Paul Schrader is a brilliant man. But… myopic.

Paul Schrader Wants Netflix and Amazon to Save the World’s Biggest Film Festivals

Festivals have a narrow value beyond the experience to be had at the festivals. And every one of the major festivals has a different purpose that extends beyond those events.

Cannes is many festivals. There are two major competitions, a few other platforms, and then a major market event that is actually a private thing. Venice is a combination of showy premieres that come to the festival with U.S. distribution, for international marketing purposes, some high-quality premieres looking for worldwide distribution, and a bunch of international titles that will never get a wide audience in the U.S. Telluride is a combination of premiering the best of Cannes (that aren’t heading to TIFF or NYFF exclusively), being an Oscar platform for films with distribution, as well as high-art odds & ends with the very rare film that is seeking distribution there. And honestly, no one quite knows what NYFF is anymore, as it changed its stripes almost annually for the last decade. It went from having virtually no premieres to having big awards slots to being murky. Netflix pushed for a festival launch for Scorsese, so Scorsese did his very rare festival launch last year. But mostly, NYFF has been the place, in this regard, to avoid the heavy competition between awards movies at TIFF.

Schrader’s notion that the power and big spending of Netflix or Amazon could foster an event that would capture the public’s imagination in the way festivals do is not realistic. Not because it is impossible to find that audience, but because the purpose of festivals is not the same as the point of public release for movies, theatrically or only digitally.

Moreover, outside of the festival world, no one knows the festival heads and no one cares about film festival awards. This does not mean that festivals don’t have a place in the life cycle of indie films. But you’re talking about five percent of the films that experience that cause and effect.

If you have a title that you accept as less-than-commercial or unlikely to explode beyond its niche — not a judgment of quality at all, often the opposite — go ahead and play at a worldwide online festival. Just like rolling the dice at Cannes or Sundance, you may have an explosive moment and get money for your next movie. The Festival Dream is a crapshoot anyway… Take a different crapshoot.

But getting back to Schrader’s prayer. His idea is premised on a fantasy, that Netflix or Amazon is in the business of cultivating high art. Netflix may feel that taking a big $ hit to get an Oscar is a worthy bet. But paying festivals to curate arthouse movies? Too Smart To Handle.

Putting these films online doesn’t add the film-fest dynamic. It adds media to the mix of direct-to-distributor sales. And some popularity scale, based on how many people watch each film. It doesn’t put First Reformed in front of distributors with an audience.

That moment when a film is discovered — tracked for months leading to the “discovery”— at the first Sundance or Cannes cannot be recreated online. It is gloriously irrational, which is why so many overspend at fests.

Also, we already have a sampling of the impact this might have. Amazon Prime has had a handful of SXSW movies on their service for weeks. Has anyone watched?

Yes, Cannes and Venice and TIFF titles would have more profile going in. Two or three might emerge as media obsessions. But again… a crap shoot.

Since I started writing, Cannes announced that it will try an online market (Marche) in June to fill the void. [LINK]

The sale of online passes will begin soon. But the question will be what kind of access the media does and does not get to these films. I have attended Cannes with a press badge and a Marche badge. It allowed me to cram a lot of extra films onto my schedule. But I was also excluded from many screenings that were meant for buyers only. I suspect that will be the experience here. Some international films will take the opportunity to allow press to get access. But my guess is that any film with serious aspirations for a U.S. window will keep us at a distance.

I circle back to my fall festival suggestion… to create a digital festival circuit for media this year that allows the distributors to take all the advantage of the media that it would normally get and to still control the opportunities for their films in the unknown situation around how films will, or will not, be distributed this fall.

In building a digital plan for media, these festivals could build a digital plan for festival attendees. Yes, the films will be on the fence until close to the last minute. But I can imagine a TIFF that leans heavily into Canadian product and docs and foreign language that opens up for TIFF ticket buyers for 10 days, allowing them a smorgasbord of opportunity and generating enough revenue for TIFF to keep them afloat, while also fulfilling the desires of the distributors and filmmakers.

In other words, build SOMETHING. Start now.

But the panacea of Schrader’s notion… Too much… Too ambitious… and too much in love with the idea of festivals. It’s a love I share. But I also know that it is a very niche romance that only a few of us are blessed to embrace every year.

“Theatrical is over.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have been listening to this bullshit for decades. And if you read David Puttnam‘s “Movies & Money” (from 1997!), you will see that this line of gloom & doom and hipster pronouncements about The Future started coming up a century ago.

This morning, Indiewire published a piece by Anne Thompson, who is fully committed to the idea of the end of theatrical as we know it and has been for a while. She rolled out a pretty complete rationale for this notion. And besides being soaked through with inaccuracies and errors of omission, there was an anger involved that took my breath away.

I will link after quoting the most offensive paragraph:
“Exhibitors are very different from their studio partners. Both groups are largely comprised of white men, but theater owners tend to reflect mainstream tastes and fairly conservative politics. (Imagine a Hollywood executive signing off emails like one Cinemark staffer: “Oh give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for His steadfast love endures forever. Ps 107:1.”) As a whole, this group prefers PG-13 to R ratings, and worships Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and all things Disney. They largely work out of their headquarters, whether that’s Kansas City (dominant AMC, with 8,000 screens), Dallas (Cinemark and Studio Movie Grill), New Orleans (Southern Theatres), Milwaukee (Marcus Theaters), Scottsdale (Harkins), Memphis (Malco), or Knoxville (Regal). It’s hard to imagine most of these folks circulating at world-class film festivals. The buyers who do attend are there for their specialty screens.”

Here is the full piece. But… REALLY?!?! Anne wants to encourage us against theatrical exhibition because their corporate offices aren’t based in Los Angeles or New York? She wishes us to see them as rubes because there are some staffers who express their religious beliefs in e-mails? And she doesn’t seem to want us to think about the fact that AMC’s ownership through much of the last decade was in Beijing and Regal’s is still in London. “It’s hard to imagine most of these folks circulating at world-class film festivals.” Are you seriously this petty and ignorant? I have known Anne a long time. She is neither of those things. But Jesus Christ on a cracker, she is writing like she is.

I have spent about as many years at CinemaCon/ShoWest as Anne, wandering about Vegas for 4 days in a sea of short-sleeved button downs and candy samplers. I understand the stereotype. But I also have now decades-long friends from all across Europe thanks to ShoWest (the original title of the exhibition event). I witnessed years of negotiations leading to digital projection, better sound, geographic multiplex placements, and stadium seating choices amidst all those… (say it mean) middle-Americans.

But let me get to the meat of Anne’s many arguments instead of lingering in my shock and dismay over the tone of this paragraph.

Unfortunately, I find myself refuting most of the article… there was a web term for doing this, which I forget. (Fisking?) But I try not to do it. But I must, I must.

“Studios and exhibitors still bring movies to a paying audience, but approach it from wildly different perspectives. Studios have multiple revenue streams; theaters have butts in seats, and buttered popcorn. Studios want the flexibility to take their movies to other platforms if that’s the better business decision; exhibitors leave a lot of patron data on the table — and charge studios access for what they do collect.”

False, at least in what is being suggested. Facts. Studios have had multiple revenue streams for over 40 years now, not counting revival houses and broadcast television sales (which at one point topped $10 million for a single screening for E.T.). VHS. DVD. Rentals for both. A once-huge Direct-To business in DVD. And streaming, which has brought the major (and some minor) studios 100s of millions of dollars while they sat on their hands, letting Netflix run with the segment until they finally saw a way to make more money doing it themselves (eventually).

It is true that theaters have only ticket revenues and concession sales to pay their brick-and-mortar rents and for the many people they employ in support. But there is a suggestion that there is something new about all of this. There is not. The desire of major studios to cut the cost of theatrical release is decades old. The shortening of the theatrical window by studios? Decades old.

But what is truly misleading is the notion that, somehow, the relationship of distribution and exhibition hasn’t – no matter the disagreements – continued to progress to both sides distinct benefit over the decades. Forty years ago, hit movies played for 30 – 40 weeks in theaters. In 1990, Ghost didn’t go to 2nd run until week 38, never surpassing 1800 screens and missing the $1 million mark on only 1 week of those 38. By 2000, the top non-Grinch grosser, Mission: Impossible 2 had its last $1 million-plus weekend on Weekend 9. In 2010, Avatar had a strong run from Christmas into the spring, but still only had 13 $1m+ weekends. Toy Story 3 had 12.

How do we think this happened? Do we think the studios got super-smart all of a sudden and poof, the runtime on first-run movies magically dropped by two-thirds while maintaining similar box office totals?

