Coronavirus's impact on the worldwide box office 3 3

[Bosco685]

13 minutes ago, Grails said:

People are starting to express their displeasure at the $20 rental pricing in the review sections of these new movies like The Invisible Man on iTunes.

Even with Redbox Streaming the price is $19.99/each. So definitely the rental price set by the studio for early releasing a film.

[media_junkie]

11 minutes ago, Grails said:

People are starting to express their displeasure at the $20 rental pricing in the review sections of these new movies like The Invisible Man on iTunes.

Eh, for two people to see a movie in my area it is $26.00.  So if the wife and I rent one of these new movies we would save money.  Hell I took the wife and kids to Onward when it opened, that was $45.00, I could have saved a bit load if I'd have waited 2 weeks.

[▫️]

51 minutes ago, media_junkie said:

Eh, for two people to see a movie in my area it is $26.00.  So if the wife and I rent one of these new movies we would save money.  Hell I took the wife and kids to Onward when it opened, that was $45.00, I could have saved a bit load if I'd have waited 2 weeks.

Yes, it would have been beneficial for your family. For me alone, it’s $12. In the evening. And I’m paying for the big screen and sound. I have no problem waiting until that $19.99 rental price becomes a purchase price in 2-3 months. 

[Xenosmilus]

I thought this was an interesting article. Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51968302

[Bosco685]

13 minutes ago, Xenosmilus said:

I thought this was an interesting article. Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51968302

Wow! But understandable with all the home-based activity.

[Bosco685]

Quote

More than 500 cinema screens have reopened in China, where the coronavirus outbreak is seen to be receding, though box office takings remain minimal as the public is mostly staying away.

 

State media CGTN reported that 486 theaters were open for business on Friday. On Monday, financial publication Caixin said the number had risen to 507, representing less than 5% of all cinemas in commercial operation prior to the virus outbreak.

 

Data from private-sector ticketing firm Maoyan showed that venues had opened in five provinces: far-flung Xinjiang; Shangdong, a coastal province that lies between Beijing and Shanghai; southern, landlocked province Sichuan; and two populous coastal regions, Fujian and Guangdong, which border Hong Kong.

 

The data showed that nationwide revenue on Friday totalled less than $2,000. In Fujian and Guangdong, not a single ticket was sold.

 

On Monday, China reported no new local cases of the virus, but confirmed 39 infections brought in from overseas, and nine more deaths, all in Wuhan, where the virus had its epicenter. Wuhan has not registered any new cases of Covid-19 for five consecutive days.

 

[Bosco685]

Quote

I watched 'The Invisible Man' for $20. If you're on the fence about renting movies still in theaters, here's why I feel it's well worth the spend.

 

Review:

• I had a quarantine date night with my wife watching "The Invisible Man."
• The movie is one of several movies in theaters that are also available to watch On Demand.
• The industry calls these titles Premium On Demand. They cost a little more to rent or buy than usual titles you can get online.
• "The Invisible Man" cost $20 to rent for 48 hours. I feel it's definitely worth it.

With many in the US stuck inside their homes due to the coronavirus pandemic, it has put the communal experience of going to a movie theater at an unprecedented standstill. So movie studios have since made it very easy to see many of its movies that were in theaters by offering them through Premium Video On Demand.

 

It's a revenue stream that the studios have been wanting to experiment with for years, but didn't want to disrupt the relationship it has with movie theaters. Now, with most theaters closed, including the three biggest in the country — AMC, Regal, and Cinemark — Premium VOD (or PVOD, for short) is now a reality.

 

Though it's extremely unlikely that upcoming big-budget movies like "Black Widow" and "Wonder Woman 1984" would get the PVOD treatment as those need huge global theatrical box office returns to make back the millions spent on them, titles that aren't blockbusters could bring in lots of money on PVOD. Especially now, as people are seeking out things to watch while sitting at home.

 

Currently, Universal is taking the lead in PVOD, as it has three titles available to rent for $20 each (for 48 hours), "The Hunt," "Emma," and "The Invisible Man." And it will also make available its upcoming release, "Trolls World Tour," on PVOD April 10.

 

I had a quarantine date night with my wife on Saturday and we watched "The Invisible Man." Here's why I think the PVOD option isn't just essential in today's world, but will be a game-changer going forward.

 

It was very easy to track down "The Invisible Man" to rent.

