Isn’t It Time For Studios To Act Like Partners To Exhibition Again?
Would you dare say to your spouse, male or female, “Hey! I’ve decided that if I only receive oral sex, it’s not really cheating and it won’t have any effect on my sexual desire for you… so I’ve just decided to institute the plan, even if you don’t like it.” (That is, unless you were President?)
This seems to be the studio attitude towards the ongoing dream of improving revenues by breaking down the windows for the wide release of feature films.
And let me say, here and now, if I believed for a second that breaking down windows would improve overall revenues, I could not, in good conscience, argue against it. But every single bit of history tells us that shortening windows does NOT improve overall revenues. And there is a lot suggesting that it does exactly the opposite.
But here we are… again… praying that the future will be better because it’s The Future.
The studios are led by and loaded with a bunch of very, very smart, motivated people… people who expect to be able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But DVD is dead. I believe that a subscription-based future is coming, which will increase revenues and reinvigorate the value of libraries. But it’s not going to come from eating away at theatrical. Home Entertainment as the dog, not the very profitable tail, is not the future. It is the past. The recent past of DVD sell-thru. And it died a rather quick death, by evolutionary standards, because the industry got too eager.
I am quite sure that cablers and satellite operators will find a business model that fits in well with an internet streaming future. Likewise, exhibition can adapt to a post-theatrical universe that is going to look very different in a few years.
Telling exhibitors what you are going to do is not partnership.
And exhibitors not allowing an inch for experimentation is not partnership either.
Digital projection is a giant win for distributors and will eventually be okay for exhibitors, opening up some interesting possibilities. But the studios are the ones that win and win immediately, saving a fortune – hundreds of millions a year, soon to be billions) on prints and the distribution of those physical prints. It took years, but the two interested parties figured it out.
Now we have this new digital opportunity. And any reasonable viewer would agree that the goal of the studios is to undercut and consume a part of the theatrical business… as well as to potentially expand the audience at a higher price point than DVD or eventual streaming.
But exhibitors don’t trust distributors because they have experienced window creep for decades and one of the really attractive things about digital home distribution for the distributors is that they don’t have to have a partner or pay for brick & mortar theaters with 45% of their revenue. Both sides know this. I don’t know if they say this to each other and try to negotiate from there… but they should.
When a studio comes up with a 3 week window for a Ben Stiller/Eddie Murphy comedy and a $60 price tag, how could it not spur mad paranoia? it’s SUCH a stupid idea. So why would Universal try it? Just to fail? Just to make an excuse to try something more invasive… more likely to succeed?
Back to your marriage. If you tell your spouse that you’re hiring a more attractive assistant because you don’t feel good about yourself and having some attention from someone really hot who you have no chance with sexually will make you feel better, your spouse is going to assume all kinds of nasty things. And they should. You may really mean it… but it opens up all kinds of weird doors.
Weird doors and staying married don’t tend to go together too well.
At first I thought Universal was just trying to make controversy to raise awareness of the movie. It was the only reason I could think of to piss off the exhibitors for an idea that will be lucky to generate $6,000 in revenue.
DP, do you think this controversy will have any impact on the film’s box office? Do you think Universal was jut being provocative to start a discussion?
Separately, Christophe Beck’s score for Tower Heist is supposed to be good. My son was second assistant on it :-). He gets first assistant on The Muppet Movie.
“Just to make an excuse to try something more invasive… more likely to succeed?”
Nailed it. They’ll scale back the window a week or so with each new announcement and eventually get something close to what they probably originally wanted when the theaters are exhausted of fighting them. (Likely in the eight week timeframe, I’d assume.) Universal and the rest of the studios will be able to be all “Look how reasonable we are now!
As the old saying goes, the prisoner thinks harder about escaping than the jailer does on locking his door, so the prisoner will always win in the end.
Actually, that’s a horrible saying, but you get the idea.
Do you ever get tired of using sex (and rape) as metaphor? It is really the only thing that puts me off from reading your editorials. Completely unnecessary.
Gus… not sure how you projected rape into this one… but I don’t get tired of anything in that way, as I don’t keep track of everything I write or every metaphor I use.
In a case like this, I think it moves the conversation out of a context that is very impersonal to most people and recasts it in a way everyone in a relationship or has been in a relationship can understand.
If I use sports metaphors, that leaves some people disconnected. If I use metaphors that are too wishy-washy, they don’t reflect the degree of passion that people who are involved have about the subject. Religious and political metaphors are sure to offend someone whose faith (or lack of faith) is being ridiculed in the metaphor.
Creating clear ways of thinking about issues that can be confusing or boring is often the goal. Sex is passionate, intimate, and filled with mixed signals for people.