Obviously not. No… the exhibitors and the distributors worked hand-in-hand to make the exhibition platforms of the 90s, 00s, and today supercharged. Exhibitors went through bankruptcies to do it, but they did it. Distributors wanted it because of DVD sales, the revenues of which were surpassing theatrical revenues… so distributors wanted to get to that cash cow as quickly as possible. But they didn’t want to give up theatrical revenues, which were still more than a third of total revenues on a movie, so the window was pushed shorter and shorter. And eventually, like a virgin on Lookout Rd, they said, “That is as far as you can go without compromising us completely.”

But the exhibitors/virgins were still putting out, keeping the exhibitors as happy as they could. Don’t get me wrong, I see this as a mutually beneficial relationship. Putting the audience aside, exhibition chooses to be there and distribution benefits enormously from the existence of exhibition and the adjustments that exhibition has made.

Here is a little example… digital projection. It took years to find the moment, the money, and the mutual will for this to become the norm. The estimate by people who counted the beans at studios was that studios would save $2 billion or more every year by not having to strike, ship, and maintain prints (God rest the format’s soul). After some bumps in the early days, exhibition has also been able to benefit greatly from the format shift. No more projection issues as we knew them. Fewer projectionists (sadly for those hard working committed men and women). Easy expansion to take advantage of big opening opportunities (accordioning, as I have called it over the years, aka, more actual playtimes on any given weekend as needed). Nearly instant delivery when needed. And the freedom to create events in theaters, like live theater, opera, and sports.

Do sprockets running through a classic projector with a bulb at proper wattage create a better experience of the image? Maybe. But honestly, that isn’t the point. That is a different conversation. But some people want to use this aesthetic argument – which obviously, the same people have regarding studio output – as some way of making exhibition seem like Luddites, hanging on to the past. This is just insulting bullshit. These are business people who have adapted to changing times, over and over and over again. And yes, many of them look like the aunts and uncles you left behind when you moved to the big city after college. But… don’t be an asshole.

Moving on…

“By night, there’s opportunities to schmooze with the studio distribution executives who represent an increasingly slim slice of conglomerates owned by AT&T, Comcast, Sony, Viacom, and Disney.”

Exactly as the exhibition business has become represented by an increasingly slim slice of conglomerates owned by multinationals. AMC, Regal, and Cinemark control more than half the screens in America and, for better or worse, the rest tend to follow their lead.

“Their awkward business partnership doesn’t lend itself to conversations; it’s designed for constant, often-rancorous negotiations over rental splits.”

What decade was this paragraph from? Yes, Disney re-opened the wounds a couple years ago with new demands, but rental splits have not been the major issue for this “couple” in many years.

“Theater owners will fight to the death to keep their exclusive 90-day window, but why can’t studios move poor theatrical performers to another platform right away, and extend the on-screen life of the ones that play? The exhibitors’ argument: Exclusivity is the only way moviegoers will keep coming to theaters.”

Again… just mean-spirited bullshit. And that doesn’t mean that there is no argument to be made for distribution’s desires here. But if you are spinning, there is usually a reason. The window, which used to be a year for pay-tv, then 6 months for DVD sell-thru (until Batman released their then-all-time-best-opening movie on DVD in November – 5 months after a June open – for the holiday sales benefit), has now been whittled all the way down to 90 days, which is already really 75 days before it goes to streaming.

Exhibitors aren’t arguing that windows are the only way moviegoers will still come to theaters. I don’t know anyone in exhibition who thinks it is the primary reason people go to theaters now. But what exhibition knows – and distribution clearly knows or they would have shoved everything into VOD by now – is that exhibition is a low-margin business and that to maintain the big boxes in the format in which they currently generate $40 billion+ a year in gross revenues and participate in creating brand value that benefits titles all the way through their ancillary revenue life, you need more than one kind of film. Because even though the media doesn’t value films that gross just $60 million in domestic box office or less, those films generated about 25% of total domestic box office last year (for instance). Take away that 25% or 20% or even 15% and exhibitors can’t make their rent unless studios want to subsidize their theaters with a higher percentage of the bigger grossers.

I’m going to keep my powder dry on this and write another column about what a reconfigured exhibition universe would look like at another time.

But what is the worst idea for marketing a movie ever? To keep moving it from one platform to another so the buyers have no idea where to find it. There is no faster road to ambivalence, then disinterest, and ultimately, “we’ll see it on streaming soon enough.” This is already an issue with shortening the theatrical window.

What anti-window people refuse to see is that once you are past the theatrical window, there is no big uptick in revenue now. But it will get smaller and smaller because all post-theatrical is the same to people at home. It will get much, much worse as everyone is in the streaming business. Disney might be able to sucker a few hundred thousand people into paying to rent Onward 2 weeks before pushing it to $7 a month Disney+, but if I had paid for that, I’d be calling the credit card company to dispute the charge. Individual unit sales are THE dying format.

Except in theatrical release.

‘During negotiations over “The Irishman,” Netflix’s Scott Stuber (a former head of Universal production) played mediator in trying to reach an accommodation on shorter windows. But the chains are not a unified group, and talks broke down.”

Uh, no. Netflix sought an accommodation for one title. The accommodation was agreed to by exhibitors. They had a shorter window. They had silence on grosses. They had the national chains. But there was one demand that Netflix would not acquiesce to… that they put a chunk of their marketing spend into pushing the theatrical release in the way major studio distribution supports most movies. Netflix refused. Deal over. I have no beef with Netflix taking whatever position on this that they like. But blaming the exhibitors for being in disarray or too unyielding is just more spin.

“Meanwhile, independent exhibitors, film festivals and distributors are taking a different tack: They pulled back from competition to pool their best practices and intelligence into launching a virtual cinema business. And when they did, they discovered a shared ability to reach cinephiles even when hunkered in their homes.”

Oh… bullshit again! Independent distribution has been fully engaged in the “virtual cinema business” (without the cinemas) for a decade. VOD has been a salvation in a still very tough market for indies. What changed under this quarantine is that they figured out – smartly – how to team with exhibitors and film festivals and the like to add a new layer of marketing to the effort. And what are the results? Please, tell us how much more money the indies are making during this disastrous moment? I bet sales are up. I bet the share with festivals and theaters eats that difference almost completely. But yes, good for them. Something is better than nothing. Good for cinema. Good for people. All good.

And this has NOTHING to do with how wide releases are released or monetized.

“If the studios and theaters were still aligned, the whole film industry picture would be very different. The theaters would not be abandoned and marooned, with only one way to make a living. Studios and theatres would have long shared the same ecosystem, reading data and innovating best practices for the ideal ways, times, and platforms to reach the consumer.”

Honestly… whose ass was this pulled out of? Please… take a moment to think about it. Think deeply. Because it is just a wistful theory with absolutely no argument to back it up.

What other way would brick and mortar theaters have to make a living if they were owned and operated by movie studios? Tell me! Someone! Anyone! Merchandise? Ha. Event programming? Already exists, to modest success. DVD sales as you come out of the theater? Are you kidding?

It all sounds so smart… “share the same ecosystem, reading data and innovating best practices for the ideal ways, times, and platforms to reach the consumer.” Seriously! What do we think this means in action? Have you been watching AT&T try to manage both DirecTV and the launch of HBO Max? Do you believe there is more money in giant Disney titles than is already being squeezed out in the billions? Do you believe that Trolls World Tour will have a stronger ancillary revenue stream with 4.5 million families renting it at home or 12 million people going to the movie theater to see it in excited groups?

Executives love control… until they come up short.

Ironically, I have long been a proponent of Netflix buying a small-ish exhibition chain to achieve their long-term goals. Why? All the reasons Anne seems to covet. But more to the point, Netflix, at this time, could run movie theaters without profitability being a principle motive. Their overall model is not profit-driven, which is why they have so little profit on $20 billion+ a year in subscription revenue. It’s by choice. (And that is a different column too.)

If Netflix had bought the Landmark chain when it was for sale, it could have been their best marketing tool ever. Because Netflix is and always has been about the freedom of consumer choice. Owning about 100 screens in 20 or more major markets would allow them to try out a ton of ideas… and again, they wouldn’t have the pressure of making money. So long as they made 50% of costs or more, it would be viable for them (in my opinion… it’s their money). If done properly, it could work for indies as well. And a big hit or five could actually make the whole operation cash positive.

Doing theatrical better would be a huge win of perception for Netflix. And it would be 100% on their branding. And it would encourage filmmakers to come to them on quality projects without having to overspend or take on films that are really too expensive or discarded or somehow broken.

But I digress…

“In France, the entire movie and television system feeds each part of the production-distribution-exhibition chain in a circular and supportive way. They’re in it together. There’s a lot to be said for that. The time for reflection and change — reframing the conversation about doing something different, that is in the best interest of the consumer — is now.”

