Hollywood Scrambles As It Loses Millions (Billions?) to Coronavirus, and I Just Can't Stop Laughing

Second look at social distancing?

With theaters closing, Universal will make its movies available on-demand on the same time they're (theoretically) available to be seen in theaters.

People have been predicting the death of the physical movie theater -- except for huge events movies where IMAX, 3D, and other format gimmicks are a selling point -- for a long time now.

Universal is now releasing movies on-demand while they're in theaters in reaction to coronavirus. If some of these dogs wind up making money on-demand, this might be an eariler-than-expected death knell for theatrical exhibition.

Universal Pictures will make new films available to stream the same day they’re released in theaters as the coronavirus pandemic shuts cinemas around the world.

In a stopgap move that analysts said would likely be duplicated soon by other big Hollywood studios, Universal’s new releases will be available for at-home and theatrical viewing on the same day starting with the April 10 release of the animated feature "Trolls World Tour," parent company NBCUniversal said.

Universal films already released in theaters -- such as the horror flick "The Invisible Man" and the satirical thriller "The Hunt" -- will be available for digital rentals as soon as Friday, according to a news release.

Disney/Marvel had been hoping to not have to delay Black Widow's release -- but they just pulled the trigger.

It was supposed to be released either April 24 or May 1 (different sites say different dates), so that's still a fair bit in the future.

But it's now delayed. They don't say when it will be released.

Disney's "Black Widow" is the latest tentpole to shift its release date because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Marvel superhero adventure, starring Scarlett Johansson, was slated to hit theaters on May 1...

Disney has already delayed "Mulan," "The New Mutants" and "Antlers," but held off on postponing "Black Widow" in the hopes that it wouldn’t have to scrap another big film. But the move was inevitable since movie theaters in multiple states, including New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington, have been ordered to close. Only AMC Theatres has given a timeline on how long its locations might be closed, estimating six to 12 weeks for venues nationwide.

Disney's other big money-maker is its parks. It's shutting down all of its hotels and parks.

After shutting down Disneyland, Disney World, Disneyland Paris, and Disney Cruise Line operations last week, Disney (NYSE:DIS) announced on Monday it would make additional closures. The entertainment giant will cease all store operations in North America on Tuesday, and all of the company's Disney World hotels are set to close Friday.

If I'm remembering right -- they already shut down Disney Tokyo, Disney Hong Kong (they had one in Hong Kong?) and Disney Shanghai (or was it Beijing).

That's a lot of cheddar.

Disney long ago has changed its business model from "family friendly entertainment" to "courting #Woke childless weirdos who retain a dubious interest in child-oriented entertainment." They've kissed off the "normies" and try to appeal to the Woke and sexually obnoxious.

But as Comics Matter says: SJWs are not only not customers, they're anti-customers. Not only will they not spend money on the #Woke entertainment they claim they'd pay for if only someone would make it, but they will actively chase away all paying customers.

They're doing that now. It's hard to imagine "Mulan" not being #Woke enough to appease the SJWs, but that's exactly what the SJWs are saying.

While the release of Disney's live-action remake of "Mulan" has been postponed indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic, the film has already received criticism from Asian Americans who feel the crew doesn’t feature sufficient Chinese representation, according to NBC News.

Many Asian Americans on social media criticized the lack of representation behind the camera -- noting the director, the screenwriters and the costume designer were not of Chinese descent -- during the Hollywood premiere this week, days before the studio announced it would be moving the film’s debut. One social media user wrote "you cannot just plop Asian actors in front of a camera & call it a day!"

"There needs to be Chinese people...," the Twitter user added.

A movie about a Chinese girl who goes Tranny to pretend to be a boy to fight in an army -- Not woke enough!, it turns out.

I didn't mention Bob Iger's resignation as CEO of Disney, because I didn't imagine it was done due to Disney performing poorly. Everyone knows Star Wars sucks and Marvel is on the slide, and Disney's parks bombed with "Galaxy's Edge," but Disney is still making a billion dollars a movie, even when they're terrible.

And to shareholders, that's what matters.

So I didn't think this was some kind of disguised firing or anything.

But Gary from Nerdrotic has been suggesting now that Bob Iger got out because he knew a ton of bad news was on the way for Disney and he didn't want to be there for the downturn. Disney's share price had been selling at $150 for a long time, and now it's fallen to $92.

Is that true? I don't know. Seems plausible, but who knows.

Also, check out the sneering dismissal Disney offered shareholders who complained of ABC's obvious anti-conservative animus.

The new CEO Bob Chapik gave George Stephanopolis glowing praise for his objectivity:

But, ah, I think ABC News has a stellar track record of being objective in reporting the news and it'll continue in the future.

