American Consequences - July 2020

because the money they generate sometimes have to service the debt that has been incurred to make them. Still, if a 2020 release of a Marvel picture that would have made $600 million in the U.S. otherwise but can now realistically only gross $200 million or less due to audience hesitation and regulations that make it impossible for theaters to sell tickets in large numbers... will studios release movies at a time when they have no assurance there will be an audience for them? Or when the audience for these movies will be 50% of the size due to cautionary practices by theaters and regulatory demands by the authorities? Professional sports leagues have had to survive players’ strikes and owners’ lockouts before, but they have multigenerational supporters who have a near-patriotic loyalty to their franchises. Every movie has to build its own audience from scratch, and it’s getting harder for films to pull this off despite the rise of grassroots communication like social media. The competition for attention is just too great, especially lately, as the number of streaming subscription services providing in-home entertainment has grown to include Disney+, HBO Max, and the forthcoming Peacock. Take Disney+... A Disney+ subscriber can watch nearly every film made by Disney Studios since the 1930s... and every episode of The Simpsons , of which there are 655. Every Marvel movie... every Star Wars movie... and a host of other family friendly entertainment, including its own new and old TV series. What’s more, Disney+ will also use the platform to release extraordinarily expensive films made for theaters but whose release was derailed by the pandemic, like the magical

with the creation of the movie theater in the first decade of the 20th century. In 2019, American cinemas sold $11.3 billion worth of tickets. Film exhibition is not a huge business – not in a country where soft-drink sales gross $242 billion annually – but since these buildings display the wares produced by what has been and remains the country’s most glamorous industry, it is of outsized influence and semiotic meaning. How it can or will revive, after two decades of declining attendance and the concomitant rise of high-definition home viewing and streaming entertainment, is the most interesting cultural question of post-pandemic America. First off is the issue of how many people will decide they won’t go to the movies at all anymore... because their consciousnesses have been raised or their fears have deepened about the nature of communicable diseases and the problems associated with indoor proximity to others. That number might be tiny in political or polling terms‚ especially given that the largest cohort of moviegoers is made up of the people least endangered by the virus – people under the age of 49. It might only be 10% of Americans. But the profit margin at a movie theater, according to Marketplace.org, is around 4%. So that 10% could mark the difference between survival and death – especially in a year where the theaters have lost months of revenue. Second, there’s the issue of whether studios will want to release their hugely expensive 2020 movies at a time when they simply don’t know what the potential audience size really is. They cannot hold onto the new James Bond or the two new Marvel films very long

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July 2020

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