Folding the Tents in Tinsel Town
The major Hollywood studios have begun clearing the 2020 decks.
With little hope that theaters in the U.S. will be able to open in sizable numbers before next year, or that movie fans would return to them even if they could, the studios are folding their tent poles for this year and decamping for 2021 in the hope of salvaging respectable theatrical openings for their big budget franchise releases.
Disney last week pulled Mulan from the 2020 calendar, just days after Warner Bros. announced an indefinite delay in the theatrical release of Tenet. The Mouse also pushed back the planned next installments in the Star Wars an Avatar franchises by a year.
Paramount has pushed back the release of Top Gun: Maverick, the sequel to the 1986 Tom Cruise blockbuster, to next July, after previously postponing A Quiet Place Part II. Also delayed are Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Jackass, Under the Boardwalk and The Tiger’s Apprentice.
Sony Pictures pushed back the release of the next live-action Spider-Man film to December 17, apparently hoping Christmas can yet be saved, but don’t be surprised if that web unravels as well.
While painful, the studios have little choice at this point. With hundreds of millions of dollars tied in production costs, to say nothing of merchandising tie-ins, theme park rides, spin-off plans and other franchise elements on the line, they can’t afford to let the main events fizzle. Whether they can turn fizzle into sizzle even a year from now, however, is an open question.
Theaters will eventually reopen. But their footprint will likely be reduced due to bankruptcies, real estate defaults and other exigencies, leaving fewer screens from which to conjure a blockbuster release.
Moviegoers, too, may be fewer in number after the trauma of pandemic and economic disruption, particularly with so much high-quality, high-profile content available for viewing at home via streaming services, some of it provided by the studios themselves.
In short, the studios could be facing a very different movie viewing and distribution landscape next year, which may never revert to its pre-Covid posture, and for which their core product strategy is singularly ill-suited…(read more)
RightsTech Roundtable
Our latest RightsTech Roundtable webinar featured musician, attorney and technologist Damien Rielh, co-founder of the All the Music Project. ATM is trying to exhaust every possible 12-note melody within a roughly 2-octave range using an algorithm. And it’s up to more than 200 billion. Why? To demonstrate that certain fundamental aspects of melody, such as the pitch change between notes, are just math. And math, like facts, by themselves cannot be copyrighted.
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