Movies, Minus the Theaters: How Hollywood Is Grappling With the Coronavirus
With theaters closing and productions shutting down around the world, the film industry is temporarily on hold, forced into backup plans that could have permanent consequencesMovies, Minus the Theaters: How Hollywood Is Grappling With the Coronavirus
With theaters closing and productions shutting down around the world, the film industry is temporarily on hold, forced into backup plans that could have permanent consequences
Early last week, Neal Moritz—producer of the Fast & Furious movies, Netflix’s Spenser Confidential, and dozens of other films and television shows—was still planning on attending the premiere of Bloodshot, another of his projects. As a producer of Sonic the Hedgehog, he had already seen the impact of the growing coronavirus crisis on ticket sales—it did well in the United States, but when Paramount Pictures released Sonic in February in South Korea as the country was in the throes of fighting COVID-19, the movie flopped, earning just over $583,000 in its opening weekend. But at the time, taking any grave measures in the States was still just a hypothetical, far away from reality.
During Moritz’s talks with Universal Pictures about the next Fast & Furious movie, F9, the coronavirus had been a major subject, along with everything else that comes with launching a film of its size. “We have discussions with the studios on everything you can imagine on a release—whether it’s weather, whether it’s actors’ availabilities, whether it’s the competition of other movies,” he said early last week. “There are so many conversations that are taking place all the time, but obviously this is a huge thing that’s been added to the mix.” Though Moritz said he had decided to “go a little Zen and just hope for the best,” the idea of pushing F9 seemed like a remote possibility when we spoke. “It’s very, very, very hard to turn a battleship around on a dime, and it’s very similar to the movies,” he said. “So much of our money is spent within the last few weeks in terms of marketing that it’s hard to make a quick change when so much of the media has been bought in advance, and it’s programmed, and you’re ready to go, and you have publicity set up, and you’ve done junkets, and you’ve done premieres. It’s just really hard to move that machine.”
Two days later, they moved the machine. On Thursday, Universal shifted F9’s May 2020 release date all the way to April 2021, following in the footsteps of No Time to Die and continuing a trend that’s gone on to include everything from the global rollout of Disney’s Mulan to the domestic release of IFC’s indie family drama The Truth. “It’s become clear that it won’t be possible for all of our fans around the world to see the film this May,” a post read on the Fast Saga’s Facebook page. “We’ll see you next spring.”
“I’ve made 60 movies, or whatever, and honestly I thought I’ve seen everything at this point,” Mortiz told me. “I’m just constantly amazed at how each movie brings a different set of circumstances that I could never see coming. And this is one of those.” After F9’s postponement, Moritz did not respond to requests for additional comments.
As the total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 rises to over 153,000 and the amount of countries affected grows to more than 140 (at the time of this writing), many members of the global population have become increasingly anxious about being around other humans. Amid a climate of sports shutdowns, theme park closings, and world leaders cautioning against holding events with more than 10 attendees, people are asking whether it’s worth putting themselves and others in danger by going to the movies. That is, if they can find a theater that’s still open. “The risk in a movie theater really comes from the people who are sitting around you within that 6-foot space, where the challenge is you have a bunch of people sitting together side-by-side for a long period of time,” said Abigail Carson, an infectious disease physician and a health care epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “Even though they’re not speaking to each other directly, which decreases their risks, the fact that they’re in that same space makes it a higher risk than, say, just milling about outside in your daily routine.”
American theater owners, questioning what legal—and moral—responsibilities they have to make sure ticket buyers don’t get sick, initially began taking steps to enforce distancing between moviegoers. Last week, AMC Theaters and Regal Cinemas, the two biggest exhibitors in the United States, announced they would limit sales to 50 percent of each individual theater’s capacity. ArcLight Cinemas, the upscale national chain, instituted a “social distancing seating plan” in which it would sell seats only in alternating rows. Now, all but one of Alamo Drafthouse’s theaters in the U.S. have closed, along with Canada’s Cineplex Odeon chain and three of the largest theater groups in the U.K. On Sunday night, the mayors of Los Angeles and New York City ordered the shuttering of all theaters in their cities. A day later, AMC and Regal changed their policies and enacted a nationwide closure.
