Cinemas are doomed.

America is a big, fast-moving economy, and it creates and destroys its unsinkable Titanics with dizzying speed. Steel, the railroads, GM, the big banks, the airlines all ruled the world until they didn’t; even the oil companies will go down when fossil fuels leave the stage.

Broadcast television had big big TV shows that seemed invincible, but they all ran out of gas in a few years, except for the occasional Lucy, Gunsmoke or SVU. Then they tried big-night lineups, so that a fading show could be supported by a new teammate show without losing fan loyalty: the Archie Bunker Saturdays, the Brady Bunch Fridays, the Cosby/Friends Thursdays, until broadcast itself became a dinosaur. Broadcast viewership has dropped by a third in six years, and gotten older. Netflix co-chief Reed Hastings boldly predicted that linear television will be gone within ten years.

VHS was massive in the 1980s until Netflix came to the party and destroyed it all.

Cable had a temporary edge over broadcast because they could push sex and violence in shows like the Wire, Deadwood, the Sopranos and Game of Thrones, until the streamers took away their advantage. MTV was massive in the 1980s until they turned into a rap/reality outlet and were overtaken by Youtube and other websites.

In the movies, genres came and went, big musicals, big westerns; they dabbled in the classics in the 1930s, in prestige pieces in the 1980s, in Young Adult a decade ago.

Technology is a graveyard. ATT versus Sprint, AOL, Time Warner, MySpace, Compuserve, Napster! Eight tracks, Betamax, dot matrix printers! Remember when Facebook was cool and edgy? Remember when the IBM 286 ruled the world? Remember the incessant ads from Wang, the gang that thought they would dethrone IBM in the 1980s until they went bankrupt?

Likewise the actors who owned the world for a short time: 100,000 people came to the funeral of Rudy Valentino. Shirley Temple was queen of the world, Clark Gable was the King of Hollywood, Fred and Ginger, Bing Crosby, Martin and Lewis, Brando, Doris Day, James Bond, Julie Andrews, Newman and Redford, Burt Reynolds, Eastwood, Stallone with his two franchises, Arnold, Cruise, Murphy, Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts. They all ruled, they all fell. The only one who really performed at the box office for a long period was, ironically, one of the worst actors in the bunch, John Wayne.

The arrival of streaming is a bigger threat to the movies than television was 70 years ago: streaming offers much more content and convenience than old-school television did, and access to big movies pretty quickly.

In the old days before VHS, the movie studios controlled the flow of the movies. Anyone wanting to watch Casablanca on television, or indeed anywhere, had to wait until Channel 5 played it at midnight some weekend. Until cable arrived we had three or four channels that went off the air at midnight.

Even when television access to movies was only a trickle, there was an obvious hunger to see more of it in the home. Movies started popping up on local television channels very early, exposing more audiences to obscure films and future stars, inspiring future writers and directors, providing more access to the poor and rural areas. Roger Deakins and Denis Villeneuve, denizens of the big screen, both admitted discovering a lot of movies on television. Ditto Scorsese.?By the mid-1960s America wanted movies on television: they were on almost every night and got huge ratings.

All of that demand made cable and videotape inevitable, and then streamers. Today the movies everyone wants to see are already in the streamers; they just have to wait for Day 30 or 90, and soon even that delay could go away. As soon as the studios started releasing their big properties to Netflix, they surrendered the battle: they just didn’t realize it at the time.

Ballet, classical music and opera all reached the point where they couldn’t survive in the free market without charity from corporations and the rich, 20th?century artifacts. Musicals kept the stage live for years, but at a cost, crowding all the quality stuff off Broadway and into tiny nightclubs and abandoned theaters, just as Marvel crowded quality films out of the cinemas. The stage world long ago reached the point wherein the only sure way to make money was either to stage a monster musical or to hire a Hollywood actor. Live theater may go the way of ballet, and cinema may follow.

For anybody who thinks the action franchises and the theaters will absolutely come back, here’s a little history lesson. In 2000 Blockbuster was making 4 billion and Netflix was making 5 million. Netflix offered to let Blockbuster buy them; Blockbuster told them to piss off because they were too busy planning a hostile takeover of Hollywood Video. Ten years later Blockbuster and Hollywood Video were both out of business. If the Roman and British empires can go down, so can Disney and Regal.

People want selection, convenience and low price, and they want it at home. TV didn’t provide it the way streamers do now. The streamers can, in fact, kill cinemas.

The cinema chains have been trying to slow down the inevitable: they were trying to hang on to the big tent pole releases, demanding to keep their exclusive windows, seeking higher fees, seeking a piece of the home-viewing money. They were threatening to deny studios their full share of the box office and to shut out tent poles like Jurassic World and Fast and Furious, right when they were loaded with debt, short of cash and fighting off bankruptcy.

The cinemas could have worked with Moviepass, to try to figure out a way to keep customers coming and keep everybody in business; instead they freaked out and killed Moviepass.