 

Getting any movie that is currently available on PVOD is easy to rent (or buy, in some cases). It's basically like selecting any other Video On Demand option. If you have a cable service, you can do it through its On Demand service. Or you can select through iTunes, Roku, or FandangoNow. My wife and I did it through our Amazon Fire stick.

Is $20 too much to see a movie at home still in theaters? No way.

 

Compared to most titles offered On Demand, $20 is a big price tag for a rental. But you have to think about it like going to the movies.

 

Where I live, $20 is how much you have to pay per ticket if you want to see a movie in a theater. Then you have to add on if you are getting drinks or food. And if you are going out on a date, and have kids, you also have to add in the price of a babysitter. So $20 to watch "The Invisible Man" is very reasonable, at least for this reporter.

 

My wife clutched my arm throughout the thriller, despite being in the safety of our own home. For me, it was like being at the movies.

 

While this story isn't necessarily a review of "The Invisible Man," I would say it's definitely worth a watch. My colleague Libby Torres agreed, giving the film an "A."

 

Torres also broke down the film's scariest moments and everything that hints towards the movie's shocking conclusion.

 

I would definitely do PVOD again. And there are more titles coming.

 

On Tuesday alone, here are the titles that are coming early to On Demand: "Birds of Prey," "The Gentlemen," "The Way Back," and "Bloodshot."

 

 

The introduction of PVOD during the coronavirus quarantine will have a lasting effect on how we watch movies going forward.

 

 

There's something about seeing a movie inside a crowded theater that makes the experience so special. But that doesn't mean movies shouldn't be available in other ways at the same time. Maybe you don't like going to the movie theater near you. Or, like me and my wife, we don't get out often (and when we do, we skip on going to a theater).

 

Theaters will certainly return, at some point, but before then we will be catching up at home with the movies we missed in theaters (or new releases). The demand for PVOD will be a game-changer as it will build revenue for movies that aren't a must-see in theaters, like the Marvel and "Star Wars" franchises. I really don't see this option to theaters disappearing once life goes back to normal.

 

So, I'm looking forward to the next (home) date night.

 

[paperheart]

Drive-Ins Continue To Post Best Ticket Sales In Weekend Box Office Wiped Out By Theater Closures

wish there was one here, i would definitely go

[Bosco685]

THR: Reporter's Notebook: The Weekend When Box Office Hit Zero for the First Time

Quote

Hollywood's theater owners, film distribution executives, analysts and writers who pore over the numbers each week are reckoning with a full stop.

My alarm clock has awoken me between 5:45 a.m. and 6 a.m. on nearly every Saturday and Sunday for the past decade in order to cover box office for The Hollywood Reporter. My go-to coping mechanism — believe me, I am not a morning person — is to hit the snooze button two or three times, providing the illusion that I get to sleep in. By 7 a.m. latest, after coffee or tea, I’ve started writing and am prepared for the onslaught of grosses flooding my inbox.

 

And now utter silence.

 

As of last Friday — and for the first time in the 100-plus year history of the motion picture business — virtually all cinemas in the U.S. were closed amid the coronavirus pandemic, as well as in much of the rest of the world.

 

On Sunday, my heart skipped a beat when I received a 9 a.m. PT email from Comscore, the industry’s receptacle for grosses. Perhaps there were still enough locations open to make the effort worthwhile, but when I opened the attached excel sheet, it was empty and an inconceivable reminder that cinemas — like so many other businesses — have gone from full steam to no revenue in a “blink of an eye,” as National Association of Theatre Owners chief John Fithian told me during a recent interview.

 

He and I are among the numerous members of the box office tribe scattered across the world. Throughout the weekend, and especially on Sunday, teams of people at the major Hollywood studios and indie distributors collect data and blast numbers and analysis to reporters, studio chiefs, producers, directors and talent.

 

I can't possibly count the number of times those of us on perpetual box office duty have commiserated about how nice it would be to have a break. We celebrated when we gained an hour in the fall and griped when the clocks turned forward in the spring. Even during vacations, post-9/11 and personal crises — in my case, major cervical spine surgery last year which wiped me out for five weeks — all of us still peeked at the numbers flowing in sooner or later, even when “off” duty. Never could we have imagined a full stop.

