Quote from: SiL on Sep 16, 2022, 10:23:25 AMWe're not talking about every studio, we're talking Disney. Which has Marvel, Fox, Pixar and Lucasfilm, accounting for the most profitable properties in movie history. People will sign up to them. Meanwhile Netflix has lost many popular properties and their originals are struggling to keep it afloat.
Top Gun Maverick is a terrible example here. Predator movies don't make that much money in theatres. They never have. Prey has shown they're perfect for getting people to sign up and stay engaged with their streaming services.
For example, saying it's been watched for over a billion minutes sounds really impressive. But the movie is 100 minutes long. If that was made of people watching the whole movie, including credits, it's 10 million views. At $15 a ticket, that's $150 million - which the studio gets about half of.
Say they skip the credits but all watch. That only adds 10%.
Now consider all the people who only watched because it was on streaming, or only rewatched because it was on streaming.
It hasn't done that much better than previous entries. But costs were lower and the studio keeps everything and people sign up for ongoing payments so it's more profitable.
I think streaming will destroy itself eventually. It's not sustainable to have 10,000 streaming services vying for competition, and at some point anti trust and anti competitive laws are going to kick in and break them apart.
But the damage to going to the cinema is done for one simple reason: audiences like the convenience. Whether Nolan and Villeneuve or Tarantino or Lynch want you to see the movie in cinema or not is irrelevant. All that matters is where the audience decides they will go. And while the cinema is by no means dead, streaming has entrenched itself as an equal platform to audiences globally.
Well, you sounded like you were making a generalized statement about streaming, so I have to correct that. As for Predator, they did well enough in theaters to have sequels. Yes, you are right, the Predator franchise was never a mega box office champion like Marvel or Harry Potter franchises. But in general, Predator films made money. I mean, the logic is pretty simple. Leaving aside Hollywood accounting, if Predator did not make money, we wouldn't be getting sequels now, would we?
And I disagree, Top Gun is a perfectly valid example, because it shows movie in theaters still make money. It might not be the same type of film as Predator movies, but I remember at the height of the pandemic, some folks were saying streaming would kill off theaters for good. Well, that didn't happen.
As for Hulu, I'm glad Disney deemed it a success. But that is seen in isolation. We have no idea whether the next Predator sequel will be just as successful on streaming. There are people who would pay a theater ticket to see Prey but would NOT subscribe to Hulu just to watch Prey.
It seems rather short-sighted, if not downright foolish as a long-term business strategy, to put all your eggs in the streaming basket and give up on theaters or Home media release.
Bottom line, streaming has provided an extra avenue for film release, but it has not, and will not, replace theater release as a whole.