This is uncharted territory. This is the coastline changing hour by hour, day by day, week by week. The entire industry has been put on pause.Jeff Bock, senior box office analyst at Exhibitor Relations Co.
“This is uncharted territory. This is the coastline changing hour by hour, day by day, week by week,” said Jeff Bock, senior box office analyst at Exhibitor Relations Co. “The entire industry has been put on pause.”
“Although there has been speculation in the media that the temporary closure of theaters will lead to accelerated or exclusive releases of theatrical titles to home streaming, such speculation ignores the underlying financial logic of studio investment in theatrical titles,” the National Association of Theatre Owners said in a statement on Tuesday. “To avoid catastrophic losses to the studios, these titles must have the fullest possible theatrical release around the world. While one or two releases may forgo theatrical release, it is our understanding from discussions with distributors that the vast majority of deferred releases will be rescheduled for theatrical release as life returns to normal.”
However, as larger questions about the economy are raised in the U.S. and around the world, movie studios are now trying to figure out what to do with the films they’ve already spent millions of dollars on as their release dates near, while also shutting down productions around the world on future projects. “It’s a meteor aimed right at the industry,” said Richard Rushfield, the editor-in-chief of The Ankler, an email newsletter about the movie business that’s known for its often gloomy disposition but honest analysis. “It comes in the context of an industry that’s really been on its heels and confused and not knowing what it’s doing. And then you throw in basically shutting down not just theatrical releases but production for some sort of indefinite time. You can’t calculate the damage.”
While American-based studios have been addressing this new reality for just over two weeks, the international film industry has been grappling with it for months. At the end of January, the Chinese government called for almost all of the country’s 70,000 movie theaters to close, a decision that came just as Lunar New Year celebrations, typically one of the highest-grossing weekends for China’s box office, were about to begin. Only one theater—the Golden Palm Cinema in Urumqi—has reopened, albeit with limited staff. In the subsequent weeks, film attendance plummeted in heavily affected countries like Japan and South Korea. Now all theaters are closed in many Western European countries, including Italy, Spain, and France. The resulting drop in revenue has been devastating to the bottom lines of major American studios. Overseas ticket sales can sometimes account for around two-thirds of their film grosses, with China playing an increasingly important role in Hollywood’s economy. Now, The Hollywood Reporter estimates that the coronavirus pandemic has caused $7 billion in losses to the global film industry, and that the number could reach up to $17 billion through May.
Facing possible further theater shutdowns or a lack of crowds at the ones that remained open, studios began making adjustments to their slates at the beginning of March. On March 4, MGM announced that with a little over a month until the originally scheduled arrival of No Time to Die, the newest James Bond film and Daniel Craig’s last as 007, it would postpone its global release from April to November. But even then, many in the industry considered the coronavirus a minor speed bump before things would soon return to normal. (There were even rumors that MGM was using the situation as a cover to give them more time to work on No Time to Die following its reportedly difficult production.) “I did an issue on Tuesday [last week], which was my second corona issue, and I got a moderate amount of flack for, ‘Why are you doing another corona issue? What are you panicking about? We’re sick of hearing about it,’” Rushfield said on Friday. “That was three days ago. Three days ago the going wisdom was that this was all a lot of fuss about nothing.”
