Movies post-Covid

I found a most inspiring article here. It is a fact that we still like to indulge ourselves in movies. So, the pressure is still on the in terms of producing something we all want to look at. But now comes the problem. Producing a movie is a major undertaking. The average cost is some $100 million, but can be higher, depending on location, stunts, props, etc.

The traditional way of making money out of a movie is to release it to the movie houses (NuMetro, SterKinekor and so on). Of course US movie houses dominate a bit in this arena.

So the producers get their money back from the ticket sale. That is not difficult to grasp and is the traditional way of doing business. … and then came Covid!

Suddenly, the movie houses cannot be filled and that now means that some of the big movie house chains (in the US) face bankruptcy. If they go, where do we go?

We are talking real money here. According to the article, AMC (a movie chain in US) has warned its investors that they need some $750 million this year. Cineworld has shut some of its movie houses in Europe and across the US.

We have an audience (you and I) who would like to watch a new movie, a producer who is keen on producing but … the link between the producer and the audience is broken.

Netflix and other online platforms will be far more dominant in the distribution of movies.

We can then ask ourselves: what will you and I prefer? Squinting at the cell phone for watching a movie or do we still prefer to go to the movie house?

As for now, we might still prefer the movie house, but will our preferences change after 2 years of Covid restrictions? That will determine the ‘value chain’ of movie production.

The key question is also about the ticket price. What is Netflix vs. Metro? What is the convenience? Where do we really want to be watching a movie?

Let us also remember that going to the movies can still be an ‘event’. We might have a pizza before (or after) and we still have the feeling of being out and about.

That is difficult to achieve by looking at a cell phone at home.

What about the type of movies we want to watch?

The article has a few words on that account. Things I have never considered.

The first strange twist is that China ticket sale passed the US market ticket sale! This is a major development as the US market has always been the biggest and the most important one. Hollywood movies have been dominant globally.

But suddenly, the Chinese movie goers preferred Chinese movies (not Mulan!) in the likes of “The Eight Hundred,” an animated film “Jiang Ziya: The Legend of Deification” and the patriotic anthology “My People, My Homeland”. Ever heard of these? Me neither.

If we turn to the themes, we might see what the audience (you and I) like. And this might have a surprise for us.

social distancing? Probably not. It will be too much to also look at in the movie house.

I quote: “Rivals Marvel Studios and DC Films are both leaning hard on multiverses, the geeky concept of a constellation of parallel fictional worlds that still occasionally intersect.

It is a narratively complex gamble, one that was introduced to the mainstream in Sony’s animated “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” and will be teased out in such upcoming live-action movies as “Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” “The Flash,” and the next Spider-Man sequel, as well as on streaming shows on Disney Plus and HBO Max.”

Do we produce for a Covid world which we think is there 2 years from now? Or do we think we will be out of the shadow and get on with batman beating up the Joker again. As we did 2 years ago?

Video streaming giant Netflix had a total net income of over 2.76 billion U.S. dollars in 2020, whilst the company’s annual revenue reached 25 billion U.S. dollars. The number of Netflix’s streaming subscribers worldwide has continued to grow in recent years, reaching 204 million in the fourth quarter of 2020 (source: www.statista.com).

Is this the new normal?