There are only five studios left. Disney, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Warner Bros.

Paramount is as shaky as Don Knotts. Sony is stable, but lacks a clear vision for the future. And now the tie-breaker between the high (Disney and Universal) and the low, Warner Bros is taking itself out of the movie business.

Netflix has a bigger market cap than AT&T… not WarnerMedia… ALL of AT&T. You see, AT&T generates $160 billion a year in revenue… Netflix generates $24 billion. But Netflix is worth more than AT&T…. according to Wall Street.

In 2013, Ted Sarandos said, “”The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” Now, the TV-born leaders of Warner Media want to be Netflix.

Never mind than HBO alone has been more profitable than Netflix historically. Never mind that Netflix has been valued as a tech stock from the start and AT&T will never be. Never mind that HBO Max is still stumbling out of the gates and hasn’t shown an ability to convert even their own HBO-subbing customers to the new streaming service for free.

Throwing the entire 2021 schedule (and Wonder Woman 1984 at Christmas) at the HBO Max spend, they have roughly doubled their HBO Max spending for the year overnight, somewhere between $4 billion and $5 billion. Still not at Netflix pace, but a lot more than they intended when this journey started. And much more than they have ever spent on a year of theatrical movies.

HBO had, going into HBO Max, 55 million domestic subscribers and 88 million international subscribers. That’s still about 40 million short of Netflix now. But in range. Disney+, which is operational in only a few countries outside of the U.S. is in the low 60s of millions of subs. Amazon Prime has more than 142 million U.S. members… only a fraction of whom use the movie/TV service. And Peacock will catch up (after a lot of changes) in time.

So the battle has begun in earnest… Whether anyone but Jason Kilar thinks it is a good idea or not.

This is what happens when you put TV people in charge of everything… they think everything can be fixed by TV. They don’t understand the other pieces of the puzzle as well as their value.

One of my favorite writers, Joe Adalian wrote today, “Streaming is the heart and soul of these entertainment giants now, so they really don’t have much choice but to try to make these new services work.“

They are heart and soul… like Tony Stark’s chest plate. It was a jerry-rigged solution made in the middle of desperation by people a lot less brilliant than Iron Man and Tony is stuck with this thing, in the suit or not, until he dies.

Streaming is not going away. It is the future. Part of the future. Television. It is not everything. It may become the “heart and soul,” but Disney, it would become such at a massive loss of annual revenues and the taken-for-granted exhibition world won’t be there to add what will be much-desired and much-needed revenues if they are forced to shut down by the “daring experimentation.”

I believe in theatrical as much, or more, than anyone. But as I have written for decades, there are incremental losses that will collapse windows and once those lucrative windows are collapsed and replaced by flat-rate subscriptions, the majority of theaters will close and the ability of content producers/negotiators to increase profits by doing anything other than lowering spending and raising prices will be gone.

Let’s be clear… Disney doing $4 billion a year domestically is not enough to save theaters. Put aside COVID. Realistically, a strategy like the one WB is rolling out will cut domestic box office in half… at best. A majority of theaters would close and probably two-thirds of all screens. And then, Disney can’t do $4 billion or $3 billion or, most likely, $2 billion. So then they have no choice but to reconfigure their distribution plans because those massive number of seats that are empty all week in theaters is key to the mega-numbers that have become possible for blockbusters.

It’s MAD… Mutual Assured Destruction.

Many have said to me over the years that they would look forward to a film industry with its knees broken, forced into lower budgets and more opportunity. And they could get their wish. Of course, their rose-colored glasses about the wonders that will come with restraint are painted with ignorance of how money really works. They imagine a world of Easy Riders but reality tends to be a rack full of Dolph Lungren movies.

And so it begins. I am really trying to figure out how this plan works for anyone, starting with Warner Bros. It’s a soft content year for the studio, so they aren’t throwing the HUGE money away. But playing games with a unilateral move like this is taking every studio for a ride.

And exhibition.

No big deal. right?

Uh-huh.

After 22 years of doing an annual Thankful column, I shouldn’t let a mad king and a pandemic get in the way.

I am always thankful for filmmakers doing the work, even when the work doesn’t live up to my idea of the highest quality. The work of making movies is almost never easy. The life of being a filmmaker only ever becomes comfortable for a few. It doesn’t show up on your doorstep, hoping for you to be a part of the circus. Billy Ray, who is one of those who has the comforts of success, talked to me about this being the most productive year of his professional life. The circumstances created a kind of quiet, which allowed him to focus and get his work done. But then again, he seems the kind of guy who would also get his work done living on 10 square feet in the middle of an active volcano. I know a wide range of creators in the film and TV world. Each storyteller is different. Each level of drive is different. But no one sets out to fail or be embarrassing. Some go from project to project. Some grind for years between opportunities. They aren’t saving lives, but they are the front-liners of this industry. And for that I am thankful, whether I liked your movie or not.

I am thankful that in a nightmare of a year like this, Netflix built streaming into a real thing and that so many others – however nascent their efforts – have joined. It’s a double-edged sword. If I had read as many books as I have seen movies that I never would watched in a normal year, I would feel like an effete smart guy. But I am a television kid and a movie person and the range of available content that is readily available has been glorious.

I am thankful for the perspective, on a movie level, that the pandemic has allowed. I actually miss the early days of the pandemic, when I was up all night a lot and tearing through all the services, but particularly The Criterion Channel, reminiscing and expanding the stupid-large library of films in my head and heart. Not every happy memory of a movie I hadn’t seen in decades remained a good one. But it was a reminder that not every movie – even from great filmmakers – will be good and that there is something inside every piece of work that delivers value. Wandering through the Criterion 1970s horror film collection last month was illustrative. There were certainly the kink and nostalgia elements. But there were also ideas in many of those films that matured over the years, usually through other filmmakers, and delivered in a very different way in the 90s or 00s or by the last decade of Blumhouse. Right now, I suggest that anyone who hasn’t see The Underneath or King of the Hill do so (on Criterion) this weekend if you love Soderbergh’s work… because both little-seen films are key to where he is now, as all of his films are.

I am thankful that Steve McQueen decided to bring his artistic skills to cinema. Mangrove is my movie of the year, so far. The other four films in the “Small Axe” package also bring to life a personal moment in time, the way great, sometimes personal filmmakers like Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan have over decades. McQueen did it in a year or so.

I am thankful for the clarity that this year has brought to the job of being an entertainment journalist. Of course, part of that clarity is a nightmare. There are good journalists and bad journalists and good work and bad work and it all gets mixed up in the stew as everyone hopes to keep their jobs. I have become much more conscious that I can’t just grind out shit. Regardless what anyone thinks of me or my ideas, my survival as a journalist remains a function of studios buying ads over four or five months every year… But it can’t just be me carrying the water for those studios to pleasure them and rationalize my purpose. For me, the politics of the moment are a problem, not because I feel cancelled, but because the mainstream in my area of the business don’t even engage ideas that are not cleanly wrapped up in a familiar box. When I see all the water going the same way, I don’t think, “Hey, I can get attention for being contrary.” I think, “There is something really wrong here. In real life, water doesn’t all go the same way.” Something truthful is not very far from the surface… but most outlets won’t bother scratching deeper than a lottery scratcher. And of course, the me-ification of journalism puts enormous pressure on the “me”s getting it right. And very few really know or ever knew anything pre-2010. Writers, when they are the “me” don’t think of that as a problem. They are smart and skilled and people say things to them. But it is a huge problem. History informs the future. Always.

I’m thankful for the festivals that chose to stream and deeply disappointed in those that did not. They chose unwisely. For the most part, these festivals did well. There were glitches and frustrations. But those are beyond even needing to consider forgiving.

But none of these festivals were anything like being at a festival for real. And seeing films in your living room – giant TV, excellent sound, no streaming glitches – is still not seeing a film in a room with other people. And at festivals, you are generally in full rooms, which is optimal. It’s not a fetish. It is a different experience. It’s not as subtle as CD-versus-vinyl. It’s the difference between eating at a restaurant and eating at home. I love cooking at home. But I also love restaurants. And if you feel otherwise… okay. But Zoom ain’t being in the room. And in a room at a festival, I can feel this pleasure.

I am thankful that anyone has read this far. I am thankful for my family. I am thankful for my friends (every level of friend) in the industry. I am thankful for every DP/30 guest who has given me their time and their honesty while I have no glossy cover to offer as bait. And I am thankful that something that brings me so much pleasure has a consistent, albeit modest, audience of people who love the work and love the talent who talks with me.

I am thankful that we will have a new president and that I live in a country that is profoundly flawed but that can survive the lowest scum there is running the country for four years.

I am not thankful for COVID-19 in any way. Fuck you, COVID-19.

I look forward to really getting back to work when things are safer. I’m not really sure what that work should be. I am not only going to have to recalibrate for a changing journalism industry, but I have to recalibrate for a time when we are not spending hours a day trying to synthesize the madness of the nation and the existential issues that come with that. At 56, I consider the roads taken as much as the roads in front of me. That’s probably a waste of time. I have always had an arrogance about what is worthy of my time and effort. I’ve never really been able to afford that arrogance. But I have also been amazingly lucky. My life is imperfect, but I have so much to be thankful for now and in so many past years.

Thank you all. May 2021 be everything that 2020 was not.

2020 has been a brutal year… at the movies and everywhere else. Most of us are hopeful that 2021 will bring positive change, starting with the taming of the virus by habit and vaccine.

I believe, intensely, that The Academy is making a mistake by moving forward to have a competitive season at a time when movie theaters are closed in Los Angeles or New York and with theaters opening and closing across the globe as the pandemic ebbs and flows. Regardless of your opinion, or mine, about the choice to allow films that were never intended to be shown in theaters except to qualify for Oscars to compete, the idea of an Oscar year being dominated near the point of exclusivity by said films with almost nothing in the mix from the five major studios brings into question the very meaning and value of Oscar.

The horrors of 2020 do not mean that excellent work in the cinematic arts has not been done. I will proceed on a constant analysis of how the season is going, as laid out and endlessly morphed by The Academy. (I expect more candidates to be squeezed in before this is all over.)

Given that we are finally in the Biden transition, this week seems like a good one to talk about the politics of *Oscar this season. We are already feeling the excitement of Film Twitter and its pleasure in the idea of an Oscar season without major studio movies. Somewhere there is a Venn diagram of the people who are turned on by movie theaters closing and those who would love to see an end to movies that don’t pass their political purity tests. A significant percentage of Film Twitter is in that shared segment.

But when the entire *Oscar pool is made up of independent films, this gets complicated. Treacherous, even.

We might as well start with the Netflix haul, as theirs will be the biggest footprint and the closest to traditional studio movies.

Da Five Bloods
The 40-Year-Old Version
Hillbilly Elegy
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Mank
The Midnight Sky
Pieces of a Woman
The Prom
The Trial of The Chicago 7
The White Tiger

Impressive. More than a quarter of the field this season. All but one of the films has an Oscar winner in front of, or behind the camera. That would be The 40-Year-Old Version, while the only reach-y one among the rest is Pieces of a Woman, which co-stars the great Ellen Burstyn.