 

Erik Lomis, a don of the distribution business who presently works at United Artists Releasing, is famous for waking up at 4 a.m., seven days a week. By 5:30 a.m., he sends out projected grosses for the previous day. That’s in addition to a detailed analysis on the weekends of how new movies and recently released titles have performed. Last Thursday night, he realized he had to let go. “I sat at my computer at 11 p.m.,” he recalls, “and saw that a rerelease of The Big Lebowski was the top-grossing movie from nine theaters.”

 

Emails dispatched late last week turned into missives of grief. “I have been reporting the grosses since we started using computers to get the data and while I can’t remember the exact date, the year was 1988. Prior to that we used to get the grosses by calling a central hub and writing them by hand or actually calling the individual theaters to get the grosses if you can imagine that,” Lomis said in a March 19 note. “Today in these wild and crazy times I don’t think that there is any reason to continue reporting until we make it through to the other side and return to some kind of normalcy. I believe that we are resilient and that we will make it through but it may take a little time.”

 

Or this from Walt Disney Pictures on March 18: “Given the current large number of theater shutdowns around the globe, Disney will suspend global weekend reporting for the time being. Wishing you and your families the best during these testing times and please be safe.”

 

In happier times, I was always relieved when the new movie of the weekend belonged to Disney. Most studios announce their North American grosses by 7:30 a.m. Disney doesn’t generally send out their note until well after 8 a.m. — Hallelujah, one more tap of the snooze button! — since they include both domestic and global in the same memo. The rest of the studios issue their international numbers separately. (Universal is generally quickest, with overseas grosses following domestic.)

 

For those of us those covering box office, this separation between domestic and international means constantly updating the main story until 11 a.m. or later. In between, there are the calls to studio distribution executives in the hopes of gleaning a good quote and catching up on the most gossip. This past Sunday, calls went mostly unanswered. What was there to say, other than to commiserate about whether current releases being made available early on premium VOD did any business?

 

The first wave of frenzy for box office junkies begins around noon on Friday when studios begin privately estimating weekend grosses for the top five or 10 films. If you are lucky, sources will share this info. There are updates on Friday night, followed by Saturday morning stories on Friday grosses, and then the Sunday crush. And forget about having a break during major holidays (try explaining to your family year after year why presents can't be opened until you finish your Christmas morning story, or why it's tough to travel over Thanksgiving).

 

We are creatures of habit. When I went to bed on Saturday night, I stared at my iPhone, lost. What time should I set my alarm for? I decided on 7 a.m. to preserve some sort of normalcy. For Lomis, it meant getting up at 5:30 a.m. instead of 4 a.m. “It’s weird to look at the grosses and see nothing,” he told me on Sunday. For Comscore ambassador and box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian, it meant setting his alarm for 7:45 a.m. instead of 6:30 a.m. or so. He wanted to be prepared in case he received emails or phone calls from journalists. Mine was the first he received, and that was well past 10 a.m.

 

“Digesting numbers is baked into my DNA, so Sunday was a very strange feeling. I feel like a very lonely Maytag repairman,” Dergarabedian adds. “We are an ecosystem. And it represents more than the numbers going out, but a lot of hard-working people who are stuck in neutral like so many other businesses. Sometimes, we talk about what a bummer it is to have to wake up so early. Believe it or not, we will be very excited to set the alarm for 6:30 on a Sunday morning. All of us.”

 

I will be happy to say I’m a morning person after all.

 

[Bosco685]

 

[GabrielHummus]

I figured you thought I needed risk, so I'm not sure he did the same thing for usps... You're right that he's doing what he should.

Every time I go through UPS, because I know how they work, FedEx will be shipping saturdays, so it's my 1st through them, I can't tell whether I can trust the drivers haha. I just didn't like him thinking I haven't been at home this week.

[paperheart]

Warner Bros’ ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ Still Going Theatrical But In August; ‘In The Heights’, ‘Scoob!’ & ‘Malignant’ Undated For Now

thought they might be able to keep June 5 but at least they've staked out a date. The jockeying that's going to have to go on once the all clear is sounded is going to be something to behold.

Tenet July 21

Edited March 24, 2020 by paperheart

[paperheart]

Big Theater Chains Regal, Cinemark, AMC & Their Furlough Dilemmas During The Coronavirus Crisis

https://deadline.com/2020/03/coronavirus-regal-cinemark-amc-furlough-problems-theater-closures-1202891416/

Deadline heard Regal staffers received no pay and one month of COBRA, with sources painting a similar scenario to what went on with Regal’s parent company Cineworld in its handling of UK staff, which entailed those with less than 18 months of service receiving no pay, and those at three years of service or more landing 40% of their pay.

very generous, and who'll get the bailout $?