It’s getting rough out there.?Landlords are evicting theaters and suing for back rent. Locations are closing. Houston lost its only art house, and other art houses are also going down.?

Alamo Drafthouse filed for bankruptcy, ninth largest chain; they tried to attract more buyers at an auction but no one came. Some locations will close but they still hope the coming blockbusters will bring them back to life.

AMC lost four billion and the Chinese (Wanda) dumped a lot of AMC stock even after they reopened their theaters; AMC is haggling with landlords over lease payments, working with European lenders for a $400 million bridge loan, and trying to acquire leases for theaters formerly run by other chains. AMC is jacking up prices for a cash grab, which will only hasten the stampede away from the theaters and toward the streamers. Never mess with the scary end of the price-demand curve. Wall Street is wary of AMC.

Cinemark lost $78 million in one quarter in summer. It was $147 million a year earlier. Cinemark is willing to work with Netflix now, if Netflix does enough marketing to get people in the theaters, and give them a slice of the pie. And the windows. Wall Street is still hanging with Cinemark and Imax (despite the shutdown of their screens in China).

Two small California theater chains closed and liquidated: 300 theaters stay dark. Another chain, Studio Movie Grill, will close a third of its locations even after a Goldman Sachs rescue.

Who’s next? And can theaters survive if theatrical releases are blockbuster-only?

Theaters are not closing in huge numbers, but if the market never returns to pre-COVID, business models may change. And chains are fearing an economic downturn.

Theaters are thawing out regarding Netflix, since they already have to allow shorter windows for the studios too, and they may need Netflix and Amazon films if the studios release fewer movies.

Big players are more interested in grabbing Netflix’s market share than making nice with the cinemas. The cinemas have little leverage and it’s just a matter of time before the studios cut them out. The biggest player, Disney, had a business model predicated on big tentpoles, but they made a huge move to shift big-name IP to their streamer. Universal is still offering the cinemas a slice of the streaming profits, but it’s hard to see why, and harder to see it lasting for long.

Black Widow made 27 percent of its opening weekend revenue from 30-dollar premium streaming.??When the movie’s second-weekend numbers decreased precipitously, theater owners whined that everybody would have made more money if Disney had begun with theater-only. By “everybody” they mean the theaters: Disney will do fine getting a big chunk of its return from its streamer because it means they reach more viewers in the COVID market and the streamer money is pure profit for the Mouse House. Also, every time Disney bypasses the theaters, which it’s already going to do for many small and mid-budget films, they save money because they’re essentially paying for one massive marketing campaign rather than two: marketing is often what drives a movie into the red. Also the theaters don’t want to accept the fact that a lot of those people who didn’t show up for the second weekend will still pay for the movie on stream.

The studios want to release films to streamers Day 1 at a premium price, to retain their big BO return: the studios get a big payday, the cinemas don’t. Young viewers want this model, and so do the streamers.

The studios have other reasons to dislike the old model. The studios don’t want to pay the massive overhead of cinemas – thousands of theater building rentals, cinema employee salaries, popcorn machines etc. They’d rather subsidize Amazon’s video shop which is just paying for a few employees and server farms.

Netflix mostly ignoring cinemas; Amazon still wants to play in the cinema space.

Paramount didn’t do a normal theatrical release for a year; likewise Warner.

Contrariwise, studios still like using theaters to pump up the eyeball count for when the movies go to the streaming services.?

Also, current studio advertising for theatrical releases stresses, incessantly, “only in theaters”. They desperately hope to bring back the old release model. And reduce confusion in the market about where to find movies, and when, amid all the release patterns during COVID.

Universal jumped around a bit regarding their release strategies and windows when they caught some heat. They said few if any movies will get Nolan’s 90-day release for the Oppenheimer film. Universal told theaters they keep exclusive windows only for as long as the return is good: a weak opening weekend means the film will be streaming quickly. Windows will be getting shorter. They also said attendance was still down and it would take a long time to fully recover.

Warner Bros. did everything simultaneously during COVID; they planned to switch to 45 day window, while also releasing some on streamer.

Disney doesn’t care about the theaters. A couple of releases are theater only, a number are simultaneous release, and more are streamer only, with a fee or without.

Paramount, 45 day window for most releases. Some PVOD. But how many big films do they have? Like everyone else, they sell solid properties to the streamers, like Happiest Season and Coming to America. And they are building their own streamer. So what will stay in the theater, some new Star Trek project?

Sony does PVOD haphazardly.

Lionsgate, PVOD after 3-5 weeks.

If the studios can make premium VOD work, cinema is dead.

Splitting the IP streams: studios made some striking decisions about IP. Rather than risk huge losses with the old cinema model in the COVID era and beyond, they steer more and more content to their streamers, not only to secure safe returns but also to prop up the streamers.