So is there anything problematic lurking here? Well, yes. George Clooney, David Fincher, Ron Howard, Charlie Kaufman, Ryan Murphy, and Aaron Sorkin are all very successful white male American filmmakers making movies that are mostly about white people and their problems.

Let me be 100% clear. I think the idea that race or degree of success would be any part of deciding whether these filmmakers’ films are awards-worthy is wrongheaded. But I don’t run the world. And I have seen this issue become significant in award-season rumblings of the last number of seasons. If you claim you haven’t, you are being defensive or an ostrich.

That doesn’t mean that six of the eleven films in the Netflix Awards Line-Up are somehow politically disqualified from Best Picture nominations or a win in this malformed year. (One was bludgeoned on first view, if not before it screened, Hillbilly Elegy.)

Realistically, Pieces of a Woman (white international director… all-white cast) and The White Tiger (a relative romp of Danny Boyle proportions from usually sublime director Ramin Bahrani), and The 40-Year-Old Version (female writer-director of color, but pure Indie Spirit) are not serious Best Picture players.

That leaves Da 5 Bloods and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom from the Netflix playbook, both directed by and starring great black Americans, many of whom have been embraced by The Academy.

Will this matter?

Ma Rainey is the best of the Netflix films that I have seen (a couple have been withheld). Saying that these things do matter to many people is not to say that race and/or pedigree are the only or primary or secondary drivers of these films’ awards interest. But in a cultural time when other films are disqualified for “failing” these tests, there is a discussion — however dangerous — to be had.

Mank has been the presumptive front-runner of this season for at least six months. David Fincher is revered. It’s a movie about Hollywood (which has overcome PC assault… at least until La La Land). Gary Oldman is one of our great actors. Great cast overall.

It would be silly to write off Mank as anything less than one of a small handful of potential Best Picture winners. On the other hand, it is a movie about a successful 1930s (thus, obviously white) screenwriter isolated in luxury because he is an out-of-control drunk, who walks the line of endless hypocrisy in relationships he has benefited from over decades of his debauched life. And he writes a great movie… though the movie is not really what this movie is about.

I can imagine the pieces that will run if (when?) Mank is made into half of a two-horse race by media and the other horse is directed by a woman or person of color and is about some supposedly more important subject. I will not approve of these personal editorials that pretend to be offering reporting and insight. But again… I am not in charge.

So let’s step away from Netflix for a moment and look at the realistic rest of the field, by PC focus.

Female Directors: Nomadland, One Night in Miami, First Cow, I’m Your Woman, On The Rocks, Mulan, Wonder Woman 1984
Non-American-Born Directors: Ammonite, Mulan, News of the World, Nomadland, Promising Young Woman, Tenet
Non-White Directors: Minari, One Night in Miami, The United States vs. Billie Holiday

Of all these titles, two have white male leads (First Cow, News of the World). Only five of the thirteen have male leads, period.

Flipping back to Netflix, only one of the company’s eleven contending films has a female director and that is the most personal and unlikely to break through for Best Picture or Director, The 40-Year-Old Version. On the other hand, six of eleven showcase a female lead or co-lead.

Does this matter? Should it?

What none of us know is how different demographics, within the media and within the Academy voting bloc, will split the difference faced with so many options that match their preferences, both positive and negative.

Obviously, taste comes into the discussion. And once again, I point out that referencing these connections is not saying that I think that every individual uses them, consciously or unconsciously, to define their choices. But because of circumstances this season, there are no real “surprises” coming… no gamechangers.

Also, there is a difference between the nominations window and the final winner window. Again, in this situation, even more than normal, whatever “normal” may turn out to mean.

Let’s assume that Netflix will pick off three Best Picture slots and slots down the slate with them.

So Netflix takes three Best Actress slots. Then, Frances McDormand. Then… Carey Mulligan, Andra Day, one of the Ammonite women, or the Hillbilly Elegy stars who eat the true lead of that movie alive (one of its other big and rarely mentioned problems as a movie)? That’s when the arguments turn into ways of eliminating quality performances.

And how does one compare an endless parade of magic tricks by a director in a movie like Mank or Tenet to the vérité style of Nomadland or a theatrical-style piece like Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom or high style like Promising Young Woman?

Will the over-60s at The Academy actually embrace the parade of traditional directors and their more traditional movies this season? Will they still be high on the rush of honoring Parasite and Filmmaker Bong last season?

And how will everyone split their votes? Best Picture 10 versus Best Director 5. It’s not a new issue, but there are more titles stuck in the same elevator this year than ever before. One of the issues that sloshes around every Oscar season is throwing some BP votes to movies you enjoyed more than you respected… or vice versa.

And how will voters split – if they split – between a streamer like Netflix, which has spent years establishing that their films as FILMS, even if destined for the service primarily, versus movies that were targeting theatrical release – like Mulan or Soul or Wonder Woman 1984 – but got sidetracked to streaming? Is this a season where they see Netflix films as more legit than some studio releases, like, weirdly, Tenet, which hangs out there as a singularity.

In the past, I might have considered constructs that set one film with a constituency against another. But this season, the pool feels too small, both in number and style of filmmaking for that.

One Night In Miami‘s hopes are probably damaged by Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, not because they are both films with black talent behind and in front of the camera, but because both are stage pieces with limited opportunity to open things up, and Ma Rainey just does a superior version. For a first film with these limitations, Regina King did great. She got terrific performances. But four guys in a room is a circumstance that many of our great directors have failed to overcome. I look forward to her next films. George C. Wolfe did his best work as a film director and made the August Wilson play feel like a movie, with only a few moments where it feels very stagey, in a way that is very hard and a step more effective in that way)than Fences.

I also believe that Mangrove, by Steve McQueen, would destroy The Trial of the Chicago 7, although the specific subjects are different. One is mostly about the abuse of people of color in England in the early 70s and the other is about young white people (Bobby Seale is #8) fighting bad governmental policy (which feels current, even if it won’t by voting time) in the late 60s in America. The difference is that Mangrove feels more complete and is way more emotional (aside from the gagging of Bobby Seale). And McQueen is just working on a different level of directing compared to most, not just Aaron Sorkin’s second directorial effort. BUT… there is no showdown coming, as Amazon decided to push out Mangrove as part of a streaming series. So expect Chicago 7 to rack up no fewer than eight nominations and possible front-runner status.

Nomadland and Ammonite have nothing in common except for female leads. But their timing in Pandemic Year ties them together. And Nomadland came out the winner in that skirmish.

The Prom, a late entry, is the only really fun film in the mix. That alone (okay… and Streep) could deliver a Best Picture nomination.

And The United States vs. Billie Holiday has been, for now, positioned at The Closer… the last film to full jump into the *Oscar season. Previously nominated director in Lee Daniels. A female star unknown to movies. A historic show business story. Trevante Rhodes, a young actor of great charm who is beloved from Moonlight. Righteous anger aplenty.

It checks every box.

Now we just have to see the movie.

Sing it!

We are floating in the Mini-Me *Oscar season. Some people are happy. Some less so. But it is undeniable that this is not just a two-month delay in the way things normally are (except at Netflix… and not really even there). We are in a shrunken season, with as many players that are not creating the pool of potential nominees and winners as we are players who are hoping to take advantage of the void.

This will be the awards season in which the fewest people in the history of Oscar see any of the nominees on a theatrical screen. That includes both Oscar voters and civilians.

Many in the media see this as a triumph. I do not. Oscar is teetering on the edge of irrelevance. Moving forward is not a step forward, but a step toward oblivion.

I will step off of my soapbox and get to the movies. Six weeks ago, I opined…

1. Mank – Your likely winner.
Nomadland
Tenet
Dune
News of the World
C’mon C’mon (no date yet)
Connected
Hillbilly Elegy
The Trial of The Chicago Seven
The United States vs. Billie Holiday
Possible Slot Replacements
Soul
No Time To Die
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
The Outpost

Since then, Dune, Connected, Soul, and No Time To Die have checked out of the *Oscar race. That leaves 10 potential nominees from that list.

Additionally, News of the World has sold off international to Netflix while Universal will run the *Oscar effort here. And we have seen what was the full slate from Netflix… except there is now a “new” title, The Prom, not to mention The Midnight Sky, which is a Clooney thriller/drama that Netflix is slow playing, though word is that it is quite good.

In non-Netflix news, A24 has stepped up with Minari as a focus of serious effort. And Focus decided to push Promising Young Woman into the field as it was originally meant to be. And Paramount is, so far, trying to make a late move with The United States vs. Billie Holiday.

We’ve been through Toronto and New York and AFI and….

Mank is a sure-bet nominee for *Oscar in as many as 12 categories. But it is not longer the frontrunner. That doesn’t mean it won’t win. But as much as it is worthy of all kinds of praise, it is not the film that MUST win.

The King without a sword, the land without a king!

In the inevitable nature of any Oscar as a horse race, the media and consultants will find a horse race. But differentiating a voting constituency between Nomadland and Minari and Ammonite is no easy thing. Each represents a certain taste, but which one is your #1 will be a very personal choice.

How does one delineate the ever-expanding Netflix line-up? If Mank isn’t the movie, what is? Yes, a few of the titles have died off from exposure. But Mank is strong. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is strong. The Trial of the Chicago Seven is strong, especially with Boomers… who are the majority voting block at The Academy. But are any of these three titles the movie that will emerge as The One To Beat (or one of the two in the match race)?

The power of the Netflix machine is a major influencer beyond their pool of 10 potential nominated pictures. For instance, I would argue that the dubious embrace of the nicely made, but still four-guys-in-a-room-talking One Night in Miami, was instantly marginalized by the screenings of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which could be a Netflix frontrunner. Amazon made the biggest mistake of the season by letting their first serious Oscar contender, Steve McQueen’s Mangrove, float off into being a TV-first movie (part of a not-really-series series), perhaps seeing Chicago Seven as too tough, when I imagine McQueen’s emotional genius would narrow the path for Seven significantly. (We’ll never know, I guess.)

But hey! There’s more coming from Netflix. No distributor has ever had the number of films in play that Netflix has this season, including Weinstein at the top of their game. And so… THE PROM! Yes! A happy movie. But… who the hell knows until we see the movie. They have already started selling Meryl Streep like a Thanksgiving turkey… so… that could be a good sign… or a terrible sign.

And Netflix is ramping up Clooney’s The Midnight Sky, which could be the 1917 of this season or more so or less so. Throw it at the wall. See what sticks.

There are a few more titles coming. AppleTV+ may try to shove the Russo Bros’ Cherry into *Oscar season while Netflix sets the Russo Bros-produced Mosul out for consideration. (Wasn’t that move in The Queen’s Gambit?)

Warner Bros. could throw Judas and the Black Messiah and see if it sticks. Maybe not. Sam Levinson has a film at Netflix that could be thrown into the mix. Borat 2 is getting attention. Supernova is being floated, although more of an acting nom movie.