But on Thursday, March 12, the situation changed quickly and dramatically. As the number of confirmed cases in the United States rose to more than 1,600 while sports leagues like the NBA suspended their seasons, Paramount announced that it would postpone the releases of A Quiet Place Part II, The Lovebirds, and Blue Story, but publicly gave no date for when they would be moved to. On the same day, F9 announced its decision to bump its release date by a year. Disney put indefinite holds on the release dates for The New Mutants, Antlers, and Mulan—the company’s live-action remake of its 1998 animated film, which was partially created with the Chinese market in mind. Then on Tuesday, Disney officially removed Marvel’s Black Widow and The Personal History of David Copperfield from their original dates. Other major tentpoles that are planned for this summer’s movie season—including Wonder Woman 1984, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, and the sequels to Top Gun and Ghostbusters—haven’t followed suit. Yet.
There has also been reshuffling throughout the release schedule. In response to No Time to Die’s move, A24 pushed the release of its religious horror film Saint Maud back a week and DreamWorks Animation moved the release of Trolls World Tour up a week to capitalize on the now-vacant Easter weekend slot, a normally coveted time to open a movie in the United States. A pair of kids’ movies saw rearrangements as My Spy shifted from March 13 to April 17 domestically, and the opening of Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway was turned from March 27 in Europe and April 3 in the U.S. to early August globally. Magnolia Pictures announced that the premiere of Slay the Dragon, the indie’s political documentary on gerrymandering, would move from March 13 to April 3, and would also come out simultaneously in theaters and on VOD and digital services.
Last-minute shifts at this rate are unprecedented. The modern film business is structured around long-range box office tracking and release dates that are selected before shooting even begins. If a film’s arrival date is altered, that’s usually a clear sign that something has gone wrong. “There’s two different types of release date changes we have to take into consideration here,” said Daniel Loria, the editorial director of Boxoffice Pro, an industry publication for the movie theater business. “There’s the strategy-based release date change where you move the schedule because you think economically you’re going to do better at a different date.” As an example, Loria points to Alita: Battle Angel, which saw its crowded summer and then Christmastime release dates shift to the cinematic dead zone of February. Without much competition, it ended up making over $400 million worldwide. “The flip side is when you have a need-based change in a release date,” Loria continued. “Remember when The Interview didn’t come out? That’s a great example of when there’s a force majeure and you couldn’t get ahead of the game, and you’re in a situation where you completely need to change your strategy when there’s no real strategy in place.”
Right now, major studios are in the blurry middle of these two types of changes. And with each passing day, it becomes less a matter of deciding to postpone than being mandated to do so—and figuring out what to do from there.
By nature, independent studios and distributors are far nimbler and more able to handle the current day-by-day nature of responding to coronavirus news and restrictions. They’re also far less reliant on foreign markets. But after Focus Features’ highly regarded Never Rarely Sometimes Always made only $18,000 this weekend after opening in Los Angeles and New York, and with widespread theater bans now in effect, the usual options are beginning to disappear.
Two weeks ago, the filmmakers behind Slay the Dragon approached Magnolia Pictures about what the coronavirus pandemic would mean for their political documentary’s planned arrival in March. Magnolia had acquired the film last year, several months after it played the Tribeca Film Festival. Together, they decided to move Slay the Dragon’s theatrical release to April and have it coincide with its arrival on VOD and digital outlets. That extra month provides the time needed to logistically make the shift happen. “We were acting proactively,” said Magnolia president Eamonn Bowles. “We just didn’t want to be in a situation where people wouldn’t go out to do communal activities.”
Magnolia has been one of the industry’s pioneers for these kinds of day-and-date releases, as opposed to the traditional staggered release plan that’s remained the industry model for decades. The company used this model for 2010’s All Good Things and 2011’s Melancholia, and though they hadn’t turned to it as much in recent years, it’s proving itself useful again. “It’s not something that’s totally out of our realm or unusual for us to do,” said Bowles. “What is unusual is to do it on such short notice.”