Recent moves by the studios show they intend to keep a few massive franchises in the theaters, and “multiverse” them for maximum return, while shifting everything else to stream. Even for the massive franchises, a lot of that intellectual property is being steered to the streamers, to include new series, spinoffs, and feature films they don’t want to push in the cinemas.

Disney’s announcement of the dozens of streaming series for Marvel and Star Wars etc signaled that they are leaning into their streaming service. They keep the big franchises in the theater, and possibly try to squeeze more out of them with the “multiverse” model wherein they could have multiple actors playing the same character, but the low to mid-range stuff goes to stream: note that Mulan and Soul streamed, and Hamilton.

How many Disney tentpoles will really do an old-school theatrical run when Black Widow, starring one of the most bankable stars in history, opened simultaneously in theaters and in premium stream? They set up the same thing with Cruella. Marvel chief Kevin Feige said streaming is the future because the audience wants it; some content will start with the theaters but it all goes to stream eventually.

Disney’s CEO doubled down on this. He believes that some of the new film release methods used during the pandemic are here to stay. He felt that consumers are used to getting movies at home and will lose patience if they are forced to go back to the pre-COVID world. Disney won’t give up on theaters but they will be flexible: more films will get simultaneous theater/streamer releases or go straight to stream.

Similarly, Warner intended to go big with franchises in the theaters, running Affleck-Batman and Pattinson-Batman on Earth 1 and Earth 2 in a multiverse model, and presumably more installments of Wonder Woman and Aquaman. Four whoppers a year after 2021, plus two features per year to the streamers. Furiosa goes to the theaters in 2023. Like Disney, even the mid-tier stuff from Warner is going to stream: spin-offs like “The Batman” and Suicide Squad, plus Batgirl and Static Shock. They are writing off any chance that one of the mid-tiers could become a breakout moneymaker in theaters. And presumably with Wonder Woman as their true tentpole, they’re not worrying how bad it will look to dump Batgirl into the streamer while maintaining two creaky Batman franchises on the big screens, and also cancelling Ava Duvernay’s slated DC film. They also intend to beef up their streamer by resurrecting the Sopranos, Harry Potter and the Thrones universe.

Guys like Nolan and Villeneuve, who make expensive, boring, pretty pictures, howl that they need the blockbuster opening in the theaters. Tom Hanks insists that big franchises can save theaters; occasionally people might go out to see non-franchise. More sensibly, the Marvel guys, the Russos, believe that it is elitist to believe that a cinema is a “sacred space” – the cinema experience is expensive.

The old guard is trying to defend the old system, pre-Netflix, because of the massive piles of money they made. But the number of sold theater tickets peaked in 2002, and dropped by almost 20 percent even before the virus. In a few decades half of those 40,000 American cinemas will be tanning salons.

Barry Diller, the guy who ran both Paramount and Fox, was even more draconian. He said 90 percent of the world’s theaters are going to disappear. He also questioned the wisdom of folks like Disney focusing so much on blockbusters and franchises to the detriment of everything else.

Studios, actors, agents, directors, theaters are all arguing about how all these changes will happen, and it’s not up to any of them: it’s up to consumers. Movie-goers will choose Netflix over those 100-dollar trips to the cineplex. And no one, especially the theaters, has leverage if the audiences won’t come.

At home you can watch a movie on a big home system, the technology for which improves every year; you can start the movie whenever you want, turn on subtitles, pop open a beer, pause to go pee. All for one or two streamer subscriptions a month.

In the theater, you need to get dressed, commute to the theater, park, stand in multiple lines, pay top prices both for tickets and for food (tickets are $20 in New York and LA), endure obnoxious teenagers and phone users and Jujubes stuck to your feet. The cinemas are adding better seating and food, to help justify the prices, but I wonder how hot the old-school critics would be for the theater experience if they actually had to pay for their tickets like the rest of us.

Some films probably do better on the big screen, but people don’t really want the community experience all that much, and people who still feel nostalgia for the old movie experience are aging off the system, so to speak. That romantic nonsense about the shared cultural experience of going to the theater resonates very little with young viewers, except the ones who want desperately to get away from their parents so they can suck face. Which they can do elsewhere.

Day and date gives people a choice: people like choice.

Studios want to see if they can get that stream of franchise money turned back on, the big money spigot they know and understand. But they will be offering almost nothing fresh: Star Wars ended the Skywalker saga, and Marvel has taken off in a dozen directions at once, complete with time travel. They may bring back some old hits, particularly around the holidays, but that’s no way to get the pump going again and bring in those billions.

Variety thinks everything collapsed because of the virus, and the studios think people want to get out of the house after the virus is backing down, but that will wear off. And they know we’re not going back to the pre-virus world.?A lot of sacred cows will soon be hamburger. The golden goose will die. Pick the food metaphor of your choice.

Jack is a writer with 29 feature screenplays and a series completed, almost all of them with female leads, three under option. Check them out on this site and let’s get one filmed! https://threewibbes.wordpress.com/