Industry Analyst: Hollywood's Long String of Bombs Is Creating Negative Feedback Loop Which Will Further Depress Theater Attendance

In other words, they're pumping out so much bad product that theaters will go bankrupt, and then Hollywood will have fewer "stores" to sell their future terrible products at.

Hollywood is at risk of entering a "negative feedback loop" with fewer wide movie releases and a shrinking theater footprint combining to squeeze box office revenue, a veteran media analyst says.

In his annual assessment of the theatrical sector, billed as a "memo to Hollywood," TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz notes that he has taken a "bearish stance" on the theatrical window for some time. Results from 2024, with total grosses slipping 4% from 2023 to $8.57 billion, the number of wide releases down 6% from pre-Covid levels, and other factors have only reinforced his view.

"We have said for several years now that the outlook for a sustained recovery looks questionable, and that we don't think the existing global theatrical footprint can be supported solely by a handful of blockbusters," Creutz wrote in the 20-page report.

The number of screens in the U.S. has declined to about 35,000 from 41,000 before Covid struck in 2020, with exhibition also facing big challenges in 2023 and 2024 due to the strikes. That smaller footprint might help theater owners in the near term, but it could end up hastening the decline of the overall business, Creutz believes. Downsizing "risks having more films skipping theatrical and going direct to streaming services...and now you have all the ingredients for a negative feedback loop."

One of Hollywood's biggest mistakes, many believe, was embracing the streaming model of exhibition. Previously, Hollywood sold its movies multiple times. First, it would sell tickets to shows in theaters. Then, three months later, it would sell DVDs or Blu-Rays, and also make the movies available on Play on Demand video. Then, three months after that, they'd sell the movies again to pay TV services like HBO.

Finally, after a year or year and a half, they would sell the movies to over-the-air broadcast TV networks or cable networks like TBS.

Now they only show movies in theaters and then on streaming. But they've shortened the window so much that fewer and fewer people bother going to movies. In some cases, movies turn up on streaming just thirty days after being shown in movies.

In other cases, it's even worse -- movies that do particularly poorly in the theaters are yanked out quickly, and then offered for streaming in just seventeen days.

The old system encouraged people to see movies in theaters because otherwise you'd have to wait a long, long time to see them. But anyone can wait 17 days or 30 days.

Add to that the minor fact that Hollywood is putting out just terrible movies lately, and you have the possibility of a mass die-off of theaters, followed by a wrenching contraction in Hollywood.

Theater owners have been demanding for some time that Hollywood lengthen the window between theatrical exhibition and streaming, but Hollywood is refusing.

Creutz emphasizes that he is "not calling for a complete collapse of the theatrical window, but we think box office is more likely to decline than rise over the next few years, particularly as major studios continue to cut back on the number of films they make in favor of concentrating their box office efforts in fewer, bigger, established IP films."

Movie theater boosters, who are slated to gather next week in Las Vegas for CinemaCon, have characterized the pandemic as a major setback but insist they are on a path to a full rebound. Creutz disagrees.

"We believe that theatrical demand likely permanently declined 20% as a result of changed consumer behavior during the pandemic, in addition to what had already been a secular decline in attendance," he wrote. One worrying sign coming out of 2024, he notes, is that "attendance remains concentrated in relatively fewer films than market norms pre-2015."

Right. So people are skipping out seeing movies in theaters except for a few buzzworthy blockbuster spectacles. So those are the only movies worth making. But at the same time, people are sick to death of the endless would-be blockbusters.

I used to like blockbusters a lot, but this form of storytelling is very repetitive. And we keep seeing nothing but the same type of stories -- Chosen One Heroes, for example -- and are getting tired of them.

Plus, Hollywood is making very poor copies of old blockbusters, with the only "fresh" features being woke messaging plus gender- and race-swapping.

So people are tired of would-be blockbusters -- now mostly flopbusters, a new term coined because of the huge number of expensive mega-flops -- at at the same time, would-be blockbusters are also the only movies people will bother showing up at the theaters for.

That is an evil pair of trends that bodes ill for Hollywood, and for the poor mom-and-pop theater owners who will be the first to go bankrupt.

In very related news, Kathleen Kennedy Junior has been fired from Amazon.

I'm talking about Jennifer Salke, who ran the studio into the ground changing almost every male-skewing property to be a girlboss power fantasy.

Note that Barbara Brocolli, despite overseeing an increasingly woke James Bond series, has always insisted that James Bond is male. But as soon as Amazon bought the property, out came news that they were developing a "Moneypenny" series.