Don’t even get me started on the “best interest of the consumer” crap. No one cares about the best interest of the consumer. Not exhibition. Not distribution. Sorry… hard cold fact. They are in business, not in friendship. As anyone with a child knows, giving them everything they want because they want it is a terrible way of operating “in the best interest of the child.” Consumers are not children. But their desires, like most everyone aside from Mother Theresa, is selfish. You can’t operate any profitable business, much less an industry, on the principle of what is in the best interest of the consumer. Because the simple answer to that idea is… everything, always, for free. And that is not on the table anymore than a $2 premiere rental of Trolls World Tour or $3 popcorn. These are, always, businesses.

As for France…

Circular and supportive in France means a 3 to 4 month theatrical window and after 4 years, it is free for all on demand.

And with that, I am done with this for today. Let me just say as I exit, I believe in studios. And I believe in exhibition. And the great fallacy that I hear behind all of the arguments against windows is that making fundamental chance to the ecosystem can happen without both the clear financial consequences to exhibitors and the unintended consequences that studios are almost always completely inept at forecasting. This column has not said a word about the church of cinema because that is not the subject at hand. Business is.

As a student of the living film industry for decades, I have witnessed the good, the bad, and the ugly of rushing from one new panacea to the next. I am not hanging on. I love innovation as much as anyone. I admire so much about Netflix (aside from their silly stock price). But aside from running a solid operation, Netflix is based on 1 groundbreaking idea (subscription DVD rental) and 1 obvious leap into the future that studios mismanaged for a lack of vision (streaming). $10 a month for the biggest buffet of content you have ever had. Of course studios didn’t rush in… it was suicidal. And it still kinda is. But that future is almost here, whether the studios are ready or not.

Theatrical exhibition is old-fashioned. It is. Even with all the innovations. But so is storytelling. Theater still thrives. Movies still thrive. And yes, sitting in your cave, watching hours of content for very little money still thrives (from local to broadcast to cable to streaming). Things change. And yes, you can go too slow. You can also go too fast. But just remember… Netflix didn’t kill the DVD market with streaming. They killed it with subscription. And that revenue really hasn’t been replaced (a little with international expansion). Streaming and on demand are absolutely our future. But we will still go to theaters, live and “film,” and coliseums of sport to have a different experience. And we will pay a huge premium to do that. And the home experience will always be dominant because it is easiest and cheapest. And yet still… we will leave our houses.

If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand humanity. Or you just don’t see past the PVOD coming out next week or the pandemic that will give way to another in time. The worst is yet to come. The best is yet to come. Keep on living.

Some of the greatness during this period has been coincidental to the previously scheduled releases of shows. And so has the absolute crap.

It became a project during all this mess, driven by the insane amount of media coverage, to watch the worst of Netflix… which is also, apparently, the most popular of Netflix. No, not Tiger King, though I watched that. (Tiger King is one of the docs that suffer from “The Netflix Stretch”… but that’s another column.) I’m talking about the world’s most horrifying dating shows. And as jokes are always best told in sets of three: Love Is Blind, Back With The Ex and Too Hot To Handle.

I list the shows based on the order in which I watched them. But interestingly, they also lay out in the order of shittiness. (Oddly, spellcheck redlined that word, but has no correction. Same with viewers of these shows.)

Love Is Blind sounded interesting. Remove the visual from the attractiveness engagement. Give the wannabe couples time to really get to know each other without seeing one another. And then, when they leap to the point of insanity – a marriage proposal, sight unseen – let them see each other and then keep them together to watch it all come together or fall apart.

There were some “happy endings” on the show. But like the brutal messes – made more brutal by the aggressive requirement to lower the wall – overwhelmed those “nice” stories. Moreover, watching the reunion show reminds us of what a mess some of those still-together couples are.

You can’t fake the funk, as a friend of mine once reminded me. And conversely, you can’t live on the funk forever.

There was the woman who showed us every reason why she is still alone… and the man who was obsessively committed to landing her. There was the gay man still in denial with no happy possibility allowed for him on the show. There was the woman who was clearly ambivalent from early on and who would have never gotten past a third date with the also very nice guy to whom she connected. And there is the couple that is all genitals with a woman who is so strong-willed that she will not let the relationship with the rugged by weak man fail… until they have a couple kids and he gets every other weekend, which is about as inevitable as the sun continuing to rise over the various distilleries that feed their romance.

Then there are the two happy couples. One is just solid. Congrats. I don’t know that Lauren & Cameron are a lovely, sane pair of people… which makes you wonder how they ended up on this show. It’s not clear that they may not have found each other, were they ever in the same space for more than a couple hours. The other happy story, Damian and Giannina, is another story dominated by the commitment of the woman, but it doesn’t seem like it’s all about not failing for her – like one of the other marriages – and honestly, I felt okay about it… even though (SPOILER) he left her at the fake alter. Really, they are such a weird couple that they may fit just right forever.

I guess what is so irritating about this undeniably entertaining show (the editors deserve a big fat retroactive raise) is that the idea is interesting, but the execution is so simplistic. It’s like watching Michael Apted’s 7Up – 63Up but with Apted’s IQ reduced by 30 or 40 points. Imagine if the show was serious about understanding these people. I don’t mean to add psychologists analyzing every moment. We have all had relationships and intuitively understand what is going on. But the design of the show leaves no space for more than a simplistic relationship with the material, even as we can see the reality seeping out of the edges like the lost drips of an ice cream cone on a hot summer night.

Back With The Ex also starts with an interesting premise. Can exes who are now single and harbor the hope that a former love can be rekindled make the past into the current?

The methodology of this show is not messed up the way Love Is Blind is. However, it is equally sad and twice as predictable. (SPOILER) All four couples are going to suffer the exact same malady that that ended their relationships in the first place.

In 2 of the 4 stories, there was cheating or betrayal. Cheaters cheat.

In one of the stories, there is a profoundly broken man who has decided he is fixed enough to love someone else fully and the woman who tried so very hard to fix him in the past that she destroyed herself and comes back for seconds.

And the final story, that is most hopeful, is of the 2 fully formed adults. But she tells us from the beginning that she is a control freak. He tells us he is laid back to a degree that she doesn’t quite respect. She is the kind of person who is happy to strip down in front of a camera crew and skinny dip and express her strong sexual urges… but who then freaks out when he tells a story to the other guys about the same. The Dominatrix and The Dude. For that to work, they both need to be clear about what they are willing to accept. But neither is as good at sharing their boundaries with each other as they are with the TV camera. And even though the story ends up happily on the show, it fails after the show, as was destined from the start.

The third show is just a form of gawking at the young, the dumb, and the full of cum. Too Hot To Handle is a combination of Love Island and Playboy Channel’s Foursome. (I’m linking because you should not know that this show exists. It’s basically a double date where they all have sex in a cool house and show the sex on TV.)

What is striking about Too Hot To Handle is that it is so tame, considering what we are dealing with. It is, from start to finish, a big tease. Make no mistake, the show has gathered a group of people who talk endlessly about their urges, show no modesty about their bodies (though the camera does), and make it clear that they are just fine having sex with strangers on TV.

So where is all this sex?

Don’t misunderstand. I am not feeling the need for a new form of porn or even soft-core porn on Netflix. That’s not my point.

I engage most entertainment with a desire for some connection to some kind of truth. As a critic, my first interest in that truth is how it fulfills the intentions of the creator of the content. Then, my personal judgement of that intention comes into the equation.

It is odd to me that Too Hot To Handle is tamer in offering the central theme of the show – sex – than Big Brother is on CBS and all its connected digital opportunities. People on Big Brother (in America, at least) are not encouraged to have sex, sometimes do, and invariably get caught… and the evidence, almost always under a comforter, is shown. Meanwhile, Too Hot To Handle charged the group $8000 for oral sex and all the audience got was a coy explanation from the couple. I am not asking Netflix to stream the sex act. But the claim that “It may have slipped into my mouth,” is one for the ages and there must be some footage and the fine editors on that show should have been able to create a lot of fun for the perv-ing audience, suggesting how things went down, so to speak.

Sometimes a banana is just a banana. And sometimes a TV show is just about people obsessed with themselves and their pleasure and the size and placement of that banana or that flower or whatever metaphor you like.

Television is so much a part of this experience of being locked down… so I’ll skip to those adventures before getting back to movies.

Let’s start by paying tribute to FX. Devs. Better Things. And Mrs. America. This is some of the finest television of the decade.

