We read an article about the current state of cinema.
Main points:
- films including the new Bond, Top Gun: Maverick, and A Quiet Place Part II had their releases delayed; when one of the few blockbusters to get a cinema release this year, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, did not set the box office alight.
- Cineworld, Britain’s biggest cinema chain, closed its screens until further notice
- Warner Bros announced last week that all its films, including Dune and The Matrix 4, would be shown on its HBO Max streaming service next year.
- Warner's move echoes Disney’s decision to release the live-action remake of Mulan and Pixar’s Soul on its streaming platform rather than in cinemas, and it challenges the convention that cinemas get a “window” — usually about three months — between a film arriving on screens and its release to television.
- Warner Bros itself insisted that the switch was only temporary and that after a month of streaming the films would show only in cinemas. As Christopher Nolan has pointed out, it seems mainly to be a short-term marketing effort to draw attention to its new streaming service, HBO Max.
- Netflix spent a reported $17.3 billion this year alone on original content — and it does not seem to have hit box office numbers.
- 2018 was a record-breaking year for British cinema with more than 177 million ticket sales, and 2019 matched it. Two thirds of the population visited the cinema at some point last year and 45 per cent did so more than once a month (Mintel)
- Cinema performs an important role in terms of helping the public to filter films. Some analysts predict that streaming will herald a return to a version of the old studio system, where brands such as Disney, Netflix, and HBO Max will guide the public towards certain kinds of films.
- TV, VHS and illegal online downloading were all said to mean the end of cinema, but in the end all these things drove further interest in movies, educating successive generations of film-lovers, who then attended cinemas.
