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Streaming Is Changing How Companies Make Money, For Better Or Worse

By Newsy Staff
September 1, 2022

Streaming companies are prioritizing how to get and keep subscribers, but the risk in producing new or buying old shows is much higher.

Over the summer, Nielsen reported that streaming viewership surpassed cable usage for the first time in the U.S. It’s worth noting Nielsen only records on TVs and internet-connected TVs; it’s not even measuring mobile or desktop, which means their share of the market is probably even higher.

This new landscape is changing the ways streamers are trying to make money, for better or worse.

As more and more people are signing up for streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO Max or Disney+, companies are starting to roll out new ad-supported models.

In the past, one of Netflix’s co-chief executives repeatedly stated how there was “no advertising coming onto Netflix — period.” But after a huge loss of subscribers and a difficult quarter, that same executive told investors Netflix is looking into ad models “over the next year or two.”

Netflix’s woes aren’t exactly good news for its competitors that raced to make streaming platforms of their own. The news highlights a wider conversation about how these massive platforms are actually making money and how stable the new streaming model really is.

That model first includes original content.

Big blockbuster hits like “Stranger Things” on Netflix or “Wandavision” on Disney+ can definitely draw new subscribers, but it seems the threshold for a new show to survive is pretty high. Even popular shows like “The OA,” “Sense8” or “The Baby-Sitters Club” can get canceled after only a season or two. Netflix is particularly notorious for this.

Unlike with cable, streaming services are prioritizing how many new subscribers a show can bring in, not just how popular a show is within the existing subscribers. Netflix has also stated it focused on the first 28 days of release to see how many viewers began the show and how many finished a season within a month.

Compare that to a show like “The Office.” Today, it’s one of the most popular modern sitcoms, but it was at risk of cancellation due to poor ratings on NBC for its first two seasons.

There’s a reason the risk of hoping a show will grow and build an audience is much higher for streaming than it used to be for cable. Part of that is because platforms now pay production companies all production fees up front, in exchange for more control over distributing the show. So, there are much bigger losses if a show doesn’t take off. Unfortunately, as it’s been widely reported, shows with diverse stars and casts seem to be on the chopping block more often.

But while streaming services churn out original shows hoping for a breakout hit, the real competition is actually in the battle over old shows and movies that already come with fanbases.

Sky Moore, an entertainment lawyer, explained why.

“Streamers: the winner is whoever has the most content,” Moore said. “So what is happening is consolidation. Everybody is attempting to be the last man standing. There’s only probably going to be four players when the party is over in a couple of years, and whoever has the most content wins.”

This explains the jaw-dropping amounts some platforms have paid for old sitcoms like “Friends,” “Seinfeld” and “The Office,” or for intellectual property like Amazon’s record-breaking purchase of rights to “Lord of the Rings” source material.

When networks used to buy syndication rights to a show, the number was based on available ad and viewership data for that network. In the subscriber model, it’s actually unclear what these numbers are really based on.

All that is clear is that these huge purchases and mergers show how important it is to consolidate big libraries. Companies are betting massive libraries stocked with old favorites are what will keep subscribers around, and it’s part of the reason why even more mergers and buyouts between big entertainment companies are likely.

“If you look on a broad scale of entertainment, which is really who they’re competing against, it’s no longer, for example, the studios,” Moore said. “It’s studios against streamers, and broadly, it’s studios and streamers against Facebook and against YouTube and against Instagram. It’s a much broader universe of entertainment than it used to be, so they’ve got to consolidate.”

: newsy.com

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Coming To A Theater Near You: $3 Movie Tickets For One Day

By Associated Press
August 28, 2022

Sept. 3 will be a nationwide discount day in more than 3,000 theaters and on more than 30,000 screens. Major chains and film studios are participating

For one day, movie tickets will be just $3 in the vast majority of American theaters as part of a newly launched “National Cinema Day” to lure moviegoers during a quiet spell at the box office.

The Cinema Foundation, a non-profit arm of the National Association of Theater Owners, on Sunday announced that Sept. 3 will be a nationwide discount day in more than 3,000 theaters and on more than 30,000 screens. Major chains, including AMC and Regal Cinemas, are participating, as are all major film studios. In participating theaters, tickets will be no more than $3 for every showing, in every format.

Labor Day weekend is traditionally one of the slowest weekends in theaters. This year, the August lull has been especially acute for exhibitors. Cineworld, which owns Regal Cinemas, cited the scant supply of major new releases in its recent plans to fill for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

But, if successful, National Cinema Day could flood theaters with moviegoers and potentially prompt them to return in the fall. Before each showing, ticket buyers will be shown a sizzle reel of upcoming films from A24, Amazon Studios, Disney, Focus Features, Lionsgate, Neon, Paramount, Sony Pictures Classics, Sony, United Artists Releasing, Universal, and Warner Bros.

