brand-new TV show or movie every single day of the year. It is not churning out splashy press releases announcing lavish deals with TV and filmmakers like Rhimes and Ryan Murphy. It isn’t catering to consumers by allowing them to binge an entire season of a show in one sitting. Want to watch WandaVision ? Read More …

AI promises to make life easier. But it could also change what it means to be human

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The history of humans’ use of technology has always been a history of coevolution. Philosophers from Rousseau to Heidegger to Carl Schmitt have argued that technology is never a neutral tool for achieving human ends. Technological innovations—from the most rudimentary to the most sophisticated— reshape people as they use these innovations to control their environment. Artificial intelligence is a new and powerful tool, and it, too, is altering humanity. Writing and, later, the printing press made it possible to carefully record history and easily disseminate knowledge, but it eliminated centuries-old traditions of oral storytelling . Ubiquitous digital and phone cameras have changed how people experience and perceive events . Widely available GPS systems have meant that drivers rarely get lost, but a reliance on them has also atrophied their native capacity to orient themselves Read More …