And there will be more because The Academy has opened things up to all kinds of shenanigans.

At this point, there is no answer. Everyone can play, at least in theory. There is no Parasite coming. There is no Moonlight. Hell, there isn’t even a likely If Beale Street Could Talk. Not because there aren’t a bunch of quality movies, but because almost every title is a small-constituency movie.

History (and The Emmys) tells us that in a a situation like this, there will be some surprise nominations and that the winners will ultimately be found among the already expected.

So maybe Mank really still is the front-runner. Maybe the international vote galvanizes around Minari. Maybe West Side Story or Dune pushes back into “2020” with no theatrical and just Academy and Press streams, and tries to muscle out everyone else.

A lot of change can come. But one thing is sure about this Oscar stew. It will (and should) have a big fat asterisk right on it.

Working my way through DOC NYC 2020 this last couple weeks, I realize the multiple factors that are setting reactions to documentaries.

First, there is content, and how each of us connects to that material. Something we didn’t know about something that fascinates us is always the “best” film. Something we know a bit about that is enhanced by a new film is excellent. Something that fits or refutes our personal and political interests is, depending on the viewer, fantastic or horrible.

Second, there is the filmmaking. Sometimes, a polished film loses high marks because it feels too clean. Sometimes, polish allows a complex subject to be seen more clearly than it has ever been before. Some love straight vérité while others are put to sleep by it. Shaky camerawork can make some go insane, while others see it as the most authentic style. Reenactment can be joy or a sin. And the other elements of these films, from music to editing to animation and more, are judged whether the viewer is conscious of it or not.

Third, there is context. Are you someone who is swimming in a sea of great content, like DOC NYC, or are you someone who watches 1 or 2 feature docs a year. Often, there can be quality in a big pool, but the mere experience of swimming in so many films makes what something that could be more tightly embraced seem, well… meh.

I am happy as the pig in the proverbial pen of excrement at DOC NYC this year. There are pitches coming in… some terrific films. There are films I am randomly picking as I wander through… some terrific films.

So here is my list of movies to check out at DOC NYC 2020. I’m not going to post any negative opinions because, what’s really the point? Documentaries mostly start at the bottom of the cinematic ocean, desperately swimming to the surface for air. Most won’t make it. I have no urge to contribute to any doc drowning.

(Note: There are films I have seen that I might not realize are part of DOC NYC yet. I will try to get those updated as I run into them. And there are certainly great films I have not seen yet. The election week probably cost be a dozen screenings in time… sorry. Trying to catch up.)

THE EPIC

Influence – A documentary that played at Sundance and doesn’t have domestic distribution (as far as I know… this is a living document this week, so please, correct me), Influence is as important a documentary to view as any of the excellent political that have been about this moment in American history. It is, in its way, a sequel to the seminal doc, Adam Curtis’ The Century of Self. This film is built around Sir Tim Bell, an ad man who was a major part of building Saatchi & Saatchi from 1970, who then started down the path of political consulting, which was not attached to ad agency methods back then (even though The Century of Self takes the connection back to Nazi Germany). After being credited with the Thatcher win, he spread across the globe to the highest bidder. A remarkable piece of tight, entertaining filmmaking while also holding up a painful mirror to the current state of the world. (11/12)

The Meaning of Hitler – I first met Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein at the time of Gunner Palace (2004). The team has made nine feature docs since. They have always had a keen interest in subtext and how, usually by using amazing graphics, they can be both objective and subjective. In their new film, they come at it from the other direction. The subject is a solid and defined past and the documentary is really about the souls of nations as reflected in those pasts. For us Americans, it is about to be part of our future. Thoughtful stuff. (11/12)

Self-Portrait – I am putting this film in this special category, as I have never seen anything quite like it in subject or delivery. Lene Marie Fossen is a very high-functioning artist of great talent who also happens to be living with anorexia since the age of 10. She is shocking and painful and beautiful and brilliant and so many human contradictions in one person. For me, this film has left a mark, in both joy and sadness, that will never be forgotten. (11/12)

THE SIMPLE PLEASURES

Calendar Girl – If you aren’t in fashion, you have probably never heard of Ruth Finley, but she was a key player in the fashion world for decades. This film not only documents that history, but catches her at the end of her run of power. Truly inspirational piece about a woman who took power when it was not easy to be a woman taking power. But also, about a person committed to doing the job that she created and being the best (and only) person people could imagine in the role for decades. And it’s about getting old. Beautiful movie. (11/12)

Duty Free

Ronnie’s – One of those great documentaries about a place and a time and a person. In this case, it is a person that few Americans will know… but if you love jazz and you ever spent time in London, you know. Not the greatest piece of film wizardry, but the footage is spectacular. (11/12)

My Psychedelic Love Story – Errol Morris has a new film. His fourteenth doc feature. This one mixes classic Errolisms with unexpected distance. The focus is on Johanna Harcourt-Smith, who reflects on her life in the gravity of Timothy Leary. No one gets got… except for the audience. Errol is not always this much pure fun. There is still some room for reflection of how far we haven’t come. (11/12)

THE SINGULAR HUMAN STORIES

Blue Code of Silence – This film builds its way backwards from an aging Bob Leuci, who film lovers will remember as the basis of Bobby Cielo in Prince of the City. But it is hard to imagine that anyone who cares for that Sidney Lumet film or who is interested in that era of dirty cops and New York won’t find this to be a dark chocolate desert they want to gobble up. Too many recreations for my taste. But so much great file footage and the voice of the (con)man at the center of this complex tale of greed and disconnection from reality.

Crutch – Bill Shannon is one of those real-world characters that you really want to know and watch. He is inspirational, irritating, glorious, brilliant, arrogant, and truly one-of-a-kind. This is one of those films about a character who just won’t take “no” for an answer. And wherever you land on him as a person, you hunger for each piece of insight, which reflects right back at you. Ironically, Shannon was a video innovator, but the roughness of the early materials may put some audiences off. Power through, I say. It is not the platform the art is painted upon, it is the art of living that makes this film special.

Flower Punk – This is a 30 minute short by Alison Klayman about Azuma Makoto, who is an environmental artist and sculpturist using flowers as his material. I loved this little film. It reminds me of the docs on Andy Goldsworthy, especially the great Rivers & Tides. (11/13)

No Ordinary Man – Billy Tipton… what a story!!! This is one of those documentaries where you don’t want to spoil a single surprise or turn in the road. Suffice it to say that Billy Tipton, born in 1914, lived a life that is barely imaginable in the 1970s, much less back then. One of those stories you just don’t see very often, made all the better by being told by documentarians.

Tiny Tim: King For A Day – If you lived through the Tiny Tim era – I just barely did – than you need to see this film… or maybe not, if you just want to live with the surface of what you knew about him. He was truly one of the biggest stars in the world for a while… much bigger than any of the Instagram or Tik Tok stars of today. And he actually had talent. This film is acid-washed kitsch.

THE COMPLEX

The Viewing Booth – A rather brilliant, heady look at how we view the world through our biases. If we already hold a belief, how much does it take for us to see beyond that belief, even to neutrality. It may see obvious from the outside, but again, you are showing your bias.

The Dilemma of Desire – I love this movie. It enlightened me. It made me embarrassed, as an adult male. And then it made me really uncomfortable when I tried to share the film with friends who I assumed would be all aboard. Men and women alike… not real anxious to talk about the clitoris or how we experience embrace and bias against sexual pleasure in women. I immediately bought some of Sophia Wallace’s jewelry (you’ll meet her in the film) and can’t get anyone to wear it. But if you want to know things, you should watch this film. It isn’t perfect filmmaking. But the content is mighty.

Origin Of The Species – Abigail Child’s movie about AI is… well, it can be a tough sit. But the content is utterly fascinating. It’s not a movie that is going to give you the answer. It’s not a movie that you can watch while flipping through your Facebook. But it does feel like someone opening the Pandora’s Box of the future, pulling out the nails slowly with a crowbar.

THE ALMOST INDESCRIBABLE

Bare

ALREADY AMONG FAVORITES THIS YEAR FROM OTHER FESTS (DP/30 Interviews)

Boys State – DP/30: Boys State, Amanda McBaine, Jesse Moss
https://youtu.be/ZlRdTVCqJxM

On The Record – DP/30: On The Record, Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering
https://youtu.be/YYwdZYaMMKw

A Thousand Cuts – DP/30: Ramona Diaz, A Thousand Cuts
https://youtu.be/yuFDeJEVlXE

Phew.

The last time I wrote about the film and television industry, aside from Twitter, was three full weeks ago. Actions have taken place in the industry, but nothing foundational has really changed since then. That doesn’t mean that the losses haven’t hurt and the wins haven’t soothed all of us.

NATO still should get significant PPP support and the hope of vaccines makes Summer 2021 seem more than a mirage. How many theaters will survive? How many will use the situation, potentially including bankruptcies, to reposition their brick-and-mortar? What fights will be fought in the name of theatrical revenues, which far outstrip streaming revenues and will for years, and what concessions—not candy and popcorn—can be made by exhibitors?

Studios have had layoffs and sell-offs, some of which will flip in the coming months. Some of which will not. Everyone has time to strategize and consider what they want to do when things return to some form of normalcy. Companies that don’t strategize as well will suffer from their COVID epiphanies. Great strategists will get great returns on their patience in the coming year.

Streamers, new and old, have kept pace with internal expectations. Quibi died. It was dying before I stopped writing. Media is, as one expects, hysterical in covering every twitch along the way, overstating some comments, pretending others never happened. Disney+ is still Stage One, having not fully managed Hulu/Star (overseas) into the inevitable strategy that will allow them to have a two-tier product to work the same turf as Netflix worldwide. HBOMax has had a strong content effort, but a problematic effort to convert subscribers in bigger numbers, even after giving up on deference to DirecTV. Peacock hasn’t found its feet, but betting against Comcast and Universal and NBC figuring it out would be a stupid bet. Paramount and Sony can’t make up their minds about what they intend to be when they grow up, par for their courses. The longer they hedge and bounce between being content providers only and launching serious streaming presences (neither has a broadcast network), the more painful this will be.

Does anyone really know how AppleTV+ and Amazon Prime will evolve? I have guesses, but those are beyond irrelevant at the moment. Both will get to a tipping point. I doubt that both will be ongoing production and distribution engines in three years. But both companies are brilliant at pivoting to what is really needed by the public instead of stubbornly trying to make square pegs fit round holes.

Netflix is fine. And they are dealing with their own shit. The company is no longer the exciting new kid on the block. I say they are Sophomores. And there are growing pains and new challenges and a content strategy that is going to evolve as demands of profitability are taken more seriously by the stock market. No one is forcing this but gravity.

Disney has many balls in the air. Theatrical will return. Parks will return in earnest a few months later. But the balance between streaming and their broadcast and cable nets on cable and satellite remains a huge challenge of finesse, timing and luck.