“After this summer’s record-breaking return to cinemas, we wanted to do something to celebrate moviegoing,” said Jackie Brenneman, Cinema Foundation president, in a statement. “We’re doing it by offering a ‘thank you’ to the moviegoers that made this summer happen, and by offering an extra enticement for those who haven’t made it back yet.”

After more than two years of pandemic, movie theaters rebounded significantly over the summer, seeing business return to nearly pre-pandemic levels. Films like “Top Gun: Maverick,””Minions: Rise of Gru,””Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and “Jurassic World Dominion” pushed the domestic summer box office to $3.3 billion in ticket sales as of Aug. 21, according to data firm Comscore. That trails 2019 totals by about 20% but exhibitors have had about 30% fewer wide releases this year.

Organizers of National Cinema Day described the event as a trial that could become an annual fixture. While some other countries have experimented with a similar day of cheap movie tickets, the initiative is the first of its kind on such a large scale in the U.S.

Additional reporting by the Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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What The Warner Bros.-Discovery Merger Means For Streaming As A Whole

Warner Bros. and Discovery’s merger means major restructuring — and not just for the streaming platforms the company owns.

The dust is settling around the highly-publicized merger between Warner Bros. and Discovery, and some experts say this is only the beginning for the streaming industry as a whole.

“You will see more merger activity, where streamers are trying to pick up existing libraries so that the consumer knows when they log on to a particular site, that they have the most choices available,” said Sky Moore, lawyer and partner at Greenberg Glusker.

With these mergers come major restructuring.

Warner Bros., which owns HBO and HBO Max, recently announced upcoming layoffs to its reality programming division, as well as cancellations of films like “Scoob 2!” and “Batgirl” — which was already in post-production and cost the company $90M.

Several writers, producers, actors and others who worked on the projects spoke out about their disappointment on social media, noting that their years of work would now never be seen.

The same happened with CNN+, which was scrapped entirely by Warner Bros. Discovery just one month after it launched.

“The company wants a clean slate when it goes forward,” Moore said. “They just simply wanted to deduct it prior to going forward so that it didn’t show up as a loss on the books of Discovery.”

Despite those losses, the ultimate goal for Warner Bros. and Discovery is a larger streaming library for viewers — something that its competitors have been working on as well.

“Disney buys Fox,” Moore said. “Netflix already has a massive library. Amazon buys MGM. You can guess Apple is going to buy somebody. It’s all being driven by the need to consolidate the most content.”

All of these business moves reveal the next phase of streaming: less of a focus on investments in original content and more of an emphasis on consolidation.

The combined subscriber numbers of HBO, HBO Max and Discovery total 92.1 million paid customers, but that’s still behind the top streamers in the industry: Disney+ has 152.1 million subscribers, Amazon has 175 million and Netflix has 220.6 million.

: newsy.com

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‘Bullet Train’ Pulls $30.1M In 2022’s Last Summer Blockbuster

The debut was solid but unspectacular for a movie that cost $90 million to make and was propelled by Pitt’s substantial star power.

The stylized action romp “Bullet Train,” starring Brad Pitt, arrived with a $30.1 million opening weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday, as the last big movie of Hollywood’s summer recovery landed in theaters.

The “Bullet Train” debut for Sony Pictures was solid but unspectacular for a movie that cost $90 million to make and was propelled by Pitt’s substantial star power. Even if it holds well in coming weeks, movie theaters have no major studio releases on the horizon for the rest of August, and few sure things to look forward to in early fall.

While late summer is always a quiet period in theaters, it will be especially so this year — and likely to sap some of the momentum stirred by “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Jurassic World: Dominion,” “Minions: The Rise of Gru” and others. After a comeback season that pushed the box office close to pre-pandemic levels, it’s about to get pretty quiet in cinemas.

“It’s definitely going to be quieter, like the calm after the storm,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for data firm Comscore. “But that doesn’t mean there’s not going to be great movies out there and perhaps the good will generated by some of those films might be enough to buoy the box office until we get into the blockbuster corridor with ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ and ‘Avatar 2’ down the road. We have to expect that we’re not going to be able to keep up the pace we had this summer.”

As the last big summer movie to leave the station, “Bullet Train” hopes to keep riding for the coming weeks. That would be in line with the playbook of some other original, August-released summer movies like “Free Guy” and “Crazy Rich Asians.” Directed by David Leitch (“Atomic Blonde,” “Deadpool 2”), “Bullet Train” gathers a number of assassins (co-stars include Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry) together on a speeding train running from Tokyo to Kyoto.

As one of the few original would-be summer blockbusters without big-name intellectual property behind it, the R-rated “Bullet Train” might have come into the weekend with more momentum if reviews had been stronger. With a low 54% fresh rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, “Bullet Train” was only slightly better received by audiences, who gave the film a B+ CinemaScore. The film added $32.4 million in overseas box office.