Yes, Moneypenny, M's secretary, would be turned into a double-o agent and girlboss badass. (Note that the movies already did this under Barbara Broccoli, but she had the good sense to have Moneypenny retire from being a Girlboss Badass to be a secretary once again.)

Salke will not be missed, except for a couple dozen Twitter bot accounts.

Hollywood was perhaps shaken, but not stirred, by this week's news that Salke has exited after seven years at Amazon -- and how James Bond was perhaps among the issues that led to her departure. Talk of Salke's departure amid a power struggle with Mike Hopkins, the head of Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios, had been swirling for a while -- and last month's deal putting the Bond IP into the creative hands of Amazon was a further signal that Hopkins was about to make a change.

Salke and Barbara Broccoli, the longtime steward of the Bond IP, had not seen eye-to-eye on the fate of the franchise from the moment that Amazon acquired MGM -- including that valuable property -- for $8.5 billion in 2022. It was Hopkins, a non-creative exec who has been Salke's boss since joining Amazon in 2020, who instead had been developing rapprochement with the Broccolis.

As Variety recently noted, Broccoli is believed to have told others that she did not feel inspired by working with Salke.

Broccoli called Amazon executives "idiots." That's a bit more than "not feeling inspired" by Salke.

Things came to a head when the WSJ published an article in December about the Bond standstill. That caused a high alert within the studio that Salke's relationship on the film side was lacking and that she didn't have the creative chops to land the plane on one of the biggest franchises in Hollywood history. (It also helped to accelerate to Amazon's deal to buy out the Broccolis, after negotiations began in early 2024.)

Sources said Salke wanted to make Bond into a broader, less dangerous character who could star in TV shows and carry video games. But her desire to make 007 into a cuddly hero for Middle America made Broccoli wince, according to multiple sources. Insiders snarked that Salke's vision of Bond suggested him as a rebellious cookie-cutter spy out of an NBC drama, not serious IP that only a handful of the most esteemed directors could tackle.

Salke is infamous for her hatred of man-skewing entertainment.

Salke cancelled a Conan the Barbarian series, which was being developed by the guys who would later have great success with House of the Dragon for HBO. She cancelled the show for having too much, get this, "toxic masculinity." Instead she greenlit Wheel of Time, changing it from featuring a male hero to female heroes, and Rings of Power, turning it into another girlboss fantasy property.

Amazon Studios founder Roy Price, kicked out of the company over #MeToo style claims, is now laughing at Jennifer Salke and calling for a full reboot/retcon of her prized girlboss show, Rangz of Power. He thinks the only way to save the billion-dollar investment in the show is to pretend the first two wretched seasons never happened.

In a recent post to his Substack, Price shared his advice on what Amazon should do in order to stop losing when it comes to TV. As part of his advice, he called for a purging of the company's TV department explaining that it has become too big and is relying on "consensus decision making"

Not only did he call for Amazon MGM Studios' TV department to be cut down to size, but indicated it needs a new attitude as well. It needs leaders that will "get out their knives, put them in their teeth, and learn how to be nonconformists again."

READ: John Boyega Implies 'Star Wars' Fans Are Racist And Describes Franchise As "The Most Whitest, Elite Space"

Speaking specifically to the shows on the docket and already in development, Price made it abundantly clear that the type of thinking that created The Rings of Power must be done away with.

He suggested, "One thing I would tell this team to do is to completely retcon everything Rings of Power so far. That was an experiment. It is now non-canonical and we are starting over from scratch. It basically never happened and we are literally throwing it away."

Price even suggests that a single episode of Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne's The Rings of Power may be created "where everyone is slaughtered in an orgy of blood that would make John Woo blush and they are finally eaten by Tom Bombadil who then larks through the forest covered with gore singing 'Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo! Ring a dong! hop along! Fal lal the willow! Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!'"

To be clear, it's not just The Rings of Power he wants to retcon, he wants to retcon any scripts or pre-production done for potential James Bond spin-offs such as 008 and Moneypenny as well as Henry Cavill's Warhammer series and the Red Dead Redemption. "All these shows are being developed (or redeveloped) from scratch," he declared.

He specifically notes that these male-skewing shows should not be turned into "big female draws" and claims this thinking is ridiculous by asking, "Why on Earth would you do that? Has it literally ever worked?"

Hire this guy back.

Update: From Sharon, shut up and sing.

posted by Ace at 04:42 PM

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