The movement to make streaming a priority has been wildly misread by press and conmen. The studios spent five solid years treating streaming as a nice little revenue stream even as the numbers grew larger. In the last 18 months, there was the big step of getting in the game. Now that revenues from streaming are real, plans need to be longterm, and streaming must be, at every multiple-content-format-delivery company, every bit as big as DVD once was or theatrical or post-theatrical sales. But that is being mistaken for STREAMING IS EVERYTHING, which I understand, because media is a premature ejaculator, but is false.

For the first time, studios and other lesser content providers have allowed the opportunity of a wider array of choices. I am 100% good with that. It is needed. Do you launch High School Musical 5 on Disney+ or Disney Channel or do you see a surge of nostalgia that would make it viable as a theatrical or do you turn it into a limited series or a series or ship it to Asia for theatrical but launch it domestically on cable and on Star in Australia? Or take a series of choices that happened, as The Last Dance ran on ESPN, then ABC, and then Netflix. Each of those venues was a financial maximization decision. (A weird quirk is that media insists on killing the idea of studios when, even if you did kill distribution, those companies would remain the dominant content creators for every delivery system.)

THAT is the business change that we are walking into. A wider array of choices. It doesn’t shutter any option. Not any time in the next five years. Disney is not shifting the majority of its content spend to Disney+. They aren’t not spending on Marvel (which is heading into its own headwinds)o r Pixar or Star Wars. That would be idiotic. Disney made a decision that Soul would have more value to the company – which is sitting on a ton of high-budget/high-profile product – as a Disney+ giveaway in December. Not charging like Mulan. Not experimenting with a $10 add-on price. Not making other choices. This is smart. This is logical. And it doesn’t change the entire distribution thinking of the industry.

But this is how business works. I didn’t agree with everything Barry Diller said last week about the industry moving forward, but the thing he said and which has been affirmed by non-industry businesses forever… Business likes stability. The sums may be massive to regular humans. But if a business can see what is coming, good leadership can manage it, because it has a form… One can set targets.

With this election, there is, regardless of all the other politics, more stable ground from which to work. The announcement of the potentially effective Pfizer vaccine this morning is another pillar of stability, which we all hope will remai). Not knowing whether we all can start digging out in earnest, in five months, or in a year or longer is dangerous in comparison to where we were just a week ago.

Production has ramped up on television shows. The film production story is more a tale of the biggest and the smallest… but content is being produced. We have a massive backlog of theatrical movies waiting to roll out just as soon as the math makes sense. (I believe Christmas is pushing it… but March or April may start to look like a worldwide release can do 75% or more of its expected pre-virus business. and that is what the standard really is to give a green light to the industry. Also, if there are people who get the virus in a movie theater – which hasn’t happened, but surely will if weekly domestic box office gets back up over $40 million – it will not destroy the industry if a true opening-up feels months away.)

As a movie fan, I am conscious of the many powerful films about the period between the Allies seeming to have defeated Germany and the complete end of the Third Reich. I am reminded that D-Day was on July 6, 1944 and Anne Frank was taken into custody and shipped to Auschwitz on the last train that would go to the death camp in August-September 1944. She died of typhus four months later, weeks before the camp was liberated. We know “the troops” are coming, but the times are still dangerous.

But today is better than last week. The course to a future of “normalcy” and then growth is within reach. We will lose companies. We will lose friends. But we are, finally, able to see land through the periscope. We just have to get there.

An article this weekend by A.O. Scott at the New York Times and a thread on Twitter by Ted Hope got me riled up. The Scott article is a mélange of consumer and critic judgements about the theatrical experience combined with assertions of how theatrical is seen within the finance of the industry, with almost all of the business assertions either misguided or wholly false.

After thinking on my responses, I moved to my computer. The ground is shifting like it is the ocean and, still, there are things we do know, even as they change monthly, weekly and even daily.

So what do I know on October 18, 2020?

1. I know that Netflix is heading into its sophomore streaming years, even as everyone else in streaming in a large way is either just buying clothes for freshman year (Disney+, Peacock, HBO Max) or is being held back in freshman year (aka, being revamped conceptually after being around… Amazon/Hulu).

What nobody really knows and what no writers I read on the subject seem to seriously consider is what Netflix’s maturity means—not only to Netflix but to everyone else.

The next Netflix quarterly drops this week, but in the last year (ending with Q2 2020), Netflix grossed $22.6 billion. They netted $2.68 billion for the year. 

That has not deterred Wall Street. In the year between the date of their Q2 reporting last year (July 17) and Q2 2020 (July 16) the market cap of the company rose from $156 billion to $216 billion.

That year of market cap growth alone ($60 billion, 2019-2020) is almost 3x the gross of the last year ($22.6b) and more than 25 years of annual net income for the company. (And Wall street has already added another $18 billion to the market cap since the July quarterly.)

I know that although the media and much of Wall Street has convinced itself that this is THE ongoing business model, it cannot be. Hollywood is already awash in complaints, public and private, about how the wild spending is drying up. And the places where Netflix is ramping up production are where it is much cheaper to produce (international content) and will have less appeal to the American home base than English-language content.

2. I know that the “new” streamers have, with the exception of Apple, chosen not to budget original content for streaming at anything close to the scale that Netflix has been operating for the last five years. They are all spending a lot… just nothing close to Netflix’s spend.

It was a historic event, recently, when Amazon bought Coming 2 America from Paramount for a December release instead of Netflix buying the film. Netflix isn’t shy about spending, but they have grown past their drunken-sailor spending stage. (They didn’t buy Greyhound either.)

3. I know that for all the endless writing about how everything is, or everything that’s being produced should be moving to streaming, this makes no sense financially. The world becomes too simple if the goal is to maximize revenues.

For instance, in 2019, Disney generated $25 billion in TV and cable and $11 billion in studio movies. That’s 1.6x as much revenue as Netflix, before getting into parks or merchandising.

And do you realize that Disney+ will generate less than $3.6 billion in 2020, even with a remarkable 60 million-plus subs generated in this first year, with only a minor number of international locations? 

The rarely mentioned key for Disney in streaming is the packaging of Disney+ with Hulu and ESPN (and eventually ABC). Hulu has almost 40 million subscribers. But it costs, without live TV, $11.39 a month compared to Disney+’s $4.62.

200 million worldwide subscriptions at $180 a year ($15/month) is where Disney needs to take streaming in order to get to the 2019 idea of breaking even with the current model.

Netflix hasn’t hit 200 million worldwide and the average subscription is under $11.

Will Disney or Netflix ever to get to $36 billion gross revenue with streaming as the mostly exclusive home of their content? Unknown.

Meanwhile, theatrical alone grossed over $40 billion last year, returning just over $20 million in net dollars to the distributors.

And there are other significant revenue streams that will, at least in theory, disappear, with an all-streaming world. 

For instance, the pay-TV window. It’s one thing to get a good price from Netflix or HBO or the others… but when all you are able to do is to move money from one corporate pocket to another, how does that math fit into your thinking?

Physical distribution (Blu-ray and so on) is on its last legs… but that $5 billion a year still counts.

International television has been a cash cow forever. But if every home that can afford it in the world is a five-streamer home, that is very close to over.

Disney and the other studios – and the power position changes and surely, it will for Disney and their IP Mania – avoided getting into streaming for 5+ years, letting Netflix take the risks and the leadership, because the numbers didn’t add up for them until recently. And really, they all know they are going to take losses on the transition. But streaming is a new and likely forever paradigm shift and eventually they all had to jump.

They would all love to believe that they are going to make a lot more money in streaming than in the older systems of distribution. Plus, they get so much more control.

But we haven’t begun to imagine what will happen when any one of them muddles through for a couple years and can’t see how the money will ever accelerate to be equal to what they had in 2015-2019. Put aside theatrical for a minute. Just the plain competitive business challenge of multiple companies getting and keeping 100 million to 200 million streaming subscribers.

We are already seeing bundling by Amazon and Apple and (who invited them?) Roku.  Just like the bad old days.

Bundling may solve your number of subscribers issue… but it also takes money out of your pocket on the subscription side. (“Keep on swimming… just keep swimming…”)

4. I know that no one has a real way of measuring the value of any one program/series/movie on a streaming platform.

You can pull one out of your ass. And you have to… it’s business, dahling. But there is no real way to measure. You can measure popularity in views (real and two-minute imagined), but that really isn’t the question.

The ONLY question when it comes to streaming is, “Are they staying subscribed?”

We are, public and industry, about to spend the next three-to-five years sorting out what serious fishermen have been succeeding or failing to figure out forever. Where are the fish? Are we better off with more fish coming to market or do we depress the market when we offer too much bounty? How dangerous is it to go out looking for the expensive fish? Are we better off landing cheap fish more safely?

Netflix doesn’t know.

They think they know. And they know a lot.  But they have built their empire with very little competition for years. Suddenly, every massive player wants not only what they have, but double what they have.  And we are only at the beginning of that war.

Do you think HBO Max or Disney+ or Amazon or Apple know? Gee, Amazon and Apple don’t even know what they want to be when they grow up!

It’s no insult to say that estimating the tipping points of over 50 million consumers is anything approaching easy. It’s not. But that is the game. The advantage of selling a large portfolio of content is that you cover a lot of the field. Netflix started streaming with the advantage of people seeing the DVD business that they began with as ubiquitous. Every movie seemed to be available (even if many were not). Going into streaming, the same felt true, although it certainly was not. But as more competitors expand the field, especially in this period when so few people have dropped the expense of cable/satellite, the more the idea of comparing how one values each $10/service grows.

Some percentage of the viewership will jump from streamer to streamer, sucking up something new or just all the content they can for one paid month then switch. Others will pay for all of them and not give it a thought. even after they stop watching and the credit card continues to get charged. But what most people want is everything for nothing, and never to learn how to navigate a new site. And the closer a streamer can come to that, the more stable they will be. For now.

Studies show that cable subscribers watch two or three percent of the channels they get in their bundle. Likewise, I’m sure very few people get through even .05% of what is on Netflix (or other apps) in a given month. Unlike the old Peter Guber story, no one has to figure out whether a show will work before it’s done at these streamers. They know. And then they have to figure out how much and how much of their audience cares.

5. I know that only a relatively small percentage of art (if you will) by the many, many incredibly talented people in The Industry will be any good or popular in a significant way.

Bad news. Film and TV are both still crapshoots. Nothing about streaming changes that.

6. I know that claims that there is no business in theatrical for anything but mega-movies and that they are everything that keeps exhibition alive are bullshit.  

I can’t answer the negative. (“If it weren’t for Marvel and Star Wars and other massive franchises, how would grosses keep going up annually?”) But I can tell you that exhibition has faced many paradigm shifts and many “inevitable threats.”

Before the collapse of the classic studio system in the late 1960s, this was a very different business. Of course, there were many real threats to the existence of theatrical in the decades before then. But television was a gamechanger. You could, for the first time, have a visually entertaining experience in your home that didn’t lead to a baby nine months later.

One of the key studio adjustments was making content for television. Not snobbery. Business.

