Tag: theater

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 …

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 …

How this Russian director’s Screenlife films went from gimmick to gold in Hollywood

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When Kazakh-Russian director Timur Bekmambetov was producing the 2014 horror film Unfriended , a movie told entirely on Skype screens in which a group of high school kids are haunted by a friend who’d been bullied and—they thought—committed suicide, he was constantly asked the same question: Why didn’t any of the characters, who, one by one, are freakishly tortured by the former friend, shut down their computers and go into each other’s homes?   Back then, of course, the question was a natural one. Now, Bekmambetov says, “No one asks that.”   Thanks to COVID-19, leaving your house and going to visit someone else, even to save their life, is a potentially fatal risk. Indeed, today no one would ever wonder why characters in a film never physically interact with one another. After all, that’s essentially what life has looked like for almost a year now. But while the pandemic has been devastating to Hollywood—shutting down productions and causing major studios to shift many of their tentpole releases to digital distribution or punt them into the future—it has been a boon for Bekmambetov and his production company, Bazelevs Studio. The company, whose primary hubs are in Moscow and Los Angeles, pioneered and specializes in so-called Screenlife films that take place exclusively on computer and mobile screens and are shot using GoPros and other nontraditional cameras, often with actors and filmmakers in separate locations Read More …

How WarnerMedia just killed the Hollywood way of doing business

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“It’s holy shit time.”   So proclaimed one Hollywood manager just minutes after WarnerMedia announced on December 3 that it will be releasing its entire 2021 slate of movies on HBO Max, the company’s fledgling streaming platform. The lineup of films, which includes major tentpole releases such as Suicide Squad 2 , Godzilla vs. Kong , Dune, and The Matrix 4 , will simultaneously be released in theaters.   The move marks the most significant milestone yet in the streaming-versus-theatrical debate that has been roiling for years now, growing more agitated and desperate in recent months due to COVID-19, which has all but decimated the theatrical moviegoing business. Yet even as COVID-19 has shuttered movie theaters around the world and caused movie studios to make historically unheard-of decisions—for instance, moving would-be theatrical films such as Hamilton and Mulan over to their streaming services (both of those were released on Disney Plus) or selling off otherwise worthy films to Netflix or another tech giant (such as Enola Holmes and Greyhound, which bowed on Netflix and Apple TV Plus respectively)—studios have nonetheless clung mightily to the belief that when it comes to big-budget films, there is simply no upside in releasing them on streaming. The reason? The box-office revenue for those films is simply too vast to justify a streaming release. This explains why, up until now, studios have been feverishly punting their most valuable gems into 2021 and beyond, praying that by the time their movies are set to debut in theaters, we’ll all be vaccinated and chomping on popcorn in close proximity to other humans again. (With Mulan , which cost a reported $200 million to make, Disney tried to insulate itself by charging subscribers $30 to see the movie during its first month in release.) But WarnerMedia’s move throws down the gauntlet on what has largely been an almost academic debate. One year from now, there will be actual data showing just how much money the company made or lost on its audacious bet. It won’t be a matter of hypotheticals; there will be actual numbers showing how movies like The Matrix 4 fared on streaming, at least in terms of how many new subscribers it attracted to HBO Max in the quarter it was released, if not actual viewing metrics. Nor is this a toe-dipping experiment, as the company has teed up for this Christmas with Wonder Woman 1984 , the first tentpole to be sacrificed to a combined HBO Max and theatrical release, a move prompted by the most recent surge in COVID-19 cases. This is a company going all in. Granted, WarnerMedia is being very clear that this is a one-year thing, driven wholly by the pandemic and (not that its executives are saying this) what was learned from the disastrous rollout of Tenet in theaters back on Labor Day weekend. But putting all of its planned 2021 movies on HBO Max at the same time as debuting them theatrically remains the biggest, most declarative statement yet in terms of the future of streaming.   As for the logistics of how this will work, the movies that WarnerMedia is releasing on HBO Max will be made available to subscribers for 31 days Read More …

With just 7 COVID-19 deaths in Taiwan, even huge events are back in business

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It’s a Saturday afternoon at 3:00 in the afternoon, and Taipei Metro’s blue line is packed. Riders are standing shoulder to shoulder. Exiting passengers positioned in the interior kindly ask those in front of the doors to make way. All passengers are sporting compulsory masks—including those heading to the four-day Outdoor Show at the Nangang Exhibition Center. Right inside the exhibition center entrance, a young man is positioned off to the side behind a standup desk. On top sit a laptop and connected security camera. As attendees flow through the doors, the camera captures their body temperature and relays it to the laptop, where their respective temperatures pop up in front of their faces on the screen Read More …