For me, it’s Devs over Mr Robot. For many, it’s the other way around. But I ain’t gonna argue. Alex Garland is the closest thing we have to Kubrick. The pace can be glacial. He is not going to give you the easiest characters or easy answers. His answer may be something that requires you to marinate on for weeks, if not forever. He is fascinated by the mundane elements of life, but always is trying to figure out how they touch the face of God.

How do you review a show that, like shimmering interior of DEVS, changes a bit every episode. Looking back from the end, it seems that it was all inevitable. But watching from the start, there seem to be at least 4 different shows percolating. This both infuriating and exciting. Garland has a passion for super-dry performances and gooey moist romanticism. As a result, while Sonoya Mizuno is the lead of the show, it is Nick Offerman who truly embodies the two sides of Garland’s spiritual coin. Muzuno does well in the series, but it is Offerman’s eyes that speak volumes. In the last few episodes, Alison Pill also grows into the embodiment of that perfect emotional schizophrenia.

Pamela Adlon loves a good stunt. But what makes Better Things the best half hour on television in the last few years is what is true and raw.

Hulu seems to like to follow up the most recent episode of FX shows with the start of Better Things, Season 1, Episode 1. Watching that episode, it’s quite remarkable how the show has changed, season by season. The first season was very much a collaboration between Adlon and Louis CK. The pilot was directed by CK. Every episode of Season 1 features Adlon and CK as writers with just 2 episodes sharing credit with others (Cindy Chupak on Future Fever and Gina Fattore on Alarms).

After directing just 2 of the 10 Season One episodes, Adlon took over all the directing responsibilities in Season Two, still sharing writing duties exclusively with CK. Adlon’s directing skills were not as polished as the directors of Season One, but there was a fearlessness and intimacy that took the show to a higher level.

The New York Times story on Louis CK landed on the same day as the penultimate episode of Season Two first aired. A season that should have won award after award after award was muted by the situation and the space that Adlon understandably needed to process the public destruction of a work partnership that I first saw on a live stage in Hollywood as HBO was developing a series called Lucky Louis in 2005 or 2006. (She had one story credit on the series and wouldn’t get another until Louie in 2011.)

Season Three took a little longer to happen than before. FX moved it from a September launch to February. The season starts with, perhaps, the most famous single scene from Better Things… Sam (Adlon) in her closet, trying on clothes that she doesn’t quite fit in in anymore. Simple bra and panties and fearless visual self-examination. Episode Two also starts in her underwear (after she rips off her pants), dealing with (perhaps) menopause, then the first peak at Sam questioning her sexual boundaries, and what would become a recurring theme, a caring but caustic look at older people. Episode 4… unwanted sex dreams. Another big theme would be Sam’s similarly aged female friends at various stages in their relationships. Adlon also brings on writing staff and for the first time, even has episodes that she has no writing credit at all.

And this fourth season has had its own flavor again. Deepening. Deepening. Adlon opens the season with a dialogue-free three-minute sequence, just wandering around the house. The themes of the series continue. Broken relationships. The daughters finding out new things about themselves. More of the women dealing with life as they pass the halfway mark.

I think what I love so much about Adlon’s show is that I don’t know what is coming… but it always feels right… and it always leaves me thinking and feeling and wanting more. This is an exceptional thing in any of the arts.

Another COVID “discovery” was Marcella, a British cop show—of a sort. Anna Friel stars and she is roughly glamorous, and so broken. It’s not even clear what she does in the early moments of the first season. She is a mother. She is recently and painfully divorced. She is a mess.

And as it turns out, she is a top end murder police. The question of “whodunnit” flips on her, as a murder case turns out to be close to home and she, in her current state, has blackouts that mean she can’t trust herself in many ways.

The show airs on Netflix and I binged until I passed out.. then finished Season One in the morning. The cast is great. The twists are really unique. And it’s beautifully made.

Second season… not so much. The thing is, much of what is so special about the show is resolved in the first season. And honestly, I was done. I got four episodes into Season Two and lost interest. But man, that first season!

There is a fascinating and terribly important Frontline episode, which you should be able to bring up on the PBS app or elsewhere, on plastics and how the are being and not being recycled. Plastic Wars. I watched with my jar on the ground. Frontline is such a great show… and this episode blew me away.

I had bailed on Mr. Robot sometime towards the end of the second season. I just wasn’t interested in working that hard as an audience member. I know people LOVE the show. But on a too-tight content consumption schedule, it faded.

Then the final season came and all the superlatives that were flying in Season One were back. One friend in particular brought it up over and over and over again. So I leapt right into Season Four. And you know what… I liked this last season more (once I figured a few things out) that anything else I had seen from the show. I think it was because the actual premise was no longer a secret. And the stakes seemed so much more personal than I had felt watching the show before. It was great.

So if you are someone who fell of the Mr. Robot wagon, I encourage you to get back on there.

Shrill was one of those shows I never quite started with. Frankly, the design at Hulu keeps me from hanging around in and wandering around their content offerings. I am loving FX on Hulu, but it is always a challenged to get me to watch something for which I wasn’t already looking.

But the shutdown finally got me to start Shrill and I found it fascinating from start to finish. Aidy Bryant just falls right off the screen onto your couch. She is accessible and vulnerable and fun and dumb and brilliant. And her Annie Eaton on the show may be her in some ways and others not, but she can transfer that energy to her character and it is compelling in ways you never quite see coming.

It is the part of being open – or politically correct, if you like – that we seek to do “the right thing” for people whom we see as vulnerable, but never quite deal with the imposition of how we see those people. Nor do people find it easy to navigate the idea that people know what others see them as and sometimes they don’t feel it and sometimes they feel it deeply and the nature of both of those feelings is often misplaced, by the observer and by the object of the concern.

In many ways, Shrill is filled with the conventional. And then it just flips. and flips. And flips again. But it all makes sense. It just isn’t about nailing these characters – and not just the lead – down. Her parents! God, I loved Julia Sweeney and Daniel Stern as her parents. And Patti Harrison… holy crap… queen of playing the black notes only on the comedy keyboard.

I’m going to stop now. These review pieces have been sitting on the desktop for weeks and I’m trying to find my rhythm pushing it out. So for now, less is more… with more to come.

In light of the theoretical showdown between Universal Studios and the exhibition business and the many opinions thrown around, a simple guide to how the current exhibition/distribution relationship works, in the broadest terms, is called for.

Movie theaters are brick & mortar outlets for a small percentage of the content produced by major studios. Via their labels, the majors release around a hundred movies a year via theatrical. They produce thosuands of hours of television each year that are never intended for theatrical release.

Majors spend between $20 million and $60 million domestically to bring a new movie to market. A hundred times a year.

Movie theaters charge the same amount for every movie in each theater, regardless of the cost of production or marketing. Theaters pay distributors, on average, 50% – 55% of box-office gross. The exhibitor’s cut of the gross represents about 60% of the revenue for a movie theater. So while we talk about expensive concession prices, exhibitors cannot run their theaters on $9 popcorn alone.

Exhibitors expand the screen count within each theater to accommodate the expectations for each film… Both their own expectations and the distributor’s. The physical expansion that allows for accordioning was a result of exhibition bankruptcies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Exhibitors consolidated, got out of bad real estate leases, and started to build new mutliplexes to replace poorly chopped-up multis that were made out of bigger theaters.

This rebuild – at the expense of exhibition – has allowed for bigger and bigger openings over time. Another element of this is a worldwide 2008 co-funded effort between exhibition and distribution to replace celluloid projectors with digital projectors.

The ability to have these huge opening weekends – we have had at least six $100 million domestic openings every year of the last five years – has also indulged the impulse of the distributors to shorten the theatrical window, as a larger and larger percentage of the revenue is being generated in the first three or four weekends. The more distributors can make in theatrical in a shorter window, the sooner they can get to post-theatrical revenues… and they hope, the less they have to spend to market those post-theatrical windows.

This urge to shorten windows is directly connected to the DVD sell-thru market that started in 1997. This accelerated when DVD revenues surpassed theatrical revenues, both in gross and net. Distributors started leaving millions and tens of millions in theatrical revenue on the table in order to get to their DVD window, often driven by quarterly financial reporting (as in, “Get Batman into sell-thru for the Christmas window after a June opening!” or “We took some big losses and need Star Trek‘s DVD sell-thru to make our winter quarter work!” ).

But that financial reality hasn’t been true in more than a decade. Still, the fantasy of getting past theatrical quickly and cheaply lives on in the heads of bean counters.

As cable, then satellite, and then the internet made video-on-demand more viable for a wider and wider audience, the dream of shortened or nonexistent windows returned. But the industry ran into the same problem. VOD wasn’t generating that much money. It might have been cheaper than a Blockbuster rental, but there weren’t big enough numbers to seriously threaten anything. And thus, the fantasy of “fight pricing” – at$35 – $50 a rental for each film, figuring that if three or four people watched, it was cheaper than going out – never became more than a mirage.

