In the last six months, the coronavirus has decimated the business of American movies. People continue to watch new films on streaming services and, to a limited degree, in theaters, but the exhibi…
in Brooklyn and Queens. Picking a fight with Cuomo is something you do when you’re out of options and your back is to the wall. That suggests that Fithian and Greidinger understand the economics of blockbuster moviemaking. If something costs $300 million to produce and another $200 million to market, which a Bond movie easily does, you need to earn more than $800 million globally to break even .
It really bothers me when you go on Twitter and people boil it down to something as simplistic as “streaming wins!” I get that Netflix has more social media cred, but on a human level, the collapse of movie theaters is a cultural and economic catastrophe.
I’m glad you raised the whole “streaming wins!” thing, because that strikes me as an incredibly facile and destructive point-of-view, a way of giving up the ghost too early. I’m not “anti-streaming,” or “anti-Netflix,” or anything like that. But moviegoing as we’ve known it has been more than a pastime — it’s been a faith, a primal joy, the greatest art form of the last century.
as people look for ways to experience movies safely. There have been a few urban pop-ups, but I don’t understand why studios didn’t lead the way on this, transforming airport parking lots and other suddenly underused spaces into a venue to show “Wonder Woman 1984” and so forth. They still could! Everyone’s waiting for the world to return to “normal,” but we now live in a world with COVID in it, and public activities need to be rethought.
But that’s a perception; it’s not a reality. It’s something that can change if we have the will to change it. This is an issue so layered it goes right to the top — by which I mean, it could be profoundly influenced by the presidential election. If Biden and the Democrats win big, I could easily envision them mobilizing to find the funds that could help sustain and ultimately save movie theaters; whereas Trump and the Republicans aren’t interested in saving anything but themselves.
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