With people staying at home and self-isolating, streaming movies and TV has become the go-to entertainment diversion—and beyond day-and-date releases, studios are, and will be, experimenting with even more methods to service at-home audiences. Making the most of the situation, Disney added Frozen 2 to its Disney+ service months before it was scheduled to do so. On Monday, Universal took an unprecedented approach for a major studio, announcing that it will put up The Invisible Man, The Hunt, and Emma—films that have been in theaters for only a matter of weeks—as rentals through VOD. They should be available as early as this Friday. Trolls World Tour will get the same treatment the day it reaches theaters on April 10. A day later, Warner Bros. followed Universal’s example, accelerating the release of DC’s Birds of Prey and The Gentleman to VOD.
If other studios do the same, this could effectively eliminate the “home video” window—the period, usually 90 days after a film has been in theaters, when it’s available only for purchase in a physical format, digital download, or VOD—that comes before streaming. “Studios may start killing the home video window and sacrificing the money they make from disc and digital sales in order to boost their new [subscription video on demand] services,” said Ben Fritz, The Wall Street Journal’s West Coast bureau chief for U.S. news and the author of The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies. “Right now, with everyone cooped up at home, is the perfect opportunity/excuse. Of course, Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, Apple won’t be pleased.”
If Hollywood was smart, they’d go all in on streaming. That’s where they should put their future and walk away from theatrical.Richard Rushfield, editor-in-chief of The Ankler
Though, for as extraordinary as these moves are there is also the question of whether they are temporary. “Universal tried to go VOD with Tower Heist with Eddie Murphy a long time ago,” said Bock. “It’s no surprise to me that they’re the first to jump on this VOD thing. They wanted to do it as a company for a while. And honestly, this is a great place to test it without getting any blowback from theater owners, because this is the only way you can release these films.”
As for the box office’s current, momentous plummet, the industry already knew that the overall numbers at the end of this year would be down from 2019, since there aren’t any surefire titles on the scale of Avengers: Endgame, Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, or Toy Story 4—but they definitely weren’t ready for empty theaters. Two weekends ago, when the spread of COVID-19 in the United States seemed imminent but grocery stores shelves were still well-stocked, the latest reimagining of The Invisible Man had been performing better than expected. The leading new release, Onward, brought in $39.1 million, and while that seems low for a Pixar film, its total box office take for the weekend only just missed projections. But as more serious social-distancing measures began to be instituted, the bottom truly fell out this past weekend. The weekend box office figures of the past weekend in North America totaled $55.3 million, a 45 percent drop from the previous weekend and the lowest figure since a September weekend in 2000. A year ago this same weekend, Disney released Captain Marvel—it made more than $150 million domestically, almost three times more than the entire take this past weekend.
This could mark the final push for moving most everything, including new releases, toward the streaming services. “All these financial analysts and tech people have been saying for years that the old theatrical world is dead, that it’s not a model for business anymore, that it’s not how people want to watch content,” said Rushfield. “If Hollywood was smart, they’d go all in on streaming. That’s where they should put their future and walk away from theatrical.”
In the 1995 film Outbreak, modern society nearly comes to an end because of Patrick Dempsey in a Motörhead T-shirt. The thriller is built on this premise: What would happen if a deadly virus were to arrive in the United States and became easily transmittable through the air? Dempsey plays a dirtbag named Jimbo who steals a monkey from his job at a biotest facility, not knowing it’s a host to motaba, an imaginary disease that basically liquefies your insides. He then brings the monkey to the fictional Northern California town of Cedar Creek, where he tries to sell her to a pet store owner who deals in exotic animals of dubious origin.
The film’s most memorable sequence happens at the start of the film’s second act, when we see an infected lab tech sweating and coughing inside a crowded theater as a Tom & Jerry cartoon plays. Director Wolfgang Petersen then switches the perspective to the virus’s point of view, following the secretions as they travel through the audience, finally stopping as one lands in the open mouth of a laughing woman. The tech then stumbles into the lobby, hacking his germs into people’s faces before collapsing in front of the concession stand.