Meanwhile, along came Netflix, first disrupting the DVD sell-thru model, and then destroying the idea of fight pricing like Godzilla destroying Tokyo with their streaming subscription model.

Back at the Stable Relationship of Exhibition and Distribution, the rules are changing. Why?

Not because there is a problem with exhibition for distributors. Things haven’t changed much in the last decade, aside from exhibitors spending more money to improve and adjust theaters to current standards and audience expectations of seating and projection. Domestic theatrical went from $10.6 billion to $11.4 billion. The cost of a domestic movie ticket went from an average of $7.90 to $9.16.

Internationally, theatrical exhibition has boomed. In 2010, it was $21.2 billion. In 2019, it was $30.8 billion. That has been a big change, to the benefit of both exhibition and distribution.

Likewise, digital has boomed in the last decade. As DVDs have subsided, the digital market has grown, with MPAA citing Digital passing the overall gross for Theatrical for the first time this year since the DVD boom ended a decade ago, with almost $49 billion worldwide. But keep in mind, this figure is dominated by subscription streaming.

DEG puts the entire domestic single-sell digital market (VOD and rentals) at just $4.6 billion a year with the streaming subscription market at about 3x that. In 2019, that single-sell digital market was down 6% on the VOD side and up 5% in rentals from 2018.

Domestic Theatrical: $11 billion
International Theatrical: $30 billion
Domestic VOD/Rentals: $5 billion
Estimated International VOD/Rentals: $4 billion
Estimated Worldwide Subscription Streaming: $30 billion

VOD is a declining market in a rising digital world. So why are distributors so hot to bet on it?

VOD delivery companies (iTunes, Amazon, etc) have no more vested interest in selling or supporting movies than they do music or toilet paper. Unlike the exhibition industry, there is no investment on the part of consumer-facing digital distributors that connects them to distribution.

Movie Theaters exist almost exclusively as a distribution portal for movie distributors. That is their design. That is their purpose. They are a fruit stand in a world of big-box grocery stores. Those big boxes used to be cable and television. Now they are streamers. But the economies of scale remain the same.

If you own a fruit stand and one of your half-dozen primary distributors decides to stop distributing a certain kind of fruit, you need to fill the space at your store. If it was a popular kind of fruit, it will probably affect your bottom line. And if it was a whole category – say, citrus – it may affect you so much that your store is in danger of closing.

In the current market, keep in mind that Fox is all but gone and that will already reduce inventory by 10% – 15% a year. They may have mostly delivered boring old Red Delicious apples, but those things are still a staple product, no matter how many Neon Asian Pears or A24 Guavas With Teeth we are selling to the cool kids.

To stretch this analogy past sanity, when you find out that your distributor is cutting out the citrus to your fruit stand because they have a new customer closer to their warehouse and hope to save 10% on gas, even though that new customer is a new fruit stand in a neighborhood where others have been closing… It might piss you off. And you may decide that you don’t want to carry that distributor’s fruit salad, which you sell so well that you represent 20% of their worldwide fruit salad business… because all you wanted was the same citrus you have been selling for decades, which is part of what stabilizes your fruit stand revenues.

Yeah, you might be willing to open a fruit-salad-only store, but that would require that you sublease three-quarters of the store you have and the profits would be marginal and once you have shut down most of your old store, your distributor might well see that it has an advantage and squeeze you for more money per fruit salad, like Disney did. After all that, you’re out of business anyway.

Okay. Enough fruit. (But really, it’s accurate.) I don’t think Universal or Jeff Shell are evil. I don’t think they want to drive theaters out of business. I don’t think they want to sell just fruit salad. But while AMC and Regal and Cinemark aren’t mom-and-pop retailers, they spend a lot of money to maintain and operate a nearly single-revenue stream business. And Universal has decided, after a LOT of private talk, to try out something over their partners’ objections. They had a modest success with a single movie under one unique circumstance that encourages them to keep experimenting.

But only one side of this couple is satisfied. Exhibition and Distribution aren’t dating, they have been married for decades. For better or worse. For Pete Davidson or James Bond. And what either side of the relationship thinks is a sweet experiment may not be so good for the other side.

Reading about this disagreement, you would think that only one half of the couple matters… or in fact, that they aren’t really a proper couple. Distribution is sexy and powerful and rich and Exhibition is homely and needy and desperate?

But if you think that you aren’t doing the math. In business, no one cares who is sexy and who is homely… they care where the money is. Exhibition does desperately need the big hits to pay their leases. But you can’t find another math equation that leads to any movie getting to a gross net over $500 million with VOD as the primary revenue stream in anything but the most fluky of circumstances, much less an equation that will take over a dozen movies there each year (which we had last year).

The problem is that when you come back to the relationship and expect to get the parts of that relationship you love after “experimenting” in ways your partner finds degrading of the relationship, the problem is real. And it’s not always going to be rational. It isn’t all on one side, “failing” to accept the other’s choices.

If Noah Baumbach is writing it up, it will all work out in the end. Both sides will grow and learn and find their next love. But I tend to imagine it will end more like a David Simon script. A truce forced on both sides after a lot of filthy language has been uttered and gallons of blood are spilled.

Let’s hope HBO Max cancels this one before it gets to air.

It’s April 23, 2020. New York seems to be over the COVID-19 hump. The, uh, president is encouraging “reopening” America while simultaneously hedging so that he won’t be blamed for encouraging this when people start dying in states that reopen too recklessly. The threat of a rekindling of the pandemic in America looms heavily over the fall and winter.

But for now, let’s discuss how we might get back to the movies.

First, we need to start being brutally honest with ourselves and each other.

Cannes is great. Venice is great. But outside of exciting a thin swath of film critics, writers, and industry types who go to Cannes every year, the loss of this festival does not affect the American cinema. Almost all of the festival films that are purchased for US distribution at Cannes go into the International category for Oscar and will not get a theatrical platform of any size in America until the following year. Most of the films that show in theaters and festivals in America in the fall of any given year go into the festival with a US distributor. There are exceptions. But not many.

Venice has even less impact on the US market, aside from as a marketing platform.

I love festivals. I love the communal experience of seeing movies, unencumbered by the predispositions that marketing and publicity create. I go out of my way not to know about the films I will see at any festival, aside from friendly recommendations and loglines in the festival guides.

There is an enormous rush of power in the moment when you are one of a very small group of people who have seen a movie play in a room and interested parties clamor for your insight (to embrace or toss aside). But this moment should not be the key to the future of any film. It has been. Especially at Cannes. But it should not be.

But that strikes at a key element of the festival universe: the marketing and publicity value to distributors. Festivals are often used as a launching pad as much as anything else. But the direct cause and effect — outside of New York City, where the Times and a couple other outlets with popular critics can key the success or failure of a small film — is negligible. Festivals are bait for press coverage. And that works for both sides (to the degree it works for either side). But marketing and successful publicity is still required for a small film to do over $1 million in theatrical or better on VOD. And for a wide-release movie, it’s all about marketing, no matter how well a film does at a festival.

So why are we anxious to get back to Telluride, Toronto and New York this September?

Because we love movies. Because of the rush of the new. Because losing the revenue from the festivals themselves for these organizations would be devastating financially.

But first… Do no harm.

My first major suggestion for the fall festivals hoping to have a footprint is to take the media out of the equation. At least, in person.

There is no major distributor without a secure streaming system of some kind. Take the entire media experience of these festivals to the web. Show the movies. Set up digital interviews. Set strict review embargo dates.

This is a huge opportunity for the distributors. They can expand the base of writers who see these films and to an increasing degree, control when they write about them. The good and the bad of a place like Telluride is that a few loud voices are going to define your film going into Toronto and even beyond. If you win those people over, you win. If you lose those people, you may never recover. Again, a power rush… but not one worth gambling on.

Toronto has a ton more film writers attending than Telluride. It is heavily a media festival for premieres. These festivals compete for premieres. That doesn’t have to change, either.

Distributors could set up the same system for media that it already has. If your film premieres at Telluride, only allow writers who have passes for the festival see and write about the film in that window. Then, widen the audience for Toronto and get that second wave.

The point is, the media element that launches award season can be controlled and, surprisingly, improved for the distribution side.

The next step is the festival itself. And here is the thing… this is the most fragile element of any notion of having a fall festival. Putting people in rooms together.

The weather in Telluride is late summer/early fall, with temperatures that swing between 45 and 85 degrees over a weekend… usually with rain. The altitude is high. People have trouble breathing as it is. I have no idea whether this is a problem with COVID-19, but I do know that people who issues breathing have a bigger problem with the virus. Where is that line?