The world-changing wide release of Jaws that many use as a historic landmark? 409 screens in 1975. (Total Domestic Box Office – $1 billion)

VHS arrived just after Jaws, becoming the first real way to watch and control movie entertainment in your home.  But the pricing was high ($79 and up, early on) and that led to Blockbuster and the movie rental. (Total Domestic Box Office – roughly $1.5 billion)

VHS sell-through became a thing, led by the first Burton Batman. (Total Domestic Box Office – $4 billion)

DVD arrived in 1997 and the industry decided to make it a sell-through product… bring it home for $20. That led to massive revenues that swamped theatrical. This also led to Netflix and, in time, the dominance of the subscription model for DVD. (Total Domestic Box Office – $6 billion)

Titanic. (Total Domestic Box Office – $6.7 billion)

Mostly Digital Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. (Total Domestic Box Office – $7.4 billion)

Spider-Man. The first mostly-digital superhero. The first $100 million opening. (Total Domestic Box Office – $9.2 billion)

The Avengers. The first $200 million opening. (Total Domestic Box Office – $10.8 billion)

Avengers Endgame. The first $300 million opening. (Total Domestic Box Office – $1.3 billion)

So… yeah… Mega-movies.  Big business.

I can’t explain why Box Office Mojo is about $7 billion short on their Worldwide chart for 2019… but of the $33.7 billion in worldwide box office they have recorded, 21 movies that each cost over $150 million to make grossed $17.8 billion and the 755 movies that cost under $150 million (almost all under $40 million) grossed $15.9 billion.

If you are wondering, the top 21 “middle movies” grossed $7.2 billion. The only ones with budgets over $60 million were Once Upon A Time … in Hollywood, 1917, and Shazam! Three were Chinese. Ten of the 21 would be considered “originals.”

In other words, there is more money per-film superheroes and high-end CG and pricey sequels… but there is also a need for movies like Knives Out and Little Women and Rocketman that make a fortune in theatrical before taking a haul in pay-TV/first-streaming and eventually become highly valued pieces of a streaming library.

7. I know that we won’t know how the massive libraries of Warners, Fox, Universal, and others play out until the streamers roll out a bigger chunk of the catalog. That’s going to take a while. And even when it happens, the studios could mute their value by being restrictive in their use. Like so much of this evolution, there will be many experiments, some that the press loves and some they won’t even notice.

8. I know that a large percentage of American cinemas will reopen sometime in 2021. But I have no idea in what month.

9. I know there are no absolutes when it comes to cinema. Quality matters. But so does marketing and publicity. And when the two meet… you still don’t know.  We live in the most interesting moment in the history of cinema because there are so many possibilities. But more possibilities means more ways to unintentionally screw it up.

10. The schizophrenia of artful ambition and fiscal ambition will always be at the heart of this industry. One is not the hero and the other the heel, as they are symbiotic. Movie after movie after movie tells the story of how the conflict was engaged and how conflict turned into fate.

1. Mank – Your likely winner.
Nomadland
Tenet
Dune
News of the World

C’mon C’mon (no date yet)
Connected
Hillbilly Elegy
The Trial of The Chicago Seven
The United States vs. Billie Holiday

Possible Slot Replacements
Soul
No Time To Die
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
The Outpost

I was as generous as I could be. 38 movies seems to be the maximum that could be in contention for everything but Shorts, Animation, International, and Documentary. This includes 6 titles that are not currently scheduled to premiere this year, in theaters or out, or which have no announced their awards ambitions.

Now… remove, if you will, the 15 titles that everyone reading this knows do not have a chance in hell of getting within a mile of Best Picture or Screenplay or Director and the 6 that may well not join this dance, and your entire Oscar season is a battle between 17 movies, the vast majority of which have not been seen outside of their production teams.

Meanwhile, New York, which has been months ahead of getting the COVID issue settled… they seem to be about to tighten things back up as cases and positivity rates are on the rise again. And The PGA, which announced their Oscar-connected date today, has not publicly acknowledged whether movies with have to play in theaters in NY and LA this time out.

I’m going to just shut my big mouth now and leave you with this question… Does this look like any kind of Oscar Season to you?

Ammonite
The Assistant
The Broken Hearts Gallery
Cherry
C’mon C’mon**

Coming 2 America
Connected
Da Five Bloods
Downhill
Dune

The Father
First Cow
The 40-Year-Old Version
Greyhound
Hillbilly Elegy

I’m Thinking of Ending Things
I’m Your Woman**
The Invisible Man
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Mank

Minari
Next Goal Wins**
News of the World
No Time To Die
Nomadland

On The Rocks
One Night in Miami
The Outpost
Penguin Bloom**
Pieces of a Woman

Promising Young Woman**
Respect
Soul
Stillwater**
Summerland

Tenet
The Trial of The Chicago Seven
The United States vs. Billie Holiday
The White Tiger

And here we go… pretending that everything is normal as we take the small handful of movies that would be considered the lower tier of Oscar candidates, and even then, only a small part of that tier, and handing out Oscars like Sour Patch Kids (the here’s-a-sweet-for-your-oddball-screening candy of choice) because what the hell, we need to get some ad revenue now that the reduced-revenue Emmy season is over, so let’s push really hard on what we know is good, but not likely.

You know the titles… Foxless-Searchlight’s (comment on the corporate status, not the staff… ha ha… am I in trouble?) Nomadland and Those-Who-Made-Parasite-Happen Neon’s Ammonite were the only serious contenders going into Venice and Toronto… and the only ones that are really coming out of the festivals, though only one is really equipped to survive the next six-plus months until Oscar will supposedly happen. That would be Nomadland… but only as a “bottom half” nominee with a likely Frances McDormand nod that she won’t win. Ammonite has two great actresses performing sex, but Neon released a better version on this theme last year, in French, with American-unknown actresses.

The other titles that have become hot buzz titles out of the fests are stage-play-turned-stage-movie One Night in Miami, the tragedy porn of Penguin Bloom, and the wildly overrated, although well-acted Pieces of a Woman, which is fake Cassavetes but with only one true Cassavetes performance. from Shia LeBeouf.

There is also The Father, an Anthony Hopkins vehicle with the always-great Olivia Colman. A Best Actor player, first and last.

And there are holdover dreams from before September, like First Cow and Da Five Bloods and Tenet than make me laugh really hard. Not because the films are not worthy of consideration, but because they are just plain not happening.

Netflix, after passing on the festivals, started things up this month anyway, They bought Pieces of a Woman and will try to shove Vanessa Kirby into Best Actress. They tried to launch Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, but were thwarted by the passing of Chadwick Boseman. And they launched The Trial of The Chicago Seven this week with a streamingrelease date of October 16 just ahead. (They will also put the film in theaters as a four-wall outside of New York and LA, in a strategic move best described as virtue signaling.

The line-up at Netflix is: Mank, Hillbilly Elegy, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (in that order), plus guest stars Da 5 Bloods, Pieces of a Woman, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, The 40-Year-Old Version and White Tiger.

It will be interesting to see whether Fincher, Sorkin, Denzel, and Gary Oldman are all on Season 3 of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman next month.

And A24 will release the new Sofia Coppola, On The Rocks, via AppleTV+ on October 23, with an adorable theatrical starting October 2.

This leaves us where we usually are before the start of the fall festivals… with a dozen or fewer films that have been seen, of which one or two, at the outside, have a realistic shot at being in the game at the end.

Fall festivals deliver another five-to-eight likely titles. And we wait to see what fills in with October and November screenings and some December lock.

But this is not your normal year.

We don’t know if there will be an October or November for movies and certainly for movie theaters. And we certainly don’t know whether there will be a December, January or February, as the dead of winter blows cold through America.

And if we stop where we are, I understand why Oscar guessers are giving Netflix half the Best Picture slots. Because this is not even half an Oscar season yet.

So what else is coming?

This is where the chicken and the egg get confusing.

Disney holds the most large-budget studio films that could be Oscar contenders, which are sitting in dry dock with almost guaranteed financial losses coming if had been released – on any format – in time to be Oscar contenders. This changed as I was writing, as the studio pushed West Side Story to 2021, as they already had The Last Duel. So WB’s Dune is the only relevant title.

No Disney. No Paramount. No Sony. No Warner Bros. Maybe no Universal (News of the World is still scheduled for late December.) No theatrical.

No Oscar.

There are maybe a half-dozen warm arty titles that could be loaded into the Oscar Gatling gun pretty quickly. C’mon C’mon, The French Dispatch, Next Goal Wins, Promising Young Woman, Stillwater. But if they have commercial potential, it would be a waste if there is no Oscar competition based exclusively on 2020 and Jan/Feb 2021.

Things are not looking good for there to be a 2020 Oscar. Sorry. Just the way it is.

But the 2020/2021 Oscars should be a blast!!!

Martin Scorsese on Michael Chapman: “I consider myself so fortunate to have been able to work with Michael Chapman. Michael and I made three films together—Taxi Driver, The Last Waltz and Raging Bull, and he brought something rare and irreplaceable to each of them. I remember when Taxi Driver came out and Michael became known as a ‘poet of the streets’—I think that was the wording, and it seemed right to me. Michael was the one who really controlled the visual palette of The Last Waltz, and on Raging Bull he and his team met every single challenge—and there were so many. One of the greatest of those challenges was shooting in black-and–white, which Michael had never done before, a fact that still astonishes me. His relationship with the camera and the film that was running through it was intimate, mysterious, almost mystical. He was a great artist, and it saddens me that I won’t get to see him again.”

Let’s look at the movie industry’s situation from another perspective.

*The car renters of the film business are moviegoers.
*The rental car companies of the film business are the production and distribution companies.
*The renters and owners of the parking lots where the automobile waits for pick-ups-and returns is the exhibition business.

You can’t force someone to rent a car if their travel plans have been curtailed, and worse, they fear every hundredth car might explode. They can afford to stay home, do meetings on the internet, and not rent a car for years.

The rental car companies are not used to selling the idea of people renting cars, but have been in a massive daily struggle to differentiate the quality of their company over the others. Meanwhile, they have a massive investment in cars, which are sitting there going nowhere. They could try to get people interested in renting cars with all kinds of gimmicks or they could just sell off all their cars and go into complete hibernation for a while or they could just sit on the cars they have, which are not being used and therefore not losing usefulness, and wait until people come back.

The people who own or are renting the land where the rental cars live are not making any money and will not make any money until the car renters start renting cars again. They don’t care which cars are rented or for how long or how old the cars are… They need to make some money to pay rent or their mortgage.

And here is what is screwing everyone up in this situation.

People could start traveling at any time. There’s a holiday coming. There is a study showing that the rate of exploding cars is going down in certain states. Vegas has reopened for conventions and once they have a good month, everyone will relax and the business will steadily return. Another holiday. Price cuts. Exhaustion with social distancing. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

But none of that good stuff might change anything. The ground is moving under the feet of the industry. And every week is another adventure in grasping at straws.

Back to the film business.

Studios have completed films which are commodities that have no time frame required for success or failure. They also have alternative options for these commodities that are not as healthy, but are not necessarily money losers.

