COVID LIMBO

BY: Michael Arkin

When the curtains came down on Broadway on March 12th, no one realized they were coming down for good, or at least for the foreseeable future. Since then, live theatre and just about every other form of entertainment, has been placed in suspended animation by the coronavirus.

The shuttering of New York’s Broadway season, which last year drew some 15 million people and grossed $1.8 billion, came on the heels of announcements cancelling or postponing SXSW and Coachella. Those first pronouncements portended more to come. In the days and weeks that followed, big name acts including Lady Gaga, The Rolling Stones, Justin Bieber, James Taylor & Jackson Brown, Billie Eilish, Josh Groban, Reba McEntire, Keisha and Phish, and many others, cancelled or moved their tour dates. 

 

Highly anticipated Hollywood blockbusters including No Time to Die, Top Gun: Maverick, and In the Heights have all shifted their releases out of summer, traditionally prime time for moviegoing, into the fall, or even next year. Warner Bros.’ Tenet and Disney’s Mulan have both been pushed back to August. There is so much uncertainty regarding release dates that trailers might as well say “Coming Eventually” instead of “Coming Soon”. In some cases, films are foregoing their theatrical runs completely and are heading straight to living rooms. Paramount and Nickelodeon Films’ The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run (which was originally scheduled to open in theatres for Memorial Day before being pushed to late August) will now go direct to PVOD in early 2021 before streaming on CBS All Access. 

 

Hoping to turn lemons into lemonade, Paramount and Nickelodeon Films (both divisions of ViacomCBS ) are following the trail blazed by Universal Pictures’ Trolls World Tour. That film, originally scheduled for theatrical release on April 10, went straight to PVOD and wound up renting more than 5 million times and grossed in excess of $100 million, more than the original Trolls movie made in over 5 months in theatres. Jumping on the straight-to-home bandwagon, Warner Bros. employed a similar tactic for its release of Scoob!  

It’s not just all-family fare that is taking the direct-to-home route. Universal applied their Trolls model to Judd Apatow’s King of Staten Island starring Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson. The comedy, loosely based on Davidson’s life, is testing the viability of non-family direct-to-VOD fare. Based on its #1 first weekend performance on Amazon Prime Video and iTune’s rental charts, we’re likely to see a lot more adult-targeted movies bypassing theatres. 

 

There are added benefits to the new distribution models that COVID has wrought. ViacomCBS’s Spongebob strategy allows the film’s CBS All Access window to become part of the network’s rebranding effort as it positions itself as an expanded streaming service to compete with Disney+, HBO Max and Peacock. With TV production in a virus-induced limbo, it also provides the network with another asset to be exploited during a time when every outlet is struggling to find new content to fill its pipeline. As Robert Greenblatt, chairman of Warner Media Entertainment told The Washington Post, “This Fall is going to be tricky for any network that relies on original programming.” The paper went on to point out that when the Fox broadcast network announced its new shows for the 2020-2021 season, the list contained L.A.’s Finest, a show that was not only commissioned by Spectrum, but had aired there a year ago. What else can a network do when production has been shut down? 

Michael Hanel, executive producer of CBS All Access’ Why Women Kill told me, “If I want to go to my office at CBS Radford,” a Studio-City based production facility that has been home to Brooklyn Nine Nine, Last Man Standing and Will & Grace, “I have to sign a release, have my temperature taken, and attest that I haven’t flown in the past two weeks and haven’t been out of the country.”

As difficult as it may be, getting into one’s office is a heck of a lot easier than getting the industry back up and running. “The business went from going 150 mph to a full stop,” Mr. Hanel added. There are a lot of conversations and negotiations going on between the studios, the guilds and the unions. Like many businesses during the COVID crisis, Zoom conferences have replaced in-person meetings, and due to a Writers’ Guild mandate that forbids industry scribes from working collectively in writers’ rooms, all writing is now being done via Zoom conferences.

As reported on Deadline, Hollywood was “gobsmacked” when California governor Gavin Newsom met with industry executives in late May to discuss the reopening of production. Newsom’s ‘White Paper’ outlining the protocols that must be implemented was “too ambitious” one insider told me. While negotiations continue, it has yet to be determined if film permits will be issued in Los Angeles due to the high number of cases there.  Think about it, would you want to drive down your street and have to deal with a crew of 200 people? “Our show is set in LA in 1949,” Hanel added, “and while we hope to eventually do some location shooting, we’re going to build sets and shoot at Golden Oaks Ranch (the old Disney ranch).”

While the television industry can rely on re-runs and news programs to fill the looming content void that was exacerbated by rescheduling the Summer Olympics (now planned for July 23, 2021), the motion picture industry constantly requires new product to lure audiences into theatres. In an attempt to do just that, led by Universal, some studios have re-released classic films on the big screen. Dusting off timeless films like Jurassic Park and Jaws seems to have paid off, with the former enjoying the #1 spot at the box office for the fourth time in its release history. Playing in about 1,100 theatres and drive-ins, the two films earned just over $1 million, a fraction of what a #1 film would traditionally earn during a summer weekend.

