Why Movies Should Still Be Released In Cinemas
Patience is virtue will pay off for cinemas despite increase usage of Netflix during the crisis
As we all have heard, Disney is going to have its $200 million budget movie, Mulan, to Disney Plus. However, to get to watch this, you must pay another extra $30 to watch it.
There have been negative comments about this. Fans still prefer watching it in the cinemas since 1) the theaters are way cheaper to watch 2) it’s a better experience. As someone who loves movies, I wouldn’t want to pay for this. It’s just way too expensive than what I used to watch, and the experience is very different.
It’s like the food business. Everyone has a kitchen, but there are still people going out to restaurants. What’s the difference between movies?
The purpose of a remake movie is to improve past movies, so all experiences must be maximized. The same applies to other new coming movies, imagine watching Avengers Endgame in your online streams. Will you still have the same experience as when you watched it in the theaters?
In this article, I want to further elaborate on why these highly anticipated movies should wait until cinemas reopen again.
1) We miss the cinemas!
As I said before, the Cinema is like restaurants. Everyone has a kitchen at home, but there are still people ordering takeouts. So as Cinema, everyone has a Tv to watch but there are still people who want to watch on the big screen.
This is because the experience is different. People want something new that is not in their homes, that’s why we try things that are outside our homes. So, even though Netflix and other online streaming have emerged to be an alternative to watch movies, cinemas are still in demand.
Even when today we are facing a terrible crisis and cinemas are forced to temporarily closed, people are longing for the cinemas. In the midst of the crisis, Ormax studios, a media consulting firm from India, did a survey on 1000 people from 58 cities of the country and found that 82% of them misses the theaters.
That’s just India alone, now imagine the same response world-wide. This means that when cinemas can finally reopen, people will gladly spend their money on movie tickets.
As a movie-goer myself, the first place I’d go to is the cinema. I miss it very much, and I too can’t wait to go back there. I miss the thermal ticket papers, the smell of popcorns, the movie posters in every corner of the wall, the dark-room we can gather to enjoy the movie together, and the experience to be fully absorbed into the film without interruptions. I’ll definitely be the first in line when cinemas can re-open again.
If movies decided to pull out and move it to online streaming immediately, it’s a very missed opportunity. Not only are they going to lose the audience that they estimated originally (And it might reach over their expected sales revenue), but they may not be able to cover their budget costs of the film, leading to my next point….
2) Cinema release beats home release
Making a movie is not cheap, that’s why most of the highly anticipated movies turn to the theaters first before releasing them to online platforms. Putting their movies to home-released early will not help much on increasing their revenues or cover the budget costs they had, especially blockbuster movies.
For example, A Quiet Place was a $17 million budget movie, the box office worldwide reached $340 billion worldwide.
Now, if this goes to the online streaming first, it may not be possible for them to gain that much revenue. Back then when that movie was released, people said that the experience in the theater was very unique. The audience gets to feel what utter silence is like in the theaters, making this a newer experience for people to watch.
Word of mouth spreads about this unique experience, and that was how the movie managed to triple its revenue. If the studio decided to release it online, then the movie will look like any regular horror thriller movie, making people lose their interest to watch the movie. That’s why the studio made a good move to delay the release date for its sequel instead of releasing it online.
But will this be the same with other movie genres? Especially since there are original online platform movies that made it huge as well. Not always.
Think of it this way. When you release the movie in the cinema, that’s one revenue from one chain of supply, then once it ‘leaves’ the theatres, you can release it on DVD and online streaming, another two source of income.
That’s a total of three incomes to get. Out of all these three incomes, Cinema released is still more profitable than the home-released ones. Remember, for online platforms, they can share their account, so one person can pay it for one person, and 10 people can watch with that person. That’s quite a loss, especially for blockbuster movies.
So giving up on the cinemas will only let the exciting opportunity to slip, especially when people are now dying to go back there again.
At the moment now, cinemas and studios are doing their best to survive with no coming viewers since the beginning of the year. Most movies have been tempted to release their films on online platforms but decided to stick with their plans. Afterall, patience is a virtue.
Releasing Mulan in the online platform is quite a miss opportunity unless Disney decided to take it back. Not only that it is a highly anticipated film, but a remake with a better experience, a live-action film. Then again, there may be people who are willing to pay another $30 for it, though I doubt that there will be as many as the estimated ticket sales.
Are the cinemas going to run out of business when the pandemic is over? No one can say, but cinemas have been through events like this in the past, notably World War and the swine flu. But one thing for sure, we all cannot wait to come back to watch the big screen in the darkroom again.