Exhibitors have no serious alternative revenue streams. They are just waiting around to see what the studios do. They need movies that will not only draw people who don’t worry about masks, but which are enough of a draw to bring out the not-inappropriately nervous. Meanwhile, they have serious fixed costs, no matter what they do, fairly high overhead and low margins while in operation at any scale. Unlike previous history, exhibition can’t leverage bankruptcies to improve their positions with landlords until they know to what position they want to move.

For all the talk of partnership, distributors have no motivation to devalue their expensive commodities for the sake of exhibition.

Exhibition is bending over backwards to keep things up, ready and safer than ever, hoping that distribution will find its way to taking the risk. But that effort doesn’t change reality.

The only thing that has kept exhibition’s relationship with distribution from being completely one-sided — all distributor — is that exhibition has invested in a low-margin business that gives distributors their best returns across all potential revenue streams. But if there are no moviegoers, there is no balance.

Today, there is no balance.

But that illuminates the next problem… There is this constant threat that if exhibition doesn’t lie there, bleeding out, as distribution decides whether it feels like risking a Bond movie or a Marvel movie or a Lord/Miller animated film, distribution will abandon theatrical altogether — at least for the duration of a shutdown — and start moving smaller studio/higher-range independent films into the digital world with no regard to theatrical.

Despite the fantasies floated by movie business writers, the big movies are not — unless used as specific experiments — going to the internet. With 0% interest rates, there is no financial upside to releasing an expensive movie on your streaming service or to PVOD or SPVOD. You could break even. But what distributor is in business to break even with a movie they think could be a hit? Or even a runaway hit?

The hope of Tenet swinging in like Tarzan or Lassie or Shaft and saving the day turned exhibitors into little kids trying to stay up late enough to catch Santa arriving down the chimney. But you can be sure that neither WB nor Disney is happy with the bottom line they have achieved on the releases of Tenet and Mulan

I read a quote about how exhibition needed Mulan as the second part of a one-two punch. That’s so sweet. With due respect to someone who is deeply invested in exhibition, which I love, it’s silly. All you needed to relight the flame was a second $10 million domestic opener? That is sad. Having Mulan — a family movie, making audiences even more resistant, unlike young men rushing to Tenet — do mediocre business following Tenet would only double the ugliness.

On the other hand, it might have hit exhibition in the head hard enough for them to shut down for a month or two or three or until March of 2021. That is an answer that may be better for Exhibition and Distribution, but no one wants to face yet.

Distribution and Exhibition are in a dance of injury (not death). Even if Exhibition said, “Go ahead… try anything you can think of,” Distribution doesn’t have a good answer waiting to go.

There is no source of consumer revenue that works 66% as well as the traditional windowing system. I know this hurts the feelings of some, but it’s not about your feelings. It’s math.

Even if Distribution said, “We’re going to open a new big-budget movie in your theaters every single week until the end of the year,” this would not solve Exhibition’s problem in a real way.

Twenty percent of normal revenues is better than nothing… but maybe not… The costs of being open are likely greater than that 45% of 20% of the norm.

Both Distribution and Exhibition are reliant on the third group, Consumers, to move forward. And as reluctant as industry bigwigs are to accept the painful reality, they have no more than five percent control over the hearts & minds of consumers.

I read the trade stories about this situation and all I see is bullshit and whining. (To be fair, that is all that the writers of these stories are getting… because the truth is much uglier.) Anger about how box office is being reported on Tenet? Killed by Mulan? Not enough audience education about theater safety?

Are these people fucking kidding? Are they just kidding themselves? They sound like the “send your kids back to school” maniacs. Hey… You send YOUR kids. All you like. I’m not playing roulette with my kid and my family that he would be coming home tofive nights a week. Yes, staying home is bad for him. Me or my wife getting COVID could well be worse. Much worse.

And God bless the editor who assigned a story on how Toronto found a new kind of festival in the midst of the pandemic. Bless them… but it’s an absolute lie. The festival that was TIFF this year is there every single year… but the media couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to it. In fact, there is more international… more diversity… more interesting little films that are lucky to get three or four “professional” reviews over the ten-day event. If you liked this year’s TIFF, good on you. Next year, when the stars are back, maybe you will run a review on a relatively obscure title or two.

Then there is the high-and-mighty group that just wants distribution to go ahead and give away their big investments and for exhibition to just shut up about it already.

Same answer as school: You first!

Yes, there are revenue opportunities in leveraging your $100 million or $200 million or even $40 million movie in some way other than traditional release windows. But they are all LESS than the traditional release windows, unless, of course, you have a flop.

Tenet and Mulan have been sacrificed to the Gods of Hopefulness. They may break even. More likely, one will make a very modest return and the other will lose tens of millions. (No skin off my ass, sitting on Twitter, opining.)

So…. What to do?

This is the big question. And there is no answer. Sorry. But let’s offer a few hard swings at the problem.

OPTION ONE: Shut all theatrical down until next March. Rip the Band-Aid off.

Honestly, I am leaning in this direction. Sitting around treading water for two months before mid-November releases happen or don’t won’t do Exhibition any good. Distribution sitting on dates, waiting for a COVID miracle, while not being able to do anything to make miracles happen, and planning for marketing that everyone is scared to start the money faucet flowing on, isn’t going to do Distribution any good.

Agree to this and that there will be a concerted effort come November 2021. Lay out the schedule. A new big movie every week. Don’t sweat collusion issues. If neither side is complaining, no one is complaining.

Set national standards. Promote them. Have all studios on the same page, using five seconds of every TV spot, a space on every print ad, billboards… “Welcome Back To The Movies.”

None of this toe-in-the-water crap with a long-broken New Mutants thrown out to set the stage for Tenet. Start with Soul, The Eternals, The Last Duel. Real movies. Agree to give them an eight-week theatrical window as bigger titles start playing in April.

Keep this in mind: By next March, America will have lived with COVID for another six months. We will get better at it. It is unlikely that there will be a vaccine widely available before the end of summer 2021, but another six months of this and we will all have established patterns in the world, whether mask-wearing or testing or whatever.

The great failures turned into legitimate theatrical hits in MovieLand have been failed campaigns. A reset and a relaunch hitting all the right notes… I would suggest that is an attractive option.

Would Exhibitors go bankrupt? Some might. But there is nothing big business likes better than solid, clear answers. Public-space landlords are being pressed hard all over the country. Do you think they would rather hear, “We’re hoping that Bond will change everything, though they could move it, but it depends on whether the big cities stay safe and the mid-sized cities don’t regress and…” OR “We’re shutting down for six months and then the entire industry, both sides, are going to relaunch movie theaters and we hope to do 20% in the first week and increase it by 15% to 20% every week until we are back to 100%, by which time the vaccine will be widely available, allowing us to return to business as usual.”

What would Distributors do with their considerable staffs in a six-month shutdown? I don’t know. I don’t wish for anyone to be furloughed or let go. So it’s not a one-way street for Exhibition. It’s a major challenge for everyone, including The Academy, which would have to shut down the Oscars for a year.

OPTION TWO: Exhibition accepts the idea of a hybrid business model while big markets are closed and people remain fearful.

Obviously, this undercuts the push for people going to movie theaters by offering a choice during the pandemic. Keeping a screen open — whether it’s a single screen or one of twenty in a megaplex — costs the same whether ten people are in attendance or there are 200.

So why would Exhibition keep spending that money when Distribution is pushing consumers to stay at home, since net return is better with VOD?

Some will say, “if movie theaters can’t compete, that is just people expressing what they want.” Okay. But even putting aside COVID, there is a very good reason why Distributors still want the theatrical revenue… because people pay more to go to the movies than they do to watch things at home. A lot more with a success. Enough that the 45% going to Exhibition is still more valuable than VOD with a roughly 80% return.

The delusion of giving the buyer what they want at the price they want it is madness. Maximizing revenues is the norm in every business, including the movie business. When you go to a restaurant, they make money on your drink, your appetizer, your dessert, you sides… and not so much on the entree. People buy new cars that lose value the second they leave the lot. Americans buy a ton of branded merchandise that doubles or triples the cost of the item. “What the customer wants” is a false notion. It is “what the market will bear.” $42.5 billion in theatrical last year. The number-one revenue stream for movies.

So the truth, in my eyes, is that Distribution, frustrated as it is, do not want this option. They would like more breathing room. They want to keep experimenting on Exhibition’s dime. But they don’t want to kill the goose that lays golden eggs.

OPTION THREE: We carry on as we have for the last few months.

I don’t see how this works for anyone. Magic could happen. Somehow, one, or a combination of all the revenue streams, could explode into sufficient success to make this work for either Distribution or Exhibition or both.

But right now, we are setting ourselves up for another Tenet situation in November. I don’t know who thinks this will be a win… except if magic happens.

There is a rock. There is a hard place.

Everyone started scrambling back in March, when COVID reared up and spat in the industry’s collective face before we could put on a mask. (Even beyond business, I lost four friends in that first two months but haven’t had someone I know die since June.)

I think Distributors did their best. They experimented. They analyzed. They did math. And they kept their ambitions going. Likewise, Exhibition did what it had to do.

I wouldn’t say that all of these were big experiments. But they have all arrived into the culture in a way that was unexpected at the start of the year 2020. And they should be recognized as participants in this history (in order of release).

Trolls World Tour
The King of Staten Island
The Lovebirds
The High Note
Artemis Fowl
My Spy
Hamilton
Greyhound
Palm Springs
The One and Only Ivan
Bill & Ted Face the Music
The New Mutants
Tenet
Mulan

Whatever answers the powers that be arrive at, it will be painful. There is no ready answer, in great part because Exhibition and Distribution have separate interests as well as profoundly intertwined interests. It is an easier road for Distribution… but overplaying that position wouldn’t be fully honest. All sides have a lot on the line.

I wish you all — all of us — wisdom and patience and perspective and luck.

Let’s start again with…

THE UNTOUCHABLES (alphabetical order, as of July)

A Quiet Place II

Black Widow

Coming 2 America

The Conjuring 3

Connected

The Croods 2

Dune

The Eternals

Free Guy

The King’s Man

The Last Duel

Mulan

No Time To Die

Soul

Tenet

Top Gun Maverick

West Side Story

Wonder Woman 1984

Okay. Obviously, Warner Bros and Disney took a leap into experimentation with Tenet and Mulan. Both failed. (See Episode II)

That leaves a studio big-title library of 16 films waiting their turn. Wonder Woman 1984 pushed to December… primarily to give WB enough time to make whatever its release decision will be in a month or so.

Six of the titles are already dated in 2021… where many of them are still as likely as not to have to be moved again. But it takes the pressure off.

With the remaining 9 titles, let’s go to the calendar.

Black Widow. Disney is at their marketing “shit or get off the pot” point on this film for a November 6 release date. It’s moving to 2021.

