It’s no coincidence that (slight spoiler alert) the still-to-air two-episode finale of The Studio — Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s bright, funny Apple TV+ satire of the movie business — takes place in Las Vegas at the annual CinemaCon.
CinemaCon, where studios spend millions on bringing out the stars of their upcoming releases to encourage cinema chains to book their productions, has become an increasingly desperate and significant sales pitch for film producers.
It’s particularly important to studios in an age when, for the price of a movie ticket, you can select from more content than you could ever hope to consume in a lifetime from dozens of streaming services. Streamers also entertain you in the comfort of your own home, where the size of your screen could be anything from a smartphone to a projection screen in your custom-built home theatre.
This year’s presentations at CinemaCon have ranged from screenings of footage from theSuperman reboot to Brad Pitt’s racing drama F1, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Frankenstein reframe, The Bride. While the number of clickbait articles about every presentation at CinemaCon may create the illusion of a buzzing, excited movie theatre industry in rude, post-pandemic health, the truth is a little more complicated.
The last time the movies faced a similar existential and profit-slashing crisis was in the 1950s, when the arrival of TVs in millions of American homes threatened to keep audiences away from the big screen. In response, studios took a step back, looked at what made their offering significantly different from television and ramped those aspects up as high as they could go. US cinema in the 1950s went big on previously expensive Technicolor; widened its panoramic gaze thanks to bigger-than-ever screen gimmicks like CinemaScope and VistaVision; and made its stories longer, more epic and full of the kind of spectacle TV was not able to emulate.
In other areas of the world, such as Italy, France and England, the shattering existential trauma of World War 2 had led many filmmakers to make smaller, more human-centred and emotionally relatable films whose impact could be felt on any size screen, but in the US the studios went big in a desperate attempt not to have to go home.
Half a century later, the gap between movie magic and home entertainment has significantly shrunk. Since The Sopranos and the 2000s’ peak TV era onset, television looks like cinema, tells epic stories centred on complex characters and delivers thrilling, engaging content that keeps its audience in their comfortable chairs for hours and hours. The enforced isolation of the pandemic combined with subsequent economic and social anxieties have made the job of getting people out to the movies even harder for a studio system that seems increasingly out of step with what is happening outside its conference rooms and the data on current cinemagoing habits.
As Deadline.com’s Anthony D’Alessandro recently observed in a sharp wake-up call to the US movie industry, this year’s CinemaCon comes at a time “when the box office really stinks — and that’s an understatement”. US box office takings are projected to amount to less than $10bn this year, delivering a gut punch to last year’s industry rallying cry of “survive till ’25”. As far as D’Alessandro is concerned, the reason for this is a studio executive class and distribution industry “stuck in some seriously antiquated ways”. What’s needed is “a revolution, a detox, a rewiring ... if the business is going to change the minds of stubborn quadrants who find that the best experience for a movie is to watch it at home”.
Studios now tend to release tranches of potentially big box office hitters all at once rather than leaving space for expectation to force audiences off the couch and into cinemas. If you’re going to have consistent demand for the movie theatre, then you need to ensure there’s always something worth watching — filling the space between big releases with decidedly “meh” content wastes time, money and space.
Studios also need to increase the windows for screenings for big films so audiences aren’t encouraged to just wait a month for them to be available on premium video on demand (PVOD). A recent internal survey conducted by AMC, the world’s largest theatre chain, found that “72% of consumers are trained to stay at home if they know a movie is coming out on PVOD soon, versus 28% who’ll come see it in a theatre”.
Lastly, there’s the obvious question of what distributors are actually offering to people who opt to go to the cinema rather than sit in the comfort of their own homes. If you’re charging the cost of a monthly streaming service subscription for two hours of cinema experience, then you have to provide an experience that’s at least better than the one at home. Tattered seats, overpriced beverages and popcorn, dirty screens, broken air-conditioning and badly maintained projectors that offer dimly lit blurry images that hurt your eyes and head will not cut it.
Whether the studio executives will listen to D’Alessandro and other observers remains to be seen, but it’s clear that beneath the bombast of CinemaCon presentations lie some big problems that need to be addressed if going to the movies is to remain a part of our cultural lives.
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