The box office returns, with or without Beginning. But the industry’s measure of success will look very different.
Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Until a couple of weeks ago, the mystery thriller shrouded in a puzzle by director Christopher Nolan Beginning he faced a daunting responsibility. Refusing to budge from its long release date of July 17, the $ 200 million Warner Bros. title was slated to arrive as the first studio store post hitting multiplexes after a four-month theatrical shutdown caused by restrictions against coronavirus collection. If any filmmaker could convince moviegoers to break the quarantine and risk a pandemic infection to take a movie, the industry thought it would be Nolan – the rain-critical commercial creator behind the popcorn entertainment. Dunkirk and the dark Knight trilogy. Rather than being the first movie to hit theaters just as the turnstiles started spinning again, Beginning it would be a barometer of the collective desire of theater patrons to spend time with strangers in a dark auditorium, a stress test of the overall sustainability of cinema in the COVID-19 era.
However, on June 12, Warner Bros. announced that Beginning It was delayed two weeks to open on July 31, sparking a cascade of later date changes to the film’s release schedule. And on Thursday, the study postponed BeginningIt will launch an additional two weeks until August 12. “Right now, what we need to be is flexible, and we are not treating this as a traditional movie release,” a Warner Bros. spokesman said in a statement. With AMC and Regal, respectively, the nation’s largest and second largest theater chain, both reopening in mid-July, Disney’s $ 200 million live-action adaptation Mulan it will now be released in theaters on July 24 as the first post-closing box office hit (meaning if the rumors it is also considering delaying its release are false). At a time when moviedom’s most lucrative season has indeed been cut short, with studios shuffling almost all of its biggest money-earners in the fall, next spring, and even next summer, the continuing health of the film industry is declining. He will diagnose what happens in the next few weeks, with or without the latest news from Nolan.
Of course, no one expects a cumulative summer revenue of nearly $ 2 billion from last year at the box office from July to August. But if the public shows faith in renewed movie theater safety, social distancing and cleaning protocols, the remaining ticket returns from July and August could help reverse a death spiral that has so far produced a ticket sale of just $ Just $ 3 million between April and June, and narrowed the usual range from 25 to 30 potential box office hits to just 7 or 8 first-run movies. On the other hand, early negative buzz could torpedo theatrical movie streaming until a coronavirus vaccine can be widely implemented, likely resulting in movie studios and exhibitors not making billions of dollars worldwide. and push any returns to Hollywood profitability in the fourth quarter of 2020 at the earliest. .
“More important than even the movies themselves is the movie theater experience: getting people back, encouraging people to the idea of going to theaters,” says Comscore media analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “Cinema is in transition from the business of pure hospitality and the business of concessions to a health and safety conscious environment. There are many layers for this. It will be about the experiential part of the newly formed cinema and how the first adopters perceive it and transmit it to the world “.
“How that will look and feel, no one knows until it really happens,” he says.
Arriving in theaters two full weeks early MulanThe scheduled release date is the romantic comedy PG-13. The broken hearts gallery. The Sony Pictures title comes July 10 as Selena Gomez’s first outing as executive producer. It is the debut of writer Natalie Krinsky as director, directed by Geraldine Viswanathan, co-star of the 2018 comedy. Blockers. She plays a romantically disillusioned New York gallery owner who creates an emerging art space (curated around memories of relationships) after being abandoned by her latest boyfriend. Gallery it now stands as the studio’s first major Hollywood release since closing, the kind of micro-budget film that might otherwise have ended on video on demand.
“They go for a young and feminine audience; anyone between the ages of 25 and 30 will be one of the first to return to theaters, “says Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at Box Office Pro.” So it makes sense to publish a movie like that right now to start the wave. of getting people back in. It may not be a great start. ” It didn’t take much to do. Therefore, they do not need to break the bank at the box office. They are there to take advantage of the market and potentially stay in theaters longer than they normally would. ” (Distributed by independent studio Solstice Studios, Russell Crowe’s fury drama Deranged It also hits more than 2,000 theaters on July 10).
With Disney has already pulled MulanThe global release of its original release date of March 27 (largely due to the closings of COVID-19-related theaters in China, where the film is expected to perform highly), House of Mouse has a lot at stake. in the action epic. At the end of last year’s record profitability, Disney noted that its profits plunged 92 percent reported last quarter. And after having invested at least $ 200 million in marketing Mulan For its aborted spring release, the studio is taking considerable risk by doubling a costly new ad spend and releasing the Niki Caro-directed remake of the 1998 animated musical in an unproven theater market, where China has yet to reopen its theaters. . instead of throwing it at Disney + as the studio recently did with its $ 125 million adaptation of the ALREADY novel Artemis Fowl.
