It’s been a difficult few months for Beginning amateurs. The $ 205 million film has been shelved for weeks, as theaters have closed across the country due to the current COVID-19 pandemic. The details of the film are shrouded in secrecy, which cannot be lifted until the film is released, and the film itself cannot be released until theaters reopen. In the month from BeginningThe release date has been set, the United States has plunged into a second wave of infections, breaking daily records set in April, but the release date can only be delayed a few weeks at a time. Unless things change again, the film will hit theaters on August 12.
Much of that anticipation comes from Christopher Nolan himself. The director has insisted on not only debuting Beginning in a theater, but using it to announce the return of the theatrical release in general, “to show faith in form and solidarity with exhibitors.” Nolan previously idealized the theater experience as “a vital part of social life” that only a community vision can provide, and he wants Beginning to be the movie that will help save him.
In short, this attitude is dangerous and will put lives at risk. While there are still many things we don’t know about how COVID-19 spreads, spending a lot of time indoors near other people is clearly a major contributing factor. And movie theaters, with close-packed seats, circulating air conditioning, guests taking off their masks to eat popcorn, and long movies, seem to fit that bill perfectly. Everything we know about COVID-19 tells us that the kind of wide-spread cultural event Nolan wants will lead to more cases, more hospitalizations, and more deaths.
Beginning It is definitely important to Warner Bros., Nolan and the theater chains, I also want to see it, but it is important to remember that it is just a movie. A movie that is not worth risking your life or that of anyone else to go to a theater until the United States has a much better handle on containing the virus than we do right now.
It is unclear what exactly drives Nolan’s ambition here: a simple love of film? An opportunity to return to the limelight as author director? Or a matter of pride, a desire that your film specifically save the entire institution of cinema? It is certainly not money: it is obvious to almost everyone that yes Beginning manages to open on August 12 (its current planned release date), then Warner Bros., and Nolan himself, who would reportedly earn 20 percent of the first gross dollar, likely to lose millions compared to what they would have done expecting a more secure and stable launch period.
But if Nolan really wants to be the one to save theaters, that his movie is the kind of movie that shook the industry to life, he should release Beginning online.
In an immediate sense, a streaming launch could make almost everyone happy. Fans could see Beginning immediately and from the safety of their own homes. Warner Bros. would see a faster return on their investment. I would say that even Nolan would get what he wants, an opportunity to change the face of the cinema, in a way that does not put people at risk.
If Nolan wants to build a legacy, releasing the first blockbuster at home could be a substantial credit to that legacy. And it doesn’t come with the risk of having Beginning it was accidentally “the movie that made a lot of people sick because the director insisted on advocating for theaters before it was safe,” which is a very real concern.
There’s a question of whether a streaming launch could generate the kind of money Warner Bros. would need to make a profit here: an estimated $ 400 million. In theaters, where studios generally get about 50 percent of the cut, Beginning It would need to win $ 800 million, a type of number that is unthinkable to achieve through an HBO Max launch or an iTunes sale. But digital releases change the equation. Launch a movie to rent or buy on iTunes, Vudu, or Amazon, and the studios get around 80 percent of the money. Put it on a Warner-owned streaming service like HBO Max, and Warner Bros. won’t have to share anything at all.
Right nobody still has made the kind of money that Beginning would need to be successful through a digital or broadcast launch. But no one has tried to release a movie as big as Beginning in this way
We have already seen the financial potential of this type of launch. Trolls World Tour He made nearly $ 100 million in three weeks online. It worked so well that Universal is already talking about releasing movies in theaters and on digital platforms even after the pandemic ends, prompting AMC to threaten to blacklist all future Universal movies from their theaters. With everyone BeginningThe hype and power of the stars, and perhaps a more expensive rental price, is easier to imagine a world where that $ 400 or $ 500 million number is really possible.
Nor is it a new idea. A Sean Parker-backed startup called The Screening Room has proposed offering simultaneous home movie rentals (at $ 50 per pop) that could be offered alongside regular theatrical performances. He even had the support of big names like JJ Abrams, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and Ron Howard before fading away. But it shows that there is a real possibility of a world in which streaming and cinemas can coexist, giving customers more options rather than locking them into an arbitrary calendar limit.
Even before COVID-19’s success, theaters were in trouble. While the great tentpole movies like Avengers: Endgame, Lion King, and Star Wars They are doing better than ever and have helped to increase the numbers, overall ticket sales have declined, and most of the revenue for the entertainment industry comes from streaming, not theaters. In 2019, home and mobile digital entertainment generated $ 58.8 billion worldwide, 14 percent more than the previous year.
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Image: Warner Bros.
AND Beginning – like an original property that even the cast doesn’t fully understand – it really doesn’t look like a modern Hollywood blockbuster. While fans of Nolan will certainly highlight his uniqueness as a good thing, the fact remains that the last time a franchise-less movie topped the box office was in 2009, when Avatar took the crown. The time before that was Armageddon in 1998. In fact, of the 46 movies that have broken $ 1 billion at the box office to date, only five of them: Zootopia, Jurassic Park, Avatar, Titanicand Frozen – Were not sequels, remakes, or part of a larger franchise.
Part of the problem is Nolan’s artistic attachment to the theatrical release. Nolan and other top directors like Spielberg insist that theaters are a key part of the Hollywood experience, and that it will likely continue to be so in the future. But things are changing in the world of cinema. And while movie theaters will continue to exist for years to come, Hollywood, and Nolan specifically, should take into account new technologies that are altering the status quo.
It is not something that is not so unknown to Nolan, who has partly developed his career in the adoption of new technologies, such as the 70mm IMAX format that has become one of the signatures of his work. And the filmmakers Nolan cites as influences have focused on adopting new filming technologies and techniques, such as Michael Mann (who was one of the first to use digital cameras) or Stanley Kubrick’s pioneering work on visual effects. Avatar It was the most recent film to take advantage of new cinematic techniques for box office success, mounting the dual hype waves of the 3D and CGI created worlds to the top of the charts. maybe Beginning can follow that same line, innovating not only in how do movies but how and where we see them.
There are already a lot of interesting and artistically valuable things going on in the broadcast. Netflix has embraced the idea of producing a complete list of movies, ranging from big-budget summer blockbusters like The old guard you can come face to face with the best popcorn movies for smart and thoughtful movies like Rome or the Irish which are impressive cinematic achievements in their own right. (It is no coincidence that the service has been nominated for 54 Oscars and won eight of them.) More broadly, the ubiquity of streaming platforms makes film culture more accessible, giving art circuit films the kind of reach they could never achieve with a traditional theatrical career. It’s a new movie culture, and Nolan should want to be a part of it.
The theatrical model has been threatened by streaming and home video for years. The pandemic-induced shutdown is simply accelerating that process. And whether Hollywood likes it or not, it’s hard to imagine a world in which theaters operate at a capacity where they can attract the number of customers and revenue that were the standard before the pandemic.
It’s time to start thinking about more radical changes in how movies are released and the way we watch them. If Nolan really wants to change Hollywood again, Beginning It could be the perfect place to start.