Toronto tends to be warmer, rarely dipping below 60 at night or getting warmer than 85 during the festival.

Telluride is a festival mostly of visitors to the glorious mountain town. Toronto is a festival with the vast majority of tickets purchased by locals with a large contingent of people coming in from out of town as press or industry. But they are very different challenges.

Toronto seats somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 people in theaters each day at the festival. Telluride has fewer than 3000 attendees in total. So I see very different plans for both festivals.

Here is the benefit for both of these festivals, as opposed to the shuttered SXSW and Cannes: Neither is a sales festival. There are some titles and that might have to change. But while the idea of a South By film looking for distribution accepting a position in the online film festival being co-sponsored by Amazon, the stakes are very different at Tell&Tiff.

Also, the idea of making festival films available openly to non-fest participants is a non-starter for either of these situations.

For Telluride, I would start with the assumption that 20% of the pass buyers are not showing up this year, no matter how much of an all-clear sign is given. It could easily be more. Young people come to the festival, but the majority of attendees are over 50.

Then I would take the four-day long festival and cut it into two three-day festivals. They already got approval for an extra day. But what is needed is to cut the thing in half and let people decide which identical half they want to attend… First come, first served.

Things need to be a bit more aggressive on the cleaning side. But the volunteers — another issue — are amazing at the festival. Cut the crowd in half and everything will feel safer. Movies already screen multiple times to allow everyone to see them over the weekend. Great. The biggest house is the Werner Herzog Theater with 650 seats. Now 325 seats.

Take your temperature. Wear your mask. If you have a serious cough, stay in your rental. If you are sneezing moistly, stay in your rental.

Reconsider the “Q” system, encouraging people to get their Q early and to come back to enter the theater in time-specific groups. We are all in this together.

How much would it cost to set up a wellness center to support responsible participation? Probably nothing. I can’t imagine that some insurer or healthcare company wouldn’t jump for the chance to reach high-end customers.

When I first started going to Telluride, there was a local cable channel that became the Telluride Channel for the weekend of the fest. It would offer additional programming relevant to the festival. There was also a cable channel for TIFF back when. If you want to do the events that they now do in the park, with four or five filmmakers and a moderator discussing the issues of the moment, great… do it however you choose, Zoom, Skype, whatever, and post it to the web so festivalgoers can get access live (maybe) and post to YouTube so the entire world can engage the conversations. Welcome to 2020.

Again, I would consider leaving the media out of the equation. Distributor preferences would have to be discussed with festivals. But another 100 – 150 people off the top, with a plan to give the entire group access to the films in play, could not hurt.

There are, of course, a hundred details I am not working through. Julie Huntsinger and Tom Luddy are very smart and have smart people with whom they can work this out. But this is the core of my suggestion… expand the dates, reduce the crowds, control the media. And sorry… lose the reusable water bottles.

But the thing about Telluride is that it is really about the cinema as church. No one is going to be upset because there are no tributes for a year. Or no celebrities. And of course, people can be brought to the theater via the internet… which has been done a number of times at Telluride just because someone could not make it to the mountain.

There is the possibility that a fresh outbreak could happen in the weeks before the festival and the whole thing would have to be stopped. But if that is not the case, there could be a Telluride that is not what we have been used to for so many years, but which remains faithful to the ideal. A win for all who love film.

But if that is the case, there could be a virtual version of the festival as simple and complex as putting the 30 films or so on a secure server that passholders would be able to access for three or four days, not unlike the way things are set-up with The Academy. Unlike The Academy, Telluride could force the issue in terms of platform. (Many Academy voters didn’t partake of the Academy streaming access because they didn’t have the Apple TV hardware or more specifically, the current generation of Apple TV. If you can pay all that money for a pass to Telluride, $150 for an Apple TV is not asking too much.) If the festival has to be cancelled on the mountain, have it on your TV. There would be many people making noise about this being impossible, but Telluride’s audience is less than a third as large as the Academy membership. It’s doable. Would everyone rather it be on a screen in the glory of Telluride? Hell, yes. But… COVID.

The Toronto International Film Festival is very different. At least 100,000 people going to see over 150 feature films.

The challenge, by comparison, is mammoth.

I would start by eliminating the press element without regard to what eventually plays in the physical theaters. Or coming from a different angle, setting up a complete TIFF Press Event online without press screenings or junkets of any kinds at the festival.

This would assure distributors that the publicity and marketing goals of the festival would still be achieved, no matter what happens in the real world of Toronto.

The next step is to deal with the Industry section. And there is a very good chance that this could just be cancelled. The whole point is to engage other people face-to-face. Festival as convention. If industry people need to see movies, they should be able to get access from the distributors.

But if you rethink the Press and eliminate the Industry, you’re down to locals and maybe the greatest festival for locals in the world. And that is a giant effort that is well beyond my pay grade. How scores of thousands of Toronto residents and the management of the festival feel about all of this is not something I can project upon reasonably.

But what I suggest, perhaps for both festivals, is to keep the public element intact. Media will be even more focused. Seeing more films would be possible. And all the complications of moving talent and titles around a city would be reduced.

It would be a massive piece of work for all the publicists at all the distributors. But they are killing themselves at these festivals already.

And coming out of these festivals, the product of these festivals that distributors use for a week, a month or the whole award season, would be intact. And the future for these films would still, most likely, be a roll of the dice… but not at the festivals. That, they could control and use as they always do.

And if these festivals end up shutting down in total? The distributors are brought up short and there is no clear opportunity to progress.

Finally, The New York Film Festival, which has traditionally been a festival of festivals, heavily invested in bringing Cannes debuts to America, but with premieres in recent years.

New York has the most interesting opportunity of the group because Cannes isn’t happening and New York can work with Cannes and Venice to bring a lot of that product that may be less commercial and less about award season to New York and America.

I am less comfortable about New York gathering to watch movies in the cathedral than in either of the two other cities. Who knows? But they have another advantage in that they can wait to see where Tell&TIFF settle and decide whether to act in a similar or dissimilar way.

There is also a significant variable in that these are, generally, arthouse films… and that means a different kind of distribution. There could be a radical version of NYFF in which the festival takes place in sync with a VOD availability for the films being played – or not being played – in New York.

If there is a single theme in my thinking, it is to make radical choices. We are in a moment, of being shut in while having a level of technology that was not been available before now, in which it is not only possible to change the experience of these events significantly for this one year, but is, in fact, necessary.

The least successful answer in all cases is for nature to take an ugly course and to leave no footprint for these festivals and the films that intend to use them to the fullest. You can’t ostrich your way out of it. You can’t bravado your way out of it.

If these festivals take difficult action to manage one area of this likely problem, they will be on their way to having building blocks for the rest of their events.

And what does this mean to The Academy Awards? It positions the films in a similar, if not improved way to the norm. And the details of qualifications should be adjusted as needed… not immediately… but in the light of time. The Academy should not be the first to act. That is the cart before the horse.

Let’s keep that cart safe and clean. And next year, hopefully, we will have a vaccine and we will all be so excited to go back to the wonderful traditions of all of these festivals.

I’ve been in lockdown pretty much since March 9, when I returned from the great and glorious True/False Doc Fest. Thirty-seven days. It’s not really that much, but it feels like forever at times.

But when I am on the couch/chair/bed watching something great, time stops and the world is my oyster.

There has been a lot of expected viewing. News, news, news. Junk I like on Bravo as an alternative to electroshock therapy. Binging and waiting for weekly episodes.

My favorite part of this the freeform connection between films that has appeared so often during lockdown.

I went from Once Upon A Time … in Hollywood to Once Upon A Time in America to searching for other Tuesday Weld performances to a long-lost film that I loved as a kid in 1980 called Serial, in which Ms. Weld co-starred with the great Martin Mull and a load of familiar TV faces, because the director was an old-school TV guy named Bill Persky.

Set in late-70s Marin County, where swing was the thing, the film was based on a “novel” by Cyra McFadden that was bound like a school notebook, as I found out years later when I got a copy at a used book store. (Sigh… used book stores.)

The movie, which I paid $12.99 to own, was much as I remembered it. Beautiful people acting stupid in the way I remember friends of my parents acting in Miami Beach in that decade. Sally Kellerman swinging her breasts, Bill Macy as the put-upon middle-aged man, the woman from “Hogan’s Heroes” and another from “Dynasty” and Jerry The Dentist from “Bob Newhart” and Tom Smothers and Peter Horton and even the recently in-the-news Stacey Nelkin as the big-breasted 18-year-old sleeping with Bill Macy who doesn’t look like Woody Allen, but works as a cultural stand-in for the moment.

