It’s no secret that most movies made in the last thirty years cost absurd amounts of money.
Absurd. Megan McArdle reports that the recently released Tenet (2020), directed by Christopher Nolan, required revenues of around $400 million in order to break even, and it didn’t even get close. McArdle goes on:
Which leaves us with two open questions: First, how long will it take to get enough people vaccinated that we can once again blithely sit down in the dark with a bunch of strangers who are probably pulling down their masks to munch popcorn? In the United States, at least, the numbers keep getting more discouraging. Fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they’ll get a vaccine when it’s available, a decline that seems to be driven by partisan fear as much as medical uncertainty.
The longer it takes, the more urgent becomes the second question: Will theaters still be around when viewers are ready to go back? Theater chains are already facing a debt crisis that will become dire if they have to go another year without any significant revenue, as are the shopping malls where many of those theaters are housed. The modern movie business has been tuned to operate at vast scale, opening mega-budget blockbusters on thousands of screens at once. It’s unclear what happens if a significant portion of that capacity simply vanishes in the course of a year or two.
Yet even these financial problems are probably secondary to the behavioral one: If it takes 18 months, or even longer, for enough Americans to get vaccinated, could Americans simply lose the habit of going to the movies, learning to get their video entertainment from streaming series and their socializing from the backyard?
Once we get Covid-19 at least partly under control, then it’ll be necessary to lure audiences back while containing costs. Because movies are great for both dating and to get out of the bloody house (for us older folks), I’m envisioning these steps will be critical to reinvigorating the theater business:
- Lower ticket prices at first run theaters;
- Lower prices for popcorn and other such traditional treats;
- The above will be best served by shrinking bloated movie budgets, big time.
- Old classics shown at second run theaters;
Regarding #3, readers who are not aware of the long history of cheaply made, yet classic movies, such as the Thin Man series and Casablanca, may think it’s impossible. But all it really takes is a studio that recognizes the requirement and is willing to discard all the fancy gear and 3-D CGI artists, and instead invest in good stories, directors who know how to direct people who are not in front of green screens, and who are intensely interested in how people interact.
The indies have been doing this for years. Hell, I know all this and I’m not even a fan of the industry. Sure, I write reviews … when I remember … but it’s more because I’m a story-geek, not a movie fan.
So I’m not worried about the theaters going under, so long as they get help from the government during this time of crisis. For those shaking their heads because they’re all about money, governments exist to get us through crises, and this is certainly one.
And someday we’ll make a movie about Trump’s disastrous reaction to it, and the Republican Party’s utterly inept ideological response.