[Bosco685]

Quote

As movie theaters are shuttered nationwide due to the coronavirus pandemic, movie theater owners have to look ahead at a strategy to bounce back from the loss of being closed for what will likely be months. One strategy seems to be easing the consumer back into the multiplex slowly by offering up free content.

 

In an interview with "Screen Rant", The National Association of Theatre Owners chief communications officer Patrick Corcoran, suggested movie theaters may open for free when they're back up and running again. This would follow the same strategy that China is implementing as they begin to reopen their theaters after dealing with the coronavirus pandemic first. Theaters in that country are beginning by running old movies first such as AVATAR, AVENGERS: ENDGAME and HARRY POTTER at no cost to the consumer. This is a tactic that will only work if movie theaters have the stability of money coming in the form of loans or a bailout.

 

"We're working on it. We are working on it. We're looking at what's been happening in China. In the provinces that were least affected, they're starting to open their theaters, and they're open for free to patrons to coax them back. The movies they're showing are older ones. We will see... It's going to depend. We're both local and national markets, and our main distribution partners are very interested in national releases as opposed to local ones, so depending on how this virus goes, and whether it's more severe in some places and lifts sooner or later, that's all going to go into it. We're looking at ways to reach out to our patrons and also to our studio partners about the best ways to message and roll things out once we're back up and running."

 

It's not a bad way to get back into business. By slowly getting moviegoers back in the seats,  they can gear them up for big new releases as we try to get back to normal once this thing ends. One of the biggest concerns for movie theaters during this pandemic is the likelihood of viewing habits changing for potential consumers as they turn to streaming platforms as their main source of viewing content. The movie theater chains have to think of ways to make it worth it for moviegoers to want to visit the cinema again. Although I think most of us will flock back just to get the full theatrical experience again, this extra push could convince those who are undecided.

 

Movie theaters across the country will face the monumental task of bringing audiences back in when this situation reaches its conclusion. Slashing prices is a good start as I don't want to see this form of entertainment die. Patrick Corcoran suggested that theaters will go bankrupt without government help so  I'm hoping they do their part as I'm prepared to do my part by going to the movies when it's ready once again.

[Bosco685]

China closing theaters again. 

[paperheart]

China Orders Re-Closing Of All Cinemas Nationwide

https://deadline.com/2020/03/china-orders-re-closing-all-cinemas-nationwide-1202894103/

as stated, not a good sign

[paperheart]

Cinema Closures: Hong Kong Orders Shutdown; Japanese, Korean Chains Also Closing

why'd they wait?

[Bosco685]

Disney World And Disneyland Extend Their Closure Dates Amid Coronavirus Pandemic

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The health crisis that is the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic became very real for some people when The Walt Disney Company announced that both Disneyland and Walt Disney World resorts would shut down for the rest of the month of March as precautions against the virus' spread. Though an April 1 date had been set previously as when they would re-open to the public, Disney has since announced that they'll be extending the closure of the parks until further notice. In their statement on the closure they also confirmed they will continue paying their employees through the 18th of April.

 

"While there is still much uncertainty with respect to the impacts of COVID-19, the saffety and well-being of our guests and employees remains The Walt Disney Company's top priority," Disney Parks said in a statement. "As a result of this unprecedented pandemic and in line with direction provided by health experts and government officials, Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World resort will remain closed until further notice."

 

"The Walt Disney Company has been paying its cast members since the closure of the parks, and in light of this ongoing and increasingly complex crisis, we have made the decision to extend paying hourly parks and resorts cast members through April 18."

 

Even if Disney had decided it would open its Disney World parks in Florida or the Disneyland Resort in California starting at the beginning of April there are other factors at play that would have prevented them from doing so. Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer previously handed down a "stay at home" mandate in an attempt to combat the rapidly-expanding coronavirus pandemic which goes through at least April 9th and would prohibit large gatherings. Furthermore a ‘safer-at-home’ order was previously set for Los Angeles set to last until April 19, with the entire state of California under a similar mandate from Governor Gavin Newsom that is in place “until further notice.”

 

[Bosco685]

 

[Bosco685]

In case anyone assumes Japan isn't impacted.