No Time To Die and Soul, November 20. Marketing has started for the Bond movie, shared by Universal and MGM, but they have until the first week in October to make a real decision. Disney has now had its nose bloodied on Onward and now, Mulan. Unlike Hamilton, which is the only Disney movie to actually move to the Disney+ platform without a SuperPremiumVOD scheme, this film is a $200 million investment before marketing. Imaginary scenarios about churn don’t make it a sound financial decision to throw a $200 million lollypop to save some small percentage of a $350 million a month revenue business.

Bond films gross between $400 million and $800 million internationally. America is important, but international is the profit center. This film cost between $250m and $300m. So international is even more critical. If Bond does Tenet numbers internationally, the film has an outside shot at breakeven, even if the U.S. market opens up a bit more.

So the decision is just that simple. It’s not going to open America on Peacock. Netflix might be able to buy it for $550 million or so. (Not exaggerating.) But why would they, really?

In the next two weeks, Universal will either see a realistic path to $500 million international for No Time To Die or NY and LA will open theaters and a path to $400 million international will suffice. OR Universal and MGM will push the film to 2021.

December has the other six 2020 “untouchable” titles. Two from Disney/Fox, 2 Warner Bros, a Universal and a Paramount.

I don’t know what Free Guy cost. I am guessing over $150 million. Disney surely already knows whether they think this is a PG-13 Deadpool or your basic $200m worldwide Ryan Reynolds grosser. If it is the former, it is not opening in December. There is no route to the numbers needed, especially since it is a comedy and Reynolds, even in Deadpool, is a 40/50 domestic/international kind of star. If they think they can get an opening going for Free Guy, but that it is going to be disappointing for audiences, they could shoot for this December date, if either or both NY and LA have open indoor theaters as of Halloween.

West Side Story is not overly expensive ($100m) and obviously has Oscar ambitions. This is very different math. At this price and with the possibility (I think it’s 50/50 or worse) of an Oscar season, Spielberg and Kushner’s re-imagining of this classic show could be the next Disney+ PVOD experiment at something more like the $20 price point with a wide an international theatrical release as possible. It could also attempt a hybrid domestic theatrical with VOD where theaters are not open… if NATO can find a way to get members to agree. Drive-in premieres make perfect sense for this content, though I’m not sure how Spielberg will feel about the viewing experience.

Unless something dramatic changes by November 1, Wonder Woman 1984 is not opening in a traditional theatrical for Christmas. The title leans domestic, in terms of box office. So WB needs to have the possibility of at least $200 million domestic for this film to go forward into release. So they are not just waiting on the virus, they are waiting on Bond. If Bond moves or generates $400 million or less worldwide, Princess Diana will be on the move again.

Dune is a curious one. WB bet $200 million on one of the great working commercial directors in the world (more by quality than $) and the rising stars of Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, and Jason Momoa. Denis has never had a $300 million worldwide grosser. So is Dune still untouchable? Again, a lot relies on the studio’s feeling about the film. In a perfect world – the old one – is this a $350 million grosser or a out-sized $700 million-plus worldwide event? WB knows what they think they have. So… potential outsized grosser = unlikley Dec release. Not so comfortable with it being a surprise box office hit means they could take another Tenet shot with this title.

The Croods was a grower, not a show-er. And it also did double international over domestic. So what of The Croods 2? Very Trolls 2, except that they will want serious international numbers. So the target is $250 million minimum international and a domestic PVOD play, perhaps at $15 instead of the Trolls 2 $20 rental price. I don’t see this film being released in any way – unless Netflix buys it for $250 million – until Universal sees a realistic $250 million international theatrical opportunity.

Coming 2 America has the very real potential to be the highest grossing Paramount-made release this century not named Transformers or Mission:Impossible (the deal for Indiana Jones 4 DQs it). When a company has had a dry spell like Paramount, giving away what might be the last coconut in the desert is not so easy. Now again… Paramount knows what is in the can. I do not. And comedies lean domestic. And though Eddie Murphy was doing better internationally in the 90s, he has leaned domestic as well. So… this title is a jump ball. Probably the least likely answer is a straight worldwide release on Dec 18. Anything is possible, but Magic 8 Ball is overheating here. Netflix, which bought the upcoming Beverly Hills Cop IV, is possible. $275 million worldwide for Bad Boys For Life didn’t encourage Paramount. C2A would likely be the most popular release on Netflix in any year. $250 million. Alternatively, Paramount could see try a variation on Mulan for the newly re-named Paramount+ streaming service. Sign up for $75 for a year on Paramount+ or $130 for Paramount+ and Showtime streaming and you get access to Coming 2 America. Or pay for a month and $20 for the movie as long as you have the subscription. And there is that lingering possibility that Bond opens and does over $100m domestic and Paramount goes for it in December or January.

The first “untouchables” scheduled for 2021 are not until February. So I am going to leave that hornet’s nest alone for now.

In terms of the next group that I laid out in the first episode of this scoreboard…

POTENTIALLY TOUCHABLE (as of July 2020)

355 (Kinberg directed – Chastain/Cruz/N’Yongo)	U
Clifford The Big Red Dog	Par
Death on The Nile	Disney/Fox
Deep Water	Disney/Fox
I’m Your Woman (Rachel Brosnahan, Julia Hart dir)	Amazon
The New Mutants	Disney/Fox
News of the World	U
Peter Rabbit 2	Sony
Respect	MGM-ish
Rumble (animation/WWE)	Par

(Paramount’s Without Remorse is dated 2021… and is being discussed for a sale to Amazon. 7/23)

Of this group, only Death on the Nile is currently being marketed, with Disney releasing a new trailer last week for what is still officially a November release.

The New Mutants was thrown to the wolves by Disney 3 weekends ago… $30 million worldwide. $100 million writedown by Disney.

News of the World is still dated in December and is seen as a Hanks Oscar play (not really Greyhound) for director Peter Greengrass. This one will be caught up in Oscar decision-making. Do they drop it on VOD or streaming with some kind of theatrical where possible, walking the line for what still could well be a cancelled award season? I don’t know. All kinds of viable options and 6 weeks or more to decide.

Respect, 355, Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway, Rumble, and Cinderella are all dated for January. All 5 could easily be converted to streaming/VOD fodder. Modestly commercial entertainments without a huge price tag.

Clifford The Big Red Dog moved to 2021. I’m Your Woman is Amazon and will be an awards decision. And Deep Water is a Fox adult thriller from Adrian Lyne and Disney will likely hang onto it for a Hulu push sometime in 2021… or it could be fodder for theatrical if exhibition is still holding a lot of screens open and Disney is happy to write this one off.

On the arty front, Nomadland, Ammonite, On The Rocks, and The Father are the ones that seem to be in play, via Searchlight, Neon, Focus, and SPC. Everything else is in play. Throw a dart.

Next: Episode 3b: After The Fall, What Does The Road Ahead Look Like?

I have avoided writing constantly about the immediate prospects of exhibition and studios because we didn’t get to the next significant event between the last Movie Content Scoreboard in July and the Tenet/Mulan experiments of the last couple weeks.

I will deliver “Episode III – After The Fall” soon. But I wanted to keep the focus on the two recent major experiments. I keep reading emotional postures on the future of exhibition and VOD. But the studios have real financial skin in the game, while those writing about it have none… just a desire for what they would like to be entertained by, as soon as possible, in a way that makes them comfortable

The easier analysis of the two major movie releases is Mulan. It’s been two weekends+ and we haven’t heard a word about how much business was done in the Disney+ SuperPremium VOD window. We know that the film hasn’t done much business in any international markets where it landed in theatrical. And Disney knows that even if they add, say 50%, onto the Trolls World Tour number, this experiment is a streaming failure.

Unless there is a great surprise coming, Disney will lose no less than $50 million on this Mulan experiment. There is no conservative estimate of what Mulan would hav done in normal windows that would have ended up in a loss. The hope for this experiment is that it would at least break even, if not make some fraction of what normal windows would offer.

If it were not for the public embarrassment, Disney would likely be well-served, financially, to refund half the Mulan SPVOD fee that anyone has paid and push the film out on normal PVOD at $15 a pop. This would make the market much wider instantly, and most likely return a higher net. But that is not going to happen because… again… the public embarrassment at this point. Disney has much bigger issues.

Tenet is more complex, in every way. $30 million domestic. $180 international, almost a third of which is China, which usually costs an extra 20% of gross against rentals. But with premium deals for theatrical done by WB, that is probably a 40% bigger hit than any other country.

A generous estimate of Tenet rentals coming back to WB worldwide after three weekends is $130 million.

Do I believe that there is a second wind for Tenet? Absolutely. But if the film’s PVOD brings in 50% more than the world record for VOD, the generous estimate on gross returns to WB for Tenet is about $150 million.

So we made it to $280 million. Now add another generous $80m in post-theatrical/VOD. Hell, let’s go $150 million gross with a massively successful theatrical rerelease returning $75 million. $435 million. WB doesn’t lose money on Tenet in this most generous of scenarios.

What would Tenet have looked like in the normal series of windows?

Conservative worldwide gross of $650 million, returning $400 million to the studio. (Remember the pumped-up split. And this estimates $150 million of the gross from China, at a reduced split.)

VOD and physical media sales net a conservative $200 million.

Premium Cable/Satellite window, conservatively $30 million.

Streaming second window, say $20 million in the first two years.

$650 million, conservatively, with another $50 million in potential incidental revenues from areas like Merchandising, International Post-Theatrical, etc. AND don’t forget that the marketing budget is made smaller by over $100 million in cross-promotional ad-committed marketing deals that aren’t happening under the current situation.

Add an extra $100 million in marketing costs, if you will, for a “regular” release. Take every financial advantage you can in adding it all up. Pump up the current release all you like and tighten the margins on a traditional windowed non-COVID release… and you are still leaving at least $100 million on the table in the current scenario. On a $200 million investment in production.

There are at least 16 completed movies in a similar boat as Mulan and Tenet. So aside from “I want to see it on my TV right NOW!” what argument can anyone make to cause studios to see any advantage in moving forward right now?

That discussion in Episode 3…

The Academy under Dawn Hudson continues to be a slow-motion car wreck.

It does one thing really well. It covers its ass.

African Americans raged on Twitter about #OscarSoWhite. So The Academy responded by announcing its 2020 effort to bring more women and people of color into The Academy. Without getting into the problems of disenfranchisement that The Academy posited as progress, the reality of 2020 would be that The Academy was able to bring in a lot of women working in the American industry to good effect, but could not achieve the same for American film industry people of color (because there are not enough people of color working in the industry at that level), so they altered the goal. The Academy refocused the expansion overseas, so that people from other countries could be called “of color” to meet the originally announced goals.

I have nothing against The Academy deciding to make a real membership expansion in the international film world. It’s a quality group. But the failure to achieve a single class of invitees that was made up of even ten percent of American Black or Latino-Hispanic or Asian industry workers is not something to admire. I haven’t done a deep dive into the invites in a couple years, but I don’t believe that American industry working in those three groups ever represented ten percent combined in any year.

The intention of 2020 was positive. The representation of its execution was false. But it did what it was meant to do: It covered The Academy’s ass.

