Hollywood is torturing itself over this simple question: What’s happened to the audience? Why have movies batted .000 with its 25 wannabe hits this fall?
Many theories are being advanced, but I favor simple answers: Movies have gotten lost because there’s too much else going on.
Analyzing the confusion demo by demo, let’s start with mine: Now thoroughly digitized, the senior demo is obsessing over video games like Hades II instead of sampling movies or streamers. We’re also furtively feasting on MrBeast or Adam W on YouTube rather than checking out the neighborhood multiplex. Or sampling Boggle Party or the other myriad games exploding across Netflix (yes, that streamer company).
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Meanwhile the other major demo – the kids – seem to be sidelining TikTok to discover suddenly resuscitated shopping malls. Some are even shopping – or at least sampling goodies from Apple, like headphones projecting virtual travel.
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The ubiquitous Netflix is also on hand at the mall to offer a 200-seat screening room (the Tudum Theater) exhibiting random live events (sports) plus a mini restaurant dispensing “streamer bites.” Some kids, too, are even consulting their chatbots for possible tips on jobs; AI is hiring – or maybe firing.
To be sure, Hollywood’s movie mavens would prefer if their distracted demos were engaging in a more traditional November routine: Searching film openings and even pondering award candidates. Week after week, however, audiences seem torpid rather than tempted when scouting the megaplex offerings.
The overseers of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have their own demo to un-distract. Its ranks have been vastly expanded to 11,100 prospective voters worldwide, 25% outside the U.S., and all are being prodded to focus on those movies wider audiences tend to ignore.
Award campaigns in past years were energized by private screening parties, most now banned, and by fiercely competitive promotional campaigns, now discouraged. Further, the distribution of DVDs had fostered a community of Oscar speculation; that technology since replaced by an Academy Screening Room, revealing its own advantages and glitches.
The studios pay $25,000 or so to become “listed,” giving them the right to determine their screening schedules. Thus Jay Kelly from Netflix, starring George Clooney, is still invisible in the Academy Screening Room yet available at select theaters (not easy to find) and ultimately December 5 on your home sofa.
Members opting for the Academy Screening Room can rig their own sound and subtitles, but occasionally find their movies interrupted mid-show by warnings that “you have been logged out.”
Will this year’s award candidates spark a positive reception? A Wicked revisit will be welcomed, but some early releases have been dismissed by audiences as too cerebral (After the Hunt) or too arty (Bugonia). None has been stigmatized as too sexy (Anora in 2024) or too teary (CODA in 2021).
As an Academy member who is still also an occasional ticket buyer, I feel sorry for those filmgoers who abjure the theater experience. It seems insensitive to see a movie like Nouvelle Vague on your sofa when the essence of the experience is about shooting, editing and hanging out in theaters.
And consider Jay Kelly: It’s a movie about a Clooney-like star, played by Clooney, whose movies have been hits at the box office and at festivals. But the Jay Kelly release strategy demands that most of its audience see it on their couches.
I really liked the movie but felt it played better on the big screen, even devoid of Netflix Bites.
Sorry, Anonymous, but high ticket prices, parking, concessions, the bane of commercials, et al have a lot to do with declining attendance at theaters. The current exhibition model is archaic. It is always “ultimate retail” with fixed pricing. Festival crowds are movie snobs. People pay to see movies with “discretionary income.” So they discriminate by not paying to see films that do not relate to them. TV is no longer the “small screen.” It is home theater – the venue for good drama and comedy at a very affordable price. There is not a dearth of good ideas for films from writers. The problem is unimaginative studio execs who think that “the deal” is the movie. And no one wants to pay 12 bucks to see “the deal.”
Not sure, but I don’t think it has anything to do with high ticket prices or concessions or parking. The movies being released during the fall have been interesting to the festival crowd, but not to most regular moviegoers. And those are the ones that buy the tickets. When there’s a movie that the public wants to see, they will come.
Why people aren’t going to the movies is simple: Ticket prices are too high. Parking fees are a factor. Commercials running before the feature are a factor. Knowing you can see a film on a streamer in X days is a factor. Films that do not relate to the audience are a very BIG factor. Films that insult the intelligence of the audience is a factor. Drones have upended how future wars will be fought. Audience apathy should be the signal that how films are developed and distributed need to be reimagined. At a time when folks are anguishing over health care costs, putting food on the table or government agents are raiding car washes to kidnap people why would anyone think that sharing the angst of an aging movie star (Jay Kelly) or the interrogation of Hermann Goering (Nuremberg) would be an escape from their concerns. Content is everything – but it has to be affordably priced.
40% of the specialty houses that showed fourth quarter films closed during the pandemic. 40% of the fourth quarter audience didn’t want to suffer the multiplex. That’s the truth. This is a distribution issue. Not a content issue. Wake up. If the studios truly believe that theatrical exhibition is important to their model, then they need to lock arms and get these specialty houses back on line.
Wrong. It’s all downstream of closing the windows.
IP creation, star creation, awareness and hype all require exclusivity and eventization. Films must be presented as larger than life and special to create and sustain the eco system. The world now collectively shrugs at 75% of all film releases because they’ve been trained to wait a few weeks to watch it on tv. In turn films and stars feel less special, less of an event, less cool, easier to see, less exclusive. Diminishing returns abound and ensue. A bunch of panicked corporate idiots destroyed the engine of this industry by throwing everything to svod and streaming to stanch their debt bleeding from building streamers. Congrats on your pyrrhic victory. News flash, streaming is just a fun word that means TV. They’re like a restaurant that sold all it’s tables and chair because DoorDash was invented the blames the customers and food for not dining in person anymore. Take 5 minutes to look past your myopic perspective of fing quarterly earnings reports.
This is not complicated. Defend 90 day windows (60 if you’re a coward) with militant ruthlessness, Netflix be damned, or die.