The film is flawed in many ways. The script and the acting are too often TV glib, even though the atmosphere is highly sexualized… including a turn by the rarely-in-a-comedy Christopher Lee, playing the leader of a biker gang, with then-unexpected tastes. But it was also smart and funny and horribly current on some level. A not very deep rewrite could easily turn this into a thoughtfully funny and raunchy Seth Rogen movie.

But one of the things I remember from the swinging 70s and some of the 80s is the comfortable use of sex in movies. It’s gone. And yes, women were certainly the object of objectification, but if Tom Cruise and Kevin Costner were being honest, they would tell you that their asses were a big part of their appeal in the 80s.

Another movie from that period that was very sexually casual and which I came back to was California Dreaming, a John D. Hancock piece of almost-arty pulp starring Dennis Christopher in the same year as Breaking Away as well as indie legend Seymour Cassel. But most importantly, and the person who guided me back to the film, Glynnis O’Connor, who became a topic of dinner discussion because of “The Boy In The Plastic Bubble.” When this movie came on HBO in 1980 (I was 15 or 16), there was that sweet teenage girl from “Bubble” as well as Ode To Billy Joe and Baby Blue Marine casually dropping her bikini top.

But the film was more than an ingenue being naked on camera. It still fits into that pervy teen movie thing that was at its start and would be resurrected by American Pie in 1999. There was the notion of there being something, uh, European about the whole thing… until Porky’s and The Last American Virgin took over. Remember, La Cage Aux Folles was an arthouse sensation in 1978 and back then, it was sexually edgy. Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre was also in arthouse theaters, showing a Dracula with a much more realistic bite, leading Hollywood’s Warren Beatty from Julie Christie to Isabelle Adjani.

Oh my GOD, I need to find Camille Claudel with Adjani, a movie that moved me to my core. But I digress… which is kinda the point…

The Hunger. Tony Scott’s first feature-length film. What fun watching that one again. Tony is dead. Bowie is dead. Those women. Power and sex. Deneuve at 40, a goddess and a bad-ass. The whole experience is like eating the richest piece of cake ever, covered with drunken whipped cream, with a popper on the side.

This one was Criterion Channel’s fault. It was siting there like your favorite piece of candy, ever, when you are trying so hard to diet. It took me a moment to realize/remember that it was the great Ann Magnuson giving her all in those first seduction and blood scenes.

(Watch Making Mr. Right, which has one of the great comedy performances — as I remember it — ever by Laurie Metcalf, a goofy, sexy turn by Glenne Headly, The Great Magnuson (a downtown legend who got a brief mainstream window), and of course, Malkovich, in one of his first truly goofy performances, as both an uptight nerd and the perfect robot man. A lot of people hated the movie back in the day. But I loved it so much more than Suddenly Seeking Susan, which was the movie that got Susan Seidelman the opportunity, before she crashed with Cookie and She-Devil. ALlthough that reminds me… the BBC version of The Lives & Loves of A She Devil is prime binge viewing with a stunning lead performance by Julie T. Wallace. I so hate the idea of anyone watching any of these things on YouTube. I may have a UK DVD of She-Devil in the garage. Making Mr. Right is an Orion title, so I don’t know when it will turn back up, aside from an overpriced DVD on Amazon.)

Getting further sidetracked before returning to The Hunger, another movie I love, Louis Malle’s 1992 Damage, with Jeremy Irons as its amazing center and Miranda Richardson giving what should have been an Oscar-winning turn as his wife… plus Juliette Binoche as the object of agonized desire and a glorious spin by the then-60-year-old Leslie Caron as her mother. I bought the film digitally on Apple or Amazon and… agony. It looked like a VHS conversion instead of even being made from a print or negative. And it was in the old TV square format. Such a beautiful, subtle piece of cinematography by Peter Biziou, who was between 9 1/2 Weeks and Mississippi Burning on one side of this film and Loncraine/McKellan’s Richard III and The Truman Show on the other. Why Criterion has not done its magic on this one, I don’t know.

The Hunger took me right back to the 8th Street Playhouse where I saw it as an NYU student, young and juiced enough that I could imagine such an adventure, but never nearly hip enough for that room. And all these years later, it is amusing as hell to notice John Pankow and Willem Dafoe as “1st and 2nd Phone Booth Youths.”

And I love watching the lines of clear progression between this film, which is so unique in so many ways amongst Scott’s sixteen feature films, and the world that was to come. Tony Scott was in his late 30s making this first feature, seven years younger than his brother Ridley and six years behind Ridley’s first feature, The Duellists (and Alien and Blade Runner). His films would define the 80s — for better or worse — while Ridley stumbled until Thelma & Louise in 1991.

I could take a bite out of The Hunger… Ten-to-fifteen minutes on a pretty regular basis. I don’t need every frame. I don’t need Cliff DeYoung, who was really kneed in the balls by the rest of that cast and young Mr. Scott. He never had a chance. And Bowie… going after Alice, played by young Beth Ehlers. Amazing.

Another note: Take time to watch Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence all the way through. I think I watched that film like five times in a couple weeks at one point. It was like meditating.

Criterion Channel — yes, I know that many cannot get it in their countries — remains a joy. I had never seriously watched The Bad & The Beautiful until a few months ago on Criterion. And then I got to watch Two Weeks In Another Town, which was a much better Vincent Minnelli behind-the-curtain movie for me. TB&TB is a classic idea of Hollywood power corrupting. The Two Weeks story feels so much more like the Hollywood I know… mental breakdowns, once-greats hanging on, dumb-asses on sets, the distractions that should be easier to see past… dirtier… messier.

I also realized that I had never closely watched Contempt, although it has been at every revival house. Did I write about By The Sea without watching the unofficial original?

Loved It! Of course I did. Loved Fritz Lang in the film and Jack Palance, who was so out of his depth and so not. I’ve never really been a Godard guy. He’s not as smart as he thinks and I’m not as dumb as he thinks. But I am happy to bunk in with most of his 1960s and 1970s films.

And now, my family has driven my train of thought into a tree. So until the next episode…

As we head toward the premiere of Trolls World Tour tomorrow, a wholly different experiment than the rest of the adjustments that have been made to the VOD window in the last month, let’s get some idea of where we are.

The number of titles that have been released in the change-of-plan direct-to-paid-streaming or window-shrinking paid-streaming is almost exhausted unless more are added. Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island lands next Tuesday and that is pretty much that for films that had theatrical runs. (That movie got 4 four full weekends at the box office and was pretty much played out by the March 1 box office cliff.) There is a wave of December titles that would be coming out now regardless of the virus and there hasn’t been a significant change in the pricing or timing on those.

The most dramatic experiment, until tomorrow, the Rental-Only class, which has been Comcast with one film from Lionsgate. None of these titles are currently in the iTunes Top 30 Revenue Producers, while six catalog titles are in that 30, including a package of the 10 pre-JJ Star Trek movies, The Patriot, and Cast Away, all of which are on deep discount.

The Invisible Man, $20 Rental Only 3/20
The Hunt, $20 Rental Only 3/20
Emma, $20 Rental Only 3/20
I Still Believe, $20 Rental Only 3/27
Never Rarely Sometimes Always, $20 Rental Only 4/3

I would love to know the numbers for these releases, but they can’t be very good, in this context.

Second, the group of films with oddball pricing. There are four titles with cheaper Own prices and one title with a one-dollar premium on rental pricing.

The Fittest Sale 3/24 ($12.99), Rental
The Gentlemen Sale Only ($15) 3/24, Rental 4/14
Dolittle Sale Only 3/24, Rental 4/7 ($5.99)
Downhill, Sale Only 3/27 ($9.99), Rental 4/10
The Call of the Wild, Sale Only 3/27 ($14.99), Rental 4/10

Dolittle is the #3 revenue producer on iTunes today, primed by new rental money… Although it has been Top 10 for most of its release. The Fittest, at this lower price, was a Top 10 title on release as an iTunes exclusive and is now off the Top 30. The other two are not Top 30 today.

The third group of titles are those with sped-up dating, but with traditional VOD pricing and rental schedules. Sale Only is $19.99. Rental is either currently or advertised at $4.99 or could vary for still unreleased for rental titles.

1917 Sale Only 3/10, Rental 3/24
Onward Sale Only 3/24, Rental 4/3
Birds of Prey Sale Only 3/24, Rental 4/7
The Way Back Sale Only 3/24, Rental 4/14
Bad Boys For Life, Sale Only 3/24, Rental 4/21
Bloodshot Sale Only 3/24, Rental moved up from “June” to May 5
Sonic, Sale Only 3/31, Rental 4/28

So, 1917 wasn’t off schedule by much when it was released. The film grossed $156 million by March 1 (10 weeks in theatrical) and the virus probably cost it $5-$10 million in domestic. More internationally.