The weekend’s other new wide release, “Easter Sunday,” struggled to catch on. The Universal Pictures comedy, starring comic Jo Koy as an actor attending his family’s Easter Sunday celebration, won praise for its Filipino representation but drew even worse reviews than “Bullet Train.” It opened with $5.3 million in ticket sales.

Instead, “Bullet Train” was trailed by a number of holdovers, including Warner Bros.’ “DC League of Pets.” The animated release grossed $11.2 million in its second week of release.

Jordan Peele’s “Nope,” the Universal sci-fi horror release, continued to perform well, earning $8.5 million in its third weekend. With $98 million in tickets sold, “Nope” will soon surpass $100 million at the domestic box office.

Taika Waititi’s “Thor: Love and Thunder,” for the Walt Disney Co., came in fourth with $7.6 million in its fifth weekend. It’s now up to $316.1 million, making it the highest grossing Thor movie domestically. With $699 million globally, “Love and Thunder” is less likely to catch the $854 million worldwide haul of 2017’s “Thor: Ragnarok.”

In limited release, A24’s “Bodies Bodies Bodies” launched on six screens in New York and Los Angeles with $226,525 in ticket sales, good for a per-screen average of $37,754. The horror comedy about rich 20-somethings at a remote house party, with a cast including Amandla Sternberg, Maria Bakalova and Pete Davidson, expands nationwide on Friday.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Tuesday.

1. “Bullet Train,” $30.1 million.

2. “DC League of Super Pets,” $11.2 million.

3. “Nope,” $8.5 million.

4. “Thor: Love and Thunder,” $7.6 million.

5. “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” $7.1 million.

6. “Top Gun: Maverick,” $7 million.

7. “Where the Crawdads Sing,” $5.7 million.

8. “Easter Sunday,” $5.3 million.

9. “Elvis,” $4 million.

10. “The Black Phone,” $1.5 million.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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Comic-Con Returns In Full Force With Costumes, Crowds

It’s not clear whether the convention will draw the estimated 135,000 people who flooded San Diego before the pandemic.

The pop culture extravaganza that is Comic-Con International is back to its old extravagance. Stars, cosplayers and hordes of fans are filling the San Diego Convention Center in full force for the first time since 2019. Here’s a look at this year’s version of the four day festival.

COMIC-CROWDS

The pandemic necessitated virtual versions of Comic-Con in the summers of 2020 and 2021, and a scaled-back in-person version in November, but none were anything like the usual spectacle, with lovers of all things geeky descending from around the globe and arena-sized panels on films and TV shows that resemble sporting events.

It’s not clear whether the convention will draw the estimated 135,000 people who flooded San Diego before the pandemic. But when the doors of the Convention Center opened for Wednesday’s preview night, the fans came in droves, mobbing the floor. As required, nearly all wore masks — the protective kind, not the super-villain kind, though there were plenty of those too — and the excitement amid the crowd was palpable.

“Everybody’s just been cooped up for a while, and they’ve been anticipating this,” said Dinh Truong, 34, who came to Comic-Con for the second time from his hometown of Minneapolis. “It’s nice just to see everybody in the same atmosphere. I’m excited to see the program, see what’s going on, see everybody cosplaying and all that, and just getting back to what we used to be.”

Far bigger crowds are expected Thursday, when the events begin in earnest.

COMIC-COSPLAY

It’s likely no one has missed the in-person convention more than the captains, queens and connoisseurs of cosplay. Comic-Con is their Met Gala, and no getup is too elaborate.

Lorelei McKelvey, 54, who is from San Diego but now lives in Yokosuka, Japan, was dressed as Captain Carter, Captain America’s British, World War II-era counterpart.

“I had to do one that I could authentically replicate,” McKelvey said. “I went and did my research and found out what were the authentic British officer leathers worn in World War II, and I found manufacturers to actually make those leathers.”

She walked the Convention Center floor in real-as-possible officer cavalry boots and Royal Air Force gauntlets, and carried a 5-pound steel shield.

McKelvey came to Comic-Con and worked a booth for 20 straight years. This is her first time coming as a cosplayer, and her second time coming as a trans woman, and she’s excited to be reunited with the cherished friends she’s made here.

“My last convention is the first time they’ve seen me as Lorelei,” McKelvey said. “This is their first time to see me four years later and to see how much I’ve grown since then.”

Others wandered the halls Wednesday as “Star Wars” Stormtroopers, the Mandalorian, Wonder Woman, and Sailor Moon. Chuckie from “Child’s Play” emerged from one cosplayer’s stomach.

COMIC-COMING ATTRACTIONS

Comic-Con makes most of its news as a venue to show off trailers and footage from forthcoming films and TV shows during star-studded mega-panels held in Hall H, which holds some 6,000 people. Announced panels include Warner Bros. and the DC Universe’s “Black Adam.” It will include Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who plays the titular antihero, director Jaume Collet-Serra, and the stars playing Hawkman, Dr. Fate, and other members of the Justice Society.