If you were old enough to see Outbreak in a packed house during its opening weekend 25 years ago, this was a terrifying, agonizing 50 seconds. Afterward, every sniffle or stifled sneeze in the crowd felt like a direct threat on your life.
“I literally remember the moment I wrote [the scene], because it was one of those moments where you just say, ‘What is the absolute worst thing?’” said Laurence Dworet, the coauthor of Outbreak’s script. “What could be worse than having a scene where somebody coughs in the movie, and then somebody coughs in the theater? And obviously all these people trapped in a movie theater watching it, they’re going to get all freaked out.”
If you’re inclined to worry about all the ways the coronavirus will change life as we know it, much less what’s going to happen in the film industry, a talk with Dworet will give you enough material to send your mind spiraling. Besides writing the script for Outbreak with Robert Roy Pool, he spent 18 years as an emergency doctor at a trauma center in California’s San Fernando Valley. That experience has certainly changed his how he sees the world. “If you’re a first-rate emergency doctor, you have to think, ‘What’s the worst this can be?’ and then work backward,” he said. “Because that’s your one shot at the patient. You don’t want to miss things that could kill them.”
Back when No Time to Die was the only major postponement, Dworet wasn’t thinking about the films that were completed, but the ones that were still in production. “How do you have people on a set when they’re going to be very scared about picking up the virus and bringing it home?” he said. “Just as Amazon basically said don’t come to work because it’s a group, movie production is all groups, and so it could have a profound effect.”
After Tom Hanks announced last Wednesday that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, had been diagnosed with COVID-19 while he was in Australia while working on Baz Luhrmann’s untitled Elvis Presley film, the wave of production suspensions began. Heading into the weekend, companies including Disney, Netflix, and Universal shut down their productions, growing an ever-expanding list of TV shows and films that have been put on hold, including the next Batman and Jurassic World movies, as well as Red Notice, Netflix’s action all-star film with Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot, and Ryan Reynolds. Every part of the industry, in effect, is now on hold.
Shutting down and then restarting a production is an exceedingly expensive decision, especially if it’s overseas and the cast and crew have to return to their home countries. These decisions could also have additional repercussions if the content pipeline starts to go dry. “If [the shutdowns last] only a few weeks, it’s probably no big deal to the industry,” said Fritz. “But if it’s a few months, that could interrupt the flow of productions in the coming months or years. We won’t see the number of new TV shows and movies coming out on time. That could really negatively impact the traditional movie business and also some of the newer streaming services like HBO Max, Peacock, and Disney+ counting on big, splashy productions to grab attention.”
With far less money coming in and future projects in flux, the question is starting to shift to which entities will survive, especially if there is a broader economic recession. “This may be one of those situations where the corporatization of Hollywood is a good thing,” said Fritz. “Major public companies like Comcast, Disney, AT&T are definitely planning for the worst because they have to. The smaller production companies and talent agencies are more likely staying optimistic, in part because they have to—they may not have the financial resources to withstand the worst-case scenario.”
But when theaters do reopen, it’s unclear whether they will be able to draw back an already dwindling customer base. “The average American doesn’t go to movies anymore, for all intents and purposes, except for one blockbuster a year or something,” said Rushfield. “It’s not like they’re going to miss this habit and it’s not like they need much reason to stay away from [theaters] forever. It’s like if there’s a restaurant that is too loud, it’s too expensive, it’s a hassle to get to, parking is bad, but you get dragged there by friends every now and then. And then you’re told it was closed for vermin infestation for three months, and then you hear, ‘It’s open now so you can come back!’”
Others offer a less dyspeptic take. “I hope drive-ins make a huge comeback. That would be great to see as we enter the summer months, if we’re still going through this,” said Bock. “You could technically open drive-ins, and people can keep their distance and still enjoy a movie together.”
This is Hollywood—no matter how grim the story is, there’s always someone trying to dream up a happy ending.
Eric Ducker is a writer and editor in Los Angeles.