I think you can S my D, Bob.

Now with all of this bad news on the entertainment front, is there any good news?

Indeed there is. People love the woke Star Trek: Discovery so much that they're threatening to make an STD movie.

Studio bosses clearly have a lot of faith in Star Trek: Discovery. Season 3 hasn't even aired yet, but earlier this month it was reported that it's already been renewed for a fifth season. The show deserves credit for ushering in a new golden age of Trek on TV, too, with both Short Treks and Star Trek: Picard following it on the CBS All Access service. And the next journey of the U.S.S. Discovery could even see it go boldly into a whole new medium.

According to our sources -- the same ones who said Transformers is being rebooted and National Treasure 3 is in development, both of which turned out to be correct -- Paramount and CBS are developing a Discovery movie. The film would bring back the cast of the show, led by Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham, and could even see them crossing over with the stars of the rebooted series from J.J. Abrams. The current idea is that the Discovery would end up in the Kelvin timeline where they’ll meet the Enterprise crew from Abrams' films.

Okay, so that's of course almost certainly complete bullshit.

"We Got This Covered" -- well, I read them some time, but I don't believe all of these rumors.

But even if the rumor is a rumor -- it could very well be a lie. One thing that these people do when they know they're in big, big trouble is put out word that their next project has supposedly been greenlit, that the studio has such confidence in the current movie that they're already planning the sequel.

Paramount knew that Star Trek Beyond was going to disappoint badly at the box office, which is exactly why they floated rumors for Star Trek IV-- with Kirk meeting his father, Chris "Thor" Hemsworth -- a week before Star Trek Beyond debuted in theaters.

Spoiler: there is no Star Trek IV. They can't interest investors in putting their money into it, and Chris Pines and Chris Hemsworth have already walked.

Kathleen Kennedy at Lucasfilm was fond of announcing this new project and that new series even while her actual movies were disappointing -- or outright bombing, in the case of Solo --at the box office.

Remember that supposed trilogy Rian Johnson would be directing? Remember the trilogy that Dan Weiss and David Benihoff of Game of Thrones infamy would be producing?

Remember the Obi Wan series? How about the Boba Fett movie?

Yeah -- none of them are happening.

But Kathleen Kennedy sure did like putting out rumors and leaks about them.

So this is nonsense. Star Trek fans hate Star Trek Discovery and non-Star Trek fans are not enticed to watch it just for the #Woke points.

I take these announcements of "series five" and movies to be signs of weakness, not strength. Franchises in good shape don't have to float rumors about how super-duper they're doing.

The last via Nerdrotic.

Star Trek Discovery movie. As Gary from Nerdrotic says, Please do this. Please do this. It will give us all so much joy to see you lose $300 million.

Nerdrotic is literally laughing out loud as he tries to read this batshit-insane claim about a STD movie.

Oh, one more thing: Remember a few months ago when all of the shill SJW entertainment media couldn't stop talking about HBO's Wokemen, I mean Watchmen?

Then it wasn't renewed for season 2, and the shill SJW media told us that that was just because Damon Lindelhof had too much integrity to sully himself with a sequel to a reboot?

Well... Turns out the show -- get this -- had low ratings.

HBO's Watchmen Wasn't As Popular As You Think

Despite captivating the nerdier parts of the internet, viewing numbers for Watchmen were low compared to other, similarly hyped HBO series.

HBO's Watchmen seemed like a massive hit. Everywhere you looked, there were podcasts and articles breathlessly going through every detail of the show, trying to figure out where the story was going to go, how it connected to the comics and every little detail hidden in the background and backstory. Watchmen had the internet captivated with its every episode, it seemed.

It averaged 759,000 viewers per episode, and I'll bet you it had a lot more viewers for Episode 1 and maybe 2 than the average -- boosting that average based only on initial curiosity.

HBO now rebuts that the show got more people to watch on-demand after the original airings of each episode, but they claim... 8 million total viewers.

8 million total viewers over nine episodes.

That just brings the average up to around 900,000 per episode.

Also, no one talks about ratings this way. We don't total up all viewers for a season and say, "Big Bang Theory had 100 million viewers in its final season." We always talk about the average per episode.

Because the same people keep coming back (and the same people keep not coming back, too).

So yeah, the show that every SJW Twitter douchebag proclaimed was the most important TV event in America since the previous most important TV event in America was, as suspected, almost entirely ignored by normies.

Update: WHAT?

Rumor spreads that Apple wants to buy all of Disney.

Apple has a huge amount of money and doesn't want to pay it out in dividends, so, who knows. They're always looking for a new business to pour their wealth into. They were talking about getting into the car business five years ago!

This is all just a rumor though.

posted by Ace at 05:05 PM

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