What is COVID-19's Legacy for the Film Business?

Two-and-a-half years ago the COVID-19 pandemic dealt the film industry a truly unprecedented blow, with the (correct) anticipation of collapsing business prompting a rush of delays of major movie releases--starting, as the readers of this blog may remember, with the Bond film No Time to Die.

Of course, big movies were starting to come out again, and a portion of the public was still willing to go see them, but the pandemic had its effect nonetheless--with the result that those movies consistently made far less than would have been expected to take in during "normal" times. Thus did Pixar's animated epic Onward, after seeing its earnings cut off at a mere $62 million, still end up the seventh highest grossing movie of the year, while the sequel to 2017's $400 million hit Wonder Woman pulled in a mere $47 million, and the big Christopher Nolan thriller Tenet just $59 million. The following year Black Widow and Fast and Furious 9 failed to break $200 million--a barrier no film broke until September's Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings. And the aggregate impact was colossal. Where in 2015-2019 the movie industry averaged $1 billion in ticket sales per month, it averaged under $100 million a month for the whole year after the pandemic's outbreak, with things only slowly picking up, the May-August period usually good for $5 billion+ pulling in a mere $1.6 billion in 2021, all as the inflation beginning to bite cut into the real value of that money.

Of course, things got better in the fall, particularly the late fall. If Venom: Let There Be Carnage did not quite realize the promise of its $90 million opening weekend, the fact that it had that weekend (and followed Shang-Chi through the $200 million barrier) was still something, while if the debut of No Time to Die was a bit of a disappointment many were prepared to chalk it up to other problems (the confusion caused by the film's multiple delays, the lukewarm critical response, and frankly the fact that younger moviegoers seemed to be just plain losing interest in old 007). Still, it was undeniable that those who were upbeat about the situation were "grading on a curve" until December's Spider-Man: No Way Home pulled in an indisputably sensational $800 million (quadruple Shang-Chi's take). Luck can seem to have played its part here--specifically the movie's narrowly beating the resurgence of the pandemic (the 7 day average of new cases surging from about 125,000 on the day of release to an extraordinary new peak of 800,000 a day a month on). Still, it showed that a big movie could pull in a gross as big as what was seen pre-pandemic, and afterward the release schedule, and the grosses, increasingly normalized, with the earnings for summer 2022 about two-thirds the pre-pandemic average (which is to say, twice as good as what we saw the preceding summer), and that at least some of the shortfall was due to there being fewer big movies out than usual (e.g. just four big live-action action movies, as compared with the usual eight-plus). Indeed, one may reasonably expect that, barring some really unpleasant surprise, we will see a return to the pre-pandemic trend (the more in as 2023 is looking really packed with would-be blockbusters).

All the same, amid perhaps the leanest times in the industry's history there were real questions about the fate of a film business that was already long seen as under duress, reflected in its playing-it-ever-safer strategy of rigid production of stereotyped "tentpoles" from the same franchises over and over and over again. In particular there was the question of whether or not the studios would be shifting away from their longtime model of a theatrical release followed by the release of a movie on video at some unspecified later date--usually many months later--in favor of other arrangements. Above all there was the alternative, long-discussed but until then never attempted with a really major production, of "simultaneous" theatrical and home video release (the latter, at a premium price, of course), with which format they experimented with Mulan, Black Widow and other films. However, it seems the revenues reaped from people willing to pay $30 to stream those movies at home opening weekend came nowhere near matching the ticket sales from a robust theatrical opening--and certainly in its hosannas over the success of Top Gun 2 the entertainment press has rushed to acclaim Paramount's assiduously sticking with the old model as a key reason for that success. I think there is room for argument over whether it was so important--but that they are so insistent on it is likely reflective of Hollywood's thinking about the matter, just like Warner Bros' decisions with some of its recent superhero films, specifically its burying Batgirl while, because there was still time in which to do it, I suppose, upgrading Blue Beetle to make what had earlier been a smaller streaming project worthy of the theatrical releases on which the studio will now be focusing.

In short, the old model endures--while if anything the disappointment in same-day streaming and the like (part of a bigger disenchantment with making big-budget movies for streaming, evident in Netflix's own backing away from the practice) allows one to speak of that model's having been reaffirmed, with any more movement in such a direction likely put off for quite some time to come. At the same time, as the decision to bury Batgirl as too expensive for a streaming release but too "small" to compete in the theaters suggests the increasing emphasis of Hollywood on big-screen, big-budgeted, spectacle-oriented high concept action-adventure has also been reaffirmed. The result is that the pandemic's legacy (thus far, at least) has not been to change what Hollywood has been doing, but rather reinforce it--a testimony to the strength of the structural changes in the film business ongoing since the chaos of the studio system's collapse and the advent of television, and the studios' recognizing in George Lucas' Star Wars the basis of the strategy with which they have endeavored to stay profitable ever since.