The multimillion-dollar question is, can these novelty releases sustain the business? Are audiences truly hungry for classic films on the big screen? You have to ask yourself if you’d be running to a theatre to see a film that you can see with the push of a button on your remote control? Are audiences prepared to pay full freight for that? The larger question is, are audiences willing to return to theatres at all?  According to Kevin Goetz, founder and CEO of Screen Engine/ASI, one of the industry’s leading research and analytics firms, “There’s a portion of moviegoers that are ready to go back to theatres and there’s a strong portion that are not.”

The company, famous for its research screenings and the industry tracking studies that shape the course of many major motion picture releases, has expanded its research to include consumers’ feelings about the coronavirus itself and its impact on moviegoing.  According to their latest report, 43% of the population are very concerned about the virus. 70% feel that the number of cases will increase over the next month, with 40% believing cases will increase significantly. 38% believe that restrictions are being lifted too soon, and while 28% of them have gone out to a restaurant or bar since restrictions have been lifted, just 2% went to a movie theatre. Putting that in context, as of mid-June there were only about 1,000 theatres open and cinemas had to cap attendance at 25% of normal capacity, not to exceed 100 people. While more theatres were expected to open, the recent upsurge in cases has put the brakes on many re-openings.  Perhaps the most ominous factoid in Screen Engine’s report is that 84% of people would rather watch TV and movie content at home than go out to a theatre.

What does that figure foretell for the movie industry? According to Screen Engine, 31% of respondents will wait until the pandemic is completely over (which could be a year or more) before returning to movie theatres. “This is a mindset that will take time to overcome,” Mr. Goetz told me. Thirty-five is around the critical age where you start seeing the differences between the digital natives and the digital adopters and that’s where the rubber hits the road. Before the virus, digital natives were going to the movies less while the older digital adopters were going slightly more often, but that slight increase does not make up the erosion of the younger audience. Compounding the problem, even though per capita more people are going to the movies, they’re seeing far fewer movies. Then there’s the cost factor. The average family of four spends a little over $60 to go to the movies when they could stay at home and for the same amount (on a monthly basis), pay for 5 different streaming services with unlimited content. 

Combine those economics with the threat of the virus and the mandated government protocols attached to it (how do you eat popcorn when you’re wearing a mask?), you can quickly understand why people are skittish about returning to the movies. One of the things that makes the new stay-at-home norm more palatable is having a screening room at home. Goetz predicts, “In the not too distant future, when someone is buying upgrades for their house they’ll say ‘I’ll take the marble floors, granite countertops and the full wall screen TV with the built-in surround package’.” If that’s the case, it’s no wonder that the virus could be the death knell for movie theatres.

Not everyone in the industry agrees. George Leon, CEO and Founder of Cakewalk Entertainment told me, “Of course the marketplace has changed, consumer behavior has changed, it’s evolving, but people are tired of the content in their carousel. We have a lot of great options at home now, but I think the moviegoing experience will drive people to the theatres again. They want to do something; they want the communal experience.” Formerly an Executive Vice President at Sony Pictures, Mr. Leon added, “The exhibitors are developing global policies about social distancing that include everything from scheduling and moving people in at different times to no-touch concessions.” 

If moving people in and out of theatres sounds like a logistical nightmare, just imagine trying to coordinate social distancing for a 65-piece orchestra. That’s the challenge that faces Steve Linder, producer for Film Concerts Live, which presents major motion pictures in concert venues around the world with orchestras performing the scores live to picture. Their repertoire includes ET, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Jaws and Close Encounters among many others.

“Because we’re producing shows all around the world, we first started to hear about the virus in Taiwan in late January,” Mr. Linder told me. “We had two weekends as part of the Kaohsiung International Festival. They contacted us and said they were going to move the shows to November because they saw something happening. People began hearing about this flu and we were already starting to get wind that something was afoot and then it just started happening all around the world. Our last concert was on March 6th,” Linder adds, “The one nice thing is that none of our dates have cancelled, 99% of them have been postponed and moved into next year or even 2022.” 

Because they are one-offs and not a tour, rescheduling Film Concert Live’s dates, which Linder anticipates won’t occur until the end of the year, are easier than big name acts like Lady Gaga who moved her Chromatica Ball tour to 2021. The release of her corresponding album, Chromatica was delayed from its original April 10th release date until late May. At the time of the postponement, Gaga released a statement: “This is such a hectic and scary time for all of us, and while I believe art is one of the strongest things we have to provide joy and healing to each other during times like this, it just doesn’t feel right to me to release this album with all that is going on during this global pandemic.”

 

It doesn’t feel right for Broadway either. Just this week, The Broadway League announced that theatres will remain closed for the remainder of the year. In the meantime, consumers hungering for the Broadway experience can sign-up for Disney+, which has bumped up its release of Hamilton. Lin Manuel Miranda’s 11 Tony Award-winning musical phenomena will be debuting on the steaming network on Friday, July 3rd. So, while Broadway houses along with movie theatres, concert venues and television production remain shuttered, the theatre, like our hope for a speedy end to the pandemic, lives on.