The recent news of Cineworld’s decision to close all of their venues, may have come as a blow to many, primarily the staff, but those who work in the film industry should see this as an opportunity that has been long coming for independent filmmakers to play on a level footing: whereas before it was pretty much impossible to get your film on the big screen if you weren’t inside the studio system; now all filmmakers are aim for the same platform, your home screen, the only difference is who shows they get the film from. Many years ago everybody wanted to get there film on iTunes, these days it’s Netflix, but there are litterally thousand of streaming platforms out there, the easiest to access for many is Amazon Prime, at which point you are straight up against the major studios, and a bit ofpromotion in the right places is needed to get you started, but then it comes down to the quality of your product.
Many years ago, Speilberg and Lucas predicted what they called a “tentpole meltdown” in this 2013 article and how it would only take a few of these high budget films to under perform to bring the system crashing down.
they were right internet distribution is the way forward, very few large budget movies were released on VOD during lockdown as they will not make the returns that the studios seek, so they are postponing in the hope that they will get a theatrical release.
Tenet appears, on paper, to have severely underperformed (Though who knows how well it may have done without COVID)
Bond will now be a year late
the next big releases would be at Christmas, restrictions permitting (Wonder Woman 1984 amongst them)
The problem here is that the industry has become inextricably tied to the studio system.
cinemas are required to block out screens for months to meet their obligations to the studios in return for the right to play the film (some play the film throughout the night to empty theatres to ensure that they meet the screening quota that they’ve been set) this insures that others ar kept out of the game.
Leave a Reply