It also set up a false narrative that continues on… that older white men who dominated the membership for decades voted in an aggressive way against racial and gender progress. 12 Years A Slave and Alfonso Cuarón and Lupita Nyong’o and John Ridley won two years before #OscarSoWhite. Iñárritu and Birdman won the year before. Moonlight, Mahershala Ali, Viola Davis, and the screenplay by Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney won the year after, before any 2020 membership effort launched.

Since #OscarSoWhite, every nomination or award seen as positive has been attributed to 2020 and in spite of white male Academy voters. Every negative is positioned as the lagging past holding onto power, like Donald Trump.

(Please note: If I wasn’t the only journalist in town who acknowledged that the Brokeback Mountain loss was in no small part homophobic pushback from an Academy that was not ready to make a closet-opening gay love story Best Picture, there was only of a small handful. Crash had support for other reasons… but homophobia was not a minor issue that season. But that doesn’t mean that a lot of old white men didn’t vote for Moonlight or Parasite. They did. None of these groups are monolithic thinkers.)

It should be noted that Best Director has been won by one white guy in the last nine Oscar years: Damien Chazelle. And the Directors Branch is seen as the most old-fashioned, racist, sexist branch in The Academy (fairly or not).

That is a long wind-up to get to today’s announcement of “new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars® eligibility in the Best Picture category, as part of its Academy Aperture 2025 initiative.”

The worst of both worlds.

Not only is it going to be nearly impossible to find a movie that doesn’t qualify through this Swiss cheese set of Four Standards, it also will piss every studio off (though they will all smile a lot) by making them worry about jumping through hoops that are mostly a distraction.

STANDARD A: ON-SCREEN REPRESENTATION, THEMES AND NARRATIVES
STANDARD B: CREATIVE LEADERSHIP AND PROJECT TEAM
STANDARD C: INDUSTRY ACCESS AND OPPORTUNITIES
STANDARD D: AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT

Of the four areas, only Standard C is progressive by its nature, by today’s standard. You must meet both of these criteria to qualify… C1. Paid apprenticeship and internship opportunities and C2. Training opportunities and skills development (crew).

There are more of these things happening now than a few years ago. But you don’t need to hit on Standard C to qualify. You only need two of the four criteria to qualify. To make Standard C a core requirement would be bold and important, even though I don’t see enforcing this as Academy turf. But they aren’t really that bold… just as AMPAS was not bold enough to acknowledge how 2020 failed to achieve its ambitions for people of color in the domestic industry.

To get past Standard A, all you need is “At least one of the lead actors or significant supporting actors is from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group.”

Unless you are doing a period drama, there aren’t a lot of movies being made these days that don’t walk right past that one. You might ask, why is it in any way disqualifying to make a period movie set in World War I? Could there be another more bizarre stat than Taika Waititi playing Hitler was what kept Jojo Rabbit from starting with a strike against it? Does Anna Paquin count in The Irishman or was she too silent to be a significant supporting actor?

But put aside A and C. I can’t find a single Best Picture nominee in recent years that doesn’t qualify under Standards B and D. If a film were to come along that didn’t qualify under those standards, it would be a serious anomaly AND would almost certainly be a film made on a very small budget with a small distributor. Most likely, such a film will never face The Academy’s judgment.

But wait! It gets weirder.

Standard B commands:

At least two of the following creative leadership positions and department heads—Casting Director, Cinematographer, Composer, Costume Designer, Director, Editor, Hairstylist, Makeup Artist, Producer, Production Designer, Set Decorator, Sound, VFX Supervisor, Writer—are from the following underrepresented groups:
• Women
• Racial or ethnic group
• LGBTQ+
• People with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing

Truth is, the roles of casting director, editor, hairstylist, make-up artist, and set decorator are unfortunately already seen as “women’s jobs.” The odds of any medium or higher budget film not having women in at least two of those five slots are very low, much less the other nine slots.

Then the document adds, “At least one of those positions must belong to the following underrepresented racial or ethnic group”

So now there seem to be THREE requirements. Unless you have someone who is doubly underrepresented. The Daily Double.

I guess this keeps you from trying to find the trifecta. Of course, you could find three separate people who are underrepresented, which would be honorable. Or more!!!

But this isn’t a game. And this new effort makes it into a game. And I hate that about it.

Then the other cakewalk is Standard D:

D1. Representation in marketing, publicity, and distribution

The studio and/or film company has multiple in-house senior executives from among the following underrepresented groups (must include individuals from underrepresented racial or ethnic groups) on their marketing, publicity, and/or distribution teams.
Women
Racial or ethnic group

Asian
Hispanic/Latinx
Black/African American
Indigenous/Native American/Alaskan Native
Middle Eastern/North African
Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander
Other underrepresented race or ethnicity

LGBTQ+
People with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing

Does anyone know a major or minor distributor that doesn’t have multiple women and/or LGBTQ+ people in senior executive positions in marketing, publicity OR distribution?

There is a weird quirk in the lazy writing of Standard D. Some feel that distributors will not only need “ multiple in-house senior executives from among the following underrepresented groups” but also (must include individuals from underrepresented racial or ethnic groups)”

So how many senior executives in these areas do smaller distributors have? Gay? Not enough. Female? Not enough.

I don’t know what the official executive list is at, say, Roadside Attractions. According to IMDbPro, this very successful Oscar player has five executives. Three of these folks are out gay men. Do they now start the qualification process with a strike against them because none of the five is racially or ethnically underrepresented? Is The Academy undermining their business—which is often taking on completed or near-completed films—and throwing it to Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group to push it out via TriStar where there is a much bigger full-time staff?

Or do you go through the DNA of the movie, individuals and companies, and qualify with a “senior executive” of one of the connected companies that qualifies as underrepresented in the “right” way?

Or does The Academy just look the other way because this is all so misguided and open themselves up to lawsuits they could lose if they ever disqualify anyone?

I expect these rules, which are not solid, to float away like the effort to dislodge older and retired Academy members out of some sense that getting rid of them would help The Academy be better. A few got kicked, but few, and mostly people who just weren’t paying attention to the mail asking them to re-qualify.

And then there is the question of whether, if The Academy is going to stick its nose in this whole situation with criteria, if these criteria are not way too easy a bar to hop or limbo under.

But I’m not going to get into this because I simply do not believe that The Academy should be attempting to play morality police over cinema. For one thing, the publicity gamesmanship disqualifies the permanent leadership of the organization from being seen as morally superior.

Also, trying to reverse-engineer any outcome is, like every science fiction movie, subject to unexpected consequences, just as the move to 10 Best Picture nominees has been.

But most significantly, disqualifying films is not a way to encourage change. This set of rules is a mess. No one is likely to be disqualified. Ever. But it’s not a moral play. It’s a power play. It’s the takeaway of a salesman trying to get someone to buy. “Don’t jump through our hoops and you can’t qualify to play in our game… You will lose something of value.”

Yes, there will be some assistant who gets a bump up in status and some money as a result of this rule if by some miracle, there is a shortage of qualifications. Producer: “Uh, Gina… we need a Polynesian or something in the #2 Casting slot. I think we qualify, but let’s make sure. If she’s a gay girl, even better. Call my assistant when it’s handled, love. Thanks!” CLICK!

And let me be crystal clear… I believe the studios and producers should be under pressure all day and all night to include more people of color and women and other underrepresented groups in every level of film and television production. I absolutely do not object to the goal as offered behind this set of Standards.

But this is, for The Academy, which is struggling in many ways, putting the cart in front of the horse. And why? To look like they are doing something, The only positive press AMPAS has mustered in recent years has been around their status as social warrior (although they have cooked the books and misled to take that credit).

What’s next? Carbon footprint? Distributors have to shelter the homeless? Maybe they could take the leftovers from food delivered to Academy members during the pandemic and feed the hungry. (At least that would be directly productive.)

No. The Academy will continue to put on a big, well-intended show of affecting the work life of the underrepresented in Hollywood and the world while having almost no impact.

You want to turn this old cynic’s head? Publish the stats for every movie submitted for Oscar every year. What percentage of women? Of Black Americans? Of people of color from everywhere? Of LGBTQ+?And so forth. If they are in the investigation business, let the public know what you find.

I’ve been around this business my entire adult life. Shows don’t turn my head. Hard, cold truth does… and it is the rarest commodity in town.

The opening of Mulan, after a magic drone ride through the lush, green Chinese countryside with some wise male voice over about the story we are about to embark on, reminded me of Beauty & The Beast. The camera swoops into a Hakka walled village, establishing the town of personalities and, indeed, Mulan, who is chasing a chicken.

It isn’t long before dad is telling little Mulan to hide her light under a bushel in order to be a traditional girl in a traditional world. This fills the void of an opening musical number like “Belle,” in which everyone opines on the beautiful, quirky girl with her face always in a book. (I bet she could handle a chicken pretty well too.)

Then, as fast a running bird, the movie turns into an Ang Lee/Zhang Yimou high-end chop-socky movie with some great Chinese action stars and the man who was once Bruce Lee.

The rest of the way through Mulan, the film hops back and forth between the two ideas. Fish out of water meets a legitimate Chinese war movie with the requisite touch of magic.

There is something about the reality of Mulan being a real-life teenage girl that changes the dynamic of the whole experience, as compared to the animated film. Director Niki Caro never mocks… never goes for the easy gag…. never forgets that her Mulan is a real life young woman.

As a result, there is something truly dangerous about this young woman pretending to be a boy to defend the honor of her family (and ultimately, to do much more than that). The frathouse culture that sometimes comes of military training is as uncomfortable as the occasional threats that lying to could lead to death or worse. But Mulan is not a sexualized girl at all, though the actress is beautiful. Caro & Co. don’t indulge in anachronisms. Nor is she a plain Jane who finds her beauty when she takes off her glasses or her kimono or her battle gear. She is from a time long past and she feels real.

There is a lot of classic moviemaking… characters you are interested in talking for extended periods. And it’s lovely. Caro’s films, large-budget and small, have included this. As impressive as Mandy Walker’s cinematography is, the intimacy brings the magic.

And then… it’s just fun. Big canvas. Solid action. Plenty of weird Shaw Bros stuff done with a great deal more sophistication. There’s the wacky boys in military training, a dumb jock and a round-faced goof amongst them, and – hee-hee – the cute one.

Yes… She will only become a great fighter when she rocks out with her… uh… hair down. This is no spoiler. And there are moments that read as silly. But that is part of the joy.

The reason the movie works – and it really works – is that you want to believe, you like this rather silent young woman, you are rooting for her to find her higher self, and Ms. Caro never gets in your way, making the experience too sweet or too sour.

There’s even a Marilyn Monroe homage… but I’ll let you find that.

After my 10-year-old watched the film with us (“What do you mean there’s no Mushu!?!?”), we turned on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but he wasn’t ready for the subtlety of that one. Executioners from Shaolin is probably a better fit. But he had a great time, even without Mushu.

As for whether it’s worth $30 to see now instead of in December as part of the regular Disney+ package… that’s up to you. I can promise you won’t feel ripped off by the movie. Value for the dollar is in the eye of the beholder.