Due to ineffectiveness of COVID-19 measures in the US, Americans must wait to see Christopher Nolan’s Beginning. Is this the new normal?
Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon / Warner Bros.
Once upon a time, just a few months ago, before the start of the global pandemic, to be specific, the North American film market was the world’s largest theater film market – a monolithic territory whose ticket-buying behavior It largely dictated whether the film was deemed a triumph or a failure, where Hollywood studios earned the bulk of the box office revenue.
But that lead was put under the demolition ball with Monday’s announcement that Warner Bros., the studio’s distributor behind director Christopher Nolan. Beginning, plans to release the time travel thriller internationally on August 26, before opening in “selected cities” in the United States and Canada over Labor Day weekend. In an unusual reversal of the day-and-date release scheme that usually rules the giant marquee movies (in which a high-risk title like Beginning would hit screens around the world within 24 hours of its North American release), the $ 200 million movie starring John David Washington and Robert Pattinson will be released in 70 countries, including Australia, Russia, Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, and France before becoming a landfall American. (Warner Bros. does not currently have a launch framework for China, the world’s second largest theater market.)
In the footsteps of Warner Bros. July 20 announcement that Beginning It would change its release date for the third time this summer as “the pandemic continues to proliferate,” such divergence from the successful Hollywood playbook reflects the realities of the market. In other words, the theaters in Asia and Europe will be back online sooner due to the effectiveness of the measures to flatten the COVID-19 curve in the respective countries, while AMC Theaters, the largest chain in the United States (and industry leader), announced that it would not reopen most of its locations until the end of August due to the slowness of curve flattening measures at ours.
According to Comscore’s senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian, such a release schedule for a movie with huge audience appeal and nine-figure advertising budget from Beginning it is “unusual but not unprecedented”. In 2012, Marvel Studios’ The Avengers it opened in parts of Europe nearly two weeks before hitting theaters in North America, generating pent-up demand for the comic book thriller and ultimately producing an internal gross of $ 623.3 million. Similarly, 2018 Aquaman It spanned Europe over a week before hitting national theaters and went on to raise $ 1.1 billion worldwide.
On a smaller scale within this year’s Summer of No Blockbusters, STX’s disaster thriller Greenland, Starring Gerard Butler, she will make her theatrical debut in Belgium on July 29 before arriving in the United States on September 25. And the Russell Crowe road rage drama Deranged arrived at multiplex in Germany on July 16; after being postponed earlier this month due to continued closings of theaters related to the coronavirus, it will arrive in North America on August 21.
“Desperate times sometimes require desperate measures,” says Dergarabedian. “In real time, studies show that they can be agile, adjusting for the amount of [coronavirus] cases and availability and capacity of theaters country by country. So with a staggered launch in this environment, they’re just doing what they have to do. “
Despite the fact that hundreds of theaters in the U.S. began closing in the spring and remained locked up in the hottest months of 2020, Nolan, arguably the most strident advocate of cinema for the movie theater experience, was hoping to stick with BeginningThe original release date of July 17, in part to help shore up struggling American theater chains facing more disruptions due to major studios’ decision to delay their biggest budget releases until the end of the year or 2021. According to Two experts, the Oscar-nominated director only engaged in conversations with Warner’s top executives about decoupling national and international releases of Beginning when it became clear that American theaters would not reopen until the end of summer at the earliest. With the understanding that the first weekend box office numbers can no longer be trusted as a reliable yardstick for a film’s overall commerciality, the new calculation they came up with was simple: start earning money abroad as soon as possible. possible instead of waiting, perhaps indefinitely – for American movie theaters to resume business and American consumers to overcome their concerns about sharing space with strangers in a dark auditorium.
A statement by Warner Bros. President Toby Emmerich about BeginningThe most recent postponement to an indefinite future date earlier this month served to spark the studio’s intention to go with a foreign distribution scheme first. “We are not trying Beginning like a traditional worldwide day and date launch, “he said,” and our upcoming marketing and distribution plans will reflect that. “
As Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at Boxoffice Pro, sees it, it’s a good move at a time when about two-thirds of a movie like BeginningGross revenue can be expected to come from overseas ticket sales, and Hollywood has come to rely increasingly on foreign box office counts to shore up domestic gross revenue. Even with the lure of digital piracy, it costs the entertainment industry as much as $ 71 billion a year and can cost studios up to a quarter of its theatrical revenue per movie, and a host of spoilers spreading. expected to come online, predicts Americans Fans of the notoriously reserved but muscular Brain filmmaker from Nolan will likely treat the film’s arrival in theaters as a cultural event. Which, for the most part, will vigorously avoid online disclosures of Beginningclosely guarded parcel and still disburse for admission.
“The industry has been essentially closed for months and there is a growing international and national demand for a new film. Beginning in particular it has received a lot of publicity as a kind of children’s poster as the first big [post-lockdown] free, “says Robbins.” Spoilers and piracy come with the territory in any movie, even under normal circumstances. Especially now, fans don’t want to read spoilers. They want to go see movies for themselves. “
And anyway, “you might think you have Beginning Uncovered, but it usually takes three views of a Christopher Nolan movie to unravel the many mysteries within, ”says Dergarabedian.
So will other studios follow Warner Bros. ‘lead, releasing their major releases overseas before flooding the domestic movie market? With the competition exercising great caution in deploying the answer to coronavirus concerns, it may be too early to tell. In March, Sony promoted almost all of its most anticipated titles of the year: Ghostbusters: Beyond, Peter Rabbit 2 and Morbid, including in 2021. Universal enraged theater chains that same month by overlooking the theatrical release of Trolls World Tour in total and releasing the animated sequel directly to paid on demand video. Then the studio postponed theatrical release dates. F9 May to April 2, 2021 and Minions: The Rise of Gru until next July. In a launch shakeup last week, Paramount criticized its alleged 2020 box office hits. A quiet place 2 and Top Gun: Maverick in the coming year, and sold the rights to Aaron Sorkin’s Oscar bait drama The Trial of the Chicago 7 to Netflix.
Which leaves Disney alone to potentially pick up BeginningThe first foreign cane. On Thursday, House of Mouse unleashed their live-action adaptation of Mulan since its release frame on August 21, the film’s third delay due to COVID-19 outages this year, missing the film from its release schedule for the indefinite future. “In recent months, it has become clear that nothing can be set in stone when it comes to how we release movies during this global health crisis, and today that means pausing our release plans for Mulan as we evaluate how we can more effectively bring this film to audiences around the world, “a Walt Disney Studios spokesman said in a statement on July 23.
Such language, of course, leaves a lot of freedom for the epic of the Chinese period, which has a completely Asian cast and was specifically rewritten, reimagined and designed to resonate with the Asian public, to reach the 70,000 theaters of the Middle Kingdom. ahead of American multiplexes. “Everyone has been waiting to see what Beginning He does it because nobody wants to go out first, “says an executive from a rival studio who chose not to be identified.” The way [Warner Bros.] handles this is going to set the agenda. “