But even if Mulan On arrival failures, according to Dergarabedian, the meager gross earnings of the first weekend should not be considered a death sentence for either the film or the industry. “It could be the opposite of what we have known for 30 years or more, where everything is related to the opening weekend performance,” he says. “We have to be disillusioned with the notion of the importance of the first weekend. Now we are going to have to see it as the beginning of something, which is the beginning of a long distance race. It’s not a sprint for the first three days to see how much money they can get from the audience. “
“So let’s say Mulan makes X, Y, Z dollars at its opening, “he continues.” People will say, ‘That’s much less than the last Disney movie.’ Well, that was a completely different environment with no restrictions on theater capacity, no fear COVID. You might see Mulan build over time, as people become more positive about a movie theater experience and express that sentiment on social media. “
Other supposed 2020 successes like Minions: The Rise of Gru, Ghostbusters: Beyond, Jungle Cruise, Malignant, and Morbid they were evicted from their summer release dates and pushed to next year or the even more feared “TBD”. In recent weeks, Warner Bros. has delayed the release of Wonder Woman 1984 from August 2 to October 2, and moved the 10th anniversary reissue of Nolan’s sci-fi hit in 2010 Start first in Beginningthe former venue of July 17, then in its second corridor of July 31: a theatrical marketing “event” that will present to the public hitherto unseen footage of the time warp thriller, as well as a preview of footage from the next list of studio movies. And following an animated family movie playbook from the coronavirus era established in April by Trolls World Tour, (and followed a month later by Scoob!), Paramount canceled the theatrical release on August 7, The SpongeBob Movie: Escape Sponge Instead, it will release that movie to premium video on demand in 2021. Conversely, Disney changed the movie premiere date for Lin-Manuel Miranda. Hamilton from October 15, 2021 to a Disney + arch on July 3, presumably to give the curving flattening crowd some quality to see at home.
Despite feverish speculation about BeginningThe plot has rebounded on social media since the movie’s trailer appeared online in December, little is known about the film outside of its setting within the world of international espionage, its cast (which includes John David Washington, Robert Pattinson , Kenneth Branagh and Elizabeth Debicki), and which was filmed in seven countries using a 70mm mix and IMAX film. For his part, Nolan is known as a tireless proselytizer for his cinematic experience in theaters, having written an exciting opinion essay in Washington. Send in March he intended to bring the public back to the multiplex to consume Goobers and enjoy surround sound as a “vital part of social life”.
“Christopher Nolan, it’s Mr. Cinema,” says Dergarabedian. “Directors like Nolan can be the tie. Look Dunkirk. On its surface, it doesn’t look like a particularly commercial movie. But having Christopher Nolan’s name on it made it commercial. Jordan Peele, Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan are directors who, because of their sheer presence and reputation as filmmakers, make people want to go see their movies. “
Robbins adds: “It is very clear that Christopher Nolan wants to be the man, and many movie fans want him to be the man, who brings out the first great movie. But it doesn’t have to be the first. There is a very real scenario in which it comes out, it opens up quite well and then it stays for months and months. ”
Of the remaining broad release titles of the summer, A24’s Saint Maud will become the first horror movie nationwide on July 17. The third installment in Keanu Reeves’ revolutionary franchise, Bill and Ted face the music, went up one week to August 14 (from August 21) to occupy Wonder Woman 1984The previous date, where he will face the disaster thriller Gerard Butler Greenland. And after a round of confusing confusion of date changes and launch delays spanning more than two years, the X Men cleave The new mutants it’s finally slated to hit theaters on August 28.
“Bill and Ted It will be interesting because it is one of the few comedies and because of Keanu’s rebirth in recent years, that could have an interesting demographic breakdown, “says Robbins.”The new mutants – I’ll believe it when I see it. I want to support them as the first superhero movie [to come out during the pandemic]. But is it enough to overcome the delays and the negative buzz? That is an unknown right now. “
In Hollywood after the coronavirus, it’s fair to say that uncertainty remains the only certainty. “Everything is changing,” says Dergarabedian. “How we perceive success, how we report the numbers, all of that will be different.”