“Get ready, because the hype is real,” Johnson said in pro-wrestler promo mode on Instagram earlier this month. “Guess who’s coming to town, the most electrifying man in all the DC Universe.”

Warner Bros. will also provide a preview of “Shazam: Fury of the Gods.”

Marvel may hold back its best material for Disney’s forthcoming D23 Expo, but is expected to tease its next film, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and the Disney+ TV series “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.”

A pair of much-anticipated fantasy prequels will also give fans a taste of their worlds. A new trailer dropped Wednesday in advance of a panel from HBO Max that will show off the “Game of Thrones” spinoff “House of the Dragon,” set 200 years before the original series.

Amazon is going back in time 2000 years for “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” a tale of the emergence of evil among the elves long before Frodo and Bilbo walked Middle Earth. Their panel this year comes 21 years after director Peter Jackson presented footage from the first of the original films at Comic-Con.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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How Jack Welch’s Reign at G.E. Gave Us Elon Musk’s Twitter Feed

When Jack Welch died on March 1, 2020, tributes poured in for the longtime chief executive of General Electric, whom many revered as the greatest chief executive of all time.

David Zaslav, the C.E.O. of Warner Bros. Discovery and a Welch disciple, remembered him as an almost godlike figure. “Jack set the path. He saw the whole world. He was above the whole world,” Mr. Zaslav said. “What he created at G.E. became the way companies now operate.”

Mr. Zaslav’s words were meant as unequivocal praise. During Mr. Welch’s two decades in power — from 1981 to 2001 — he turned G.E. into the most valuable company in the world, groomed a flock of protégés who went on to run major companies of their own, and set the standard by which other C.E.O.s were measured.

Yet a closer examination of the Welch legacy reveals that he was not simply the “Manager of the Century,” as Fortune magazine crowned him upon his retirement.

broken up for good.

the fateful decision to redesign the 737 — a plane introduced in the 1960s — once more, rather than lose out on a crucial order with American Airlines. That decision set in motion the flawed development of the 737 Max, which crashed twice in five months, killing 346 people. And while a number of factors contributed to those tragedies, they were ultimately the product of a corporate culture that cut corners in pursuit of short-term financial gains.

The pandemic accelerated the disruption. Traditional studios like Paramount, Universal, Sony, Warner Bros. and Disney rerouted dozens of theatrical films to streaming services or released them simultaneously in theaters and online. For the second year in a row, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, citing the coronavirus threat, allowed films to skip a theatrical release entirely and still be eligible for Oscars. The academy had previously required at least a perfunctory theatrical release of at least a week in Los Angeles.

This is about more than Hollywood egotism. The worry is that, as streaming services proliferate — more than 300 now operate in the United States, according to the consulting firm Parks Associates — theaters could become exclusively the land of superheroes, sequels and remakes. The venerable Warner Bros. has slashed annual theatrical output by almost half and built a direct-to-streaming film assembly line. Last week, Amazon boosted its Prime Video service by acquiring Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the old-line studio behind “Licorice Pizza,” which is nominated for three Academy Awards, including best picture.

In a year when Hollywood largely failed to jump-start theatrical moviegoing, streaming services solidified their hold on viewers. Global ticket sales totaled $21.3 billion in 2021, down from $42.3 billion in 2019, according to the Motion Picture Association. (Theaters were closed for much of 2020.) Some theater companies have gone out of business, others have merged; the world’s biggest theater chain, AMC Entertainment, racked up $6 billion in losses over the past two years and its stock has dropped 66 percent since June. At the same time, the number of subscriptions to online video services around the world grew to 1.3 billion, up from 864 million in 2019, the group said.

One film that struggled at the box office was Mr. Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” which received an exclusive run in theaters (per his wishes) of about three months. It collected about $75 million worldwide (against a production budget of $100 million and global marketing costs of roughly $50 million). “West Side Story” is now available on not one but two streaming services, Disney+ and HBO Max, where it has almost assuredly been viewed more widely than in theaters. But the film was never able to recover — among Oscar voters — from being branded a box office misfire. It received seven nominations, and is poised to win in one category, for Ariana DeBose as best supporting actress.

Mr. Spielberg’s also-ran presence in the current Oscar race makes the ascendance of streaming contenders all the more striking: a lion in the fight to keep the Academy Awards focused on theatrical films is pushed aside.

However unlikely, it is possible that “West Side Story” could come from behind and win the best picture trophy. So could Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” for that matter. Such an outcome would be a bit like 2019, when academy voters, turned off by an over-the-top campaign by Netflix to push “Roma” to best picture glory, instead gave the prize to “Green Book,” a traditional film from Universal Pictures.

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