As you can see throughout this list, March 20/24 was the moment when the VOD dating dam broke.

Birds of Prey and Onward, which added Rental revenue this week, Bad Boys For Life, and Sonic (newer, in its second week of availability), are Top 10. The Way Back and Bloodshot had some success charting in their first week.

There is no “evolution.” There is no wave of significant change. There are studios trying things under stressful circumstances. Some will work. Some will fail. But so far, not a single thing has happened that suggests that this changes anything in terms of the traditional windows of theatrical release, no matter how many people dream of it.

Today, we are two-and-half months from the first death from COVID-19 in Wuhan. And things are beginning to start up again in Wuhan and across China.

The first death in America from this virus was on February 29, in Washington state. California: March 4. New York: March 14.

The arc will vary, but two-and-half months means May 15 – June 1 and, one hopes, the first sense of normalcy should return to these hot spots. Another month of finding our feet, and July 1 seems like a reasonable guess at when we can go to a restaurant and maybe see a movie in a theater.

Thing is, America is a big country. And most of the country is just getting their invitations to this horrible, horrible party. Easter is 18 days away and the rotten eggs won’t take that long to be found. Easter seems to be a likeley target date to expect the first deaths in much of the country and for the U.S. toll to blow past the 5,000 mark. (We will be lucky if it’s that low in 18 days… it could easily be double that if New York or L.A. or San Francisco hospitals are overwhelmed.)

That would put much of the country at a July 1 first break date and an August 1 start of relative normalcy.

In the meanwhile, anything that speeds up the process, from any part of the globe, is incredibly welcome. Anything the preening peacock Donald Trump does that helps… incredibly welcome. I am relatively safe and comfortable. But people are dying. People sick with other things will not get the attention they need. Women are giving birth alone in hospitals, scared to death that, no matter how careful, they or their child will be infected. Businesses are closing. Employees who can’t afford to pay for home delivery and tip others are anxious and already eating less than they should. Schools are working to stay connected to the kids, but it is hard. Rents and mortgages are due for many in less than a week as the last paychecks to be expected for a while go out almost as quickly as they come in.

But what about show business?

Even the Chicken Littles are tired. After all, how many times can the sky fall in a month?

Early VOD efforts at increased pricing—$20 for a rental—started last Friday and the fantasy that this could be the New Normal seems dead after just one weekend. (Sky Up!) A lot more on this later in the column.

Exhibition pled its case to Congress to get a carve-out in the $2 trillion stimulus. (They appear to have succeeded.) The dynamic of the future of theater owners is somewhat different now than it might have been 30 years ago with all the consolidation. But no one really wants to see a large percentage of theaters go under, including the landlords and loaning banks. Like so much of the business world, the balance is delicate and not all on the side of the people who have the power to say, “no.” If they say “no” too much, then the people they answer to start saying “no” as well.

The ongoing flaw in the Death of Theatrical argument is that millions love going out to the movies. And those people spend more per person than movies can generate in any other delivery system.

Period.

I often wonder whether media has come to deny this $30+ billion in annual revenue as significant because we, in the media, have become so obsessed with clicks that we now value quantity over quality almost exclusively. If it was argued through, copper would be better than gold, rhinestones better than diamonds, and endlessly rewritten content from the rare journalists who actually do the legwork would be valued over… well… journalism.

The television and streaming business will start having trouble come the fall, not so much this summer. That is when content flow will dry up. As others noted, there is an opportunity to clear out the crap. But expect a fresh wave of game-show reboots and reality shows to have an oversized footprint in September through Thanksgiving, maybe until 2021.

The biggest question in the industry right now is whether HBO Max and Peacock will launch in the midst of this. Theoretically, they can move forward. But like a show about to open on Broadway, there is a lot of shaking down to do once you get into the theater and start selling tickets.

Under these very unique circumstances, both HBO Max and Peacock should launch for free for everyone for their first three months. Simple as that. Limit content to some degree. Don’t launch originals, or instead launch very selectively. But open the gates. No credit card. No period leading to the moment you get charged for a month and forever more. No games. If you can get the app, you can get the content. Just sign up and watch. Until America is feeling like America again and you have created goodwill with 50 million households.

And when the three months is over—say August 1—offer an aarray of ways to join. Meanwhile, they would have harvested a load of intel about who watches what and why they love or don’t love the service.

Thing is, no one wants another hand in their pocket as the well threatens to run dry. The first 10 million customers won’t care. They are still paying for AOL dial-up every month and have no idea. But the next 50 million are paying a lot of attention. Some are cord-cutters. Some are not. But there is one thing that makes everyone happy… free.

What’s scary about this strategy is that Amazon has over 100 million Prime members in America and fewer than 20% use Prime Video, which one of the subscription’s benefits. But both Peacock and HBO Max have more marketable bait than Amazon Prime, even with “Maisel” and “Hunters” and “Boys.”

But we are all locked down with the TV. Something fresh, even if it’s only a well-remembered library, wlll be embraced. Especially for free.

The company with the most to benefit is, yes, Netflix. People aren’t going to cancel their subs, even if finding something you want to watch after spending 40 hours on the app in a recent week will get harder and harder. But better, this is a way for Netflix to not spend a couple billion on production without anyone pointing fingers. And that is the smartest thing the company could do right now. If anyone is in line for a budget haircut, it’s Netflix. This is great cover.

Another potential winner in this situation is… taa-dah… industry unions. The pressure on WGA to figure it all out is off the table, as no one is allowed to sit any anyone else’s table. The SAG/AFTRA contact comes up on June 30. This is the perfect opportunity for the two unions that have a desperate need to re-set the storyline with The Man to sync things up. Of course, the industry-friendly SAG leadership team would have to be willing to get into the fight in a real way. And while the opportunity to make that happen is kind of thrilling, the likelihood of the SAG majority showing any grit on this is kind of depressing.

Over at The Academy, I expect that Dawn Hudson, bolstered by a new contract through at least May 2023, as well as a raise in the face of many failures, will remain reactive instead of proactive and screw things up even further.

Oh, it’s going to be a sick-making day when the HPFA takes a step ahead of AMPAS in the legitimacy of its methods and practices. But all this ruckus about significant changes in the face of Coronavirus goes right up there with the “Popular Oscar.” Why does The Academy Board of Governors insist on appearing to be a bunch of out-of-touch old people who are so desperate for their grandkids to watch the show that they are willing to pay them for their attention?

These are really smart, savvy people. The only rule that should remotely be considered is a one-year abeyance of the rule about screening before being shown on post-theatrical media before qualifying theatrically. And that variation should end six weeks after theaters open up widely again.

As for the 2021 show, I suggest that they spend the next two months begging certain people to produce. (But they spent six months this year begging certain people to produce to no avail.) The problem is growing because it used to just be a time suck. Now. having your name on the show makes you a target. I believe that serious discussions about how to change the whole process should happen, and not just stunts to get someone through their next CEO contract.

The studios have other things to worry about beyond their movies. Disney has a giant problem with Parks. That is their Achilles heel. Big time. Comcast and AT&T have to protect their cable and satellite businesses… although I believe people are change-averse in moments of extreme tension. Paramount and Sony are in wheel-spinning mode, as they too often have been this last few years.

There will be another side to this. Human nature will not be transformed. Selling people stuff isn’t going to become a unique new effort.

But lockdown is a weird sensation. I was traveling a lot around 9/11. Domestic and international. And it is nothing compared to this. There were fears and odd looks and limited availability of lots of things. The feeling after 9/11 will be more like the fear next fall about a recurring wave, still pre-cure. But this… months shut in… good and bad… messes with the mind. About this, the president/fool is correct. But his response to it is childlike and not adult, much less like a leader.

We aren’t close. But let’s not throw people out of the boat now for fear of running out of food next week. We’ll get there. As. my mother used to say, “It’s an experience!”

And now… a more detailed analysis of this past weekend on the VOD side.

We don’t know the actual numbers behind the iTunes or Fandango Top Ten lists. Suffice it to say that the gross numbers are less than you are led to believe. Perspective is offered in that The Gentlemen, The Fittest, and Dolittle are all in the top 8 on iTunes.

But even in the broader picture, here is the point… the only $20 to rent only title to make the Top 10 was… nothing. The Invisible Man (a terrific film, see it!) was the highest ranking film at #13. None of the other $20 to rent titles made the Top 20. And that #13 showing was with the film coming in as the #1 and #2 box office movie in weeks past and as the most headlined title in media story after media story after media story.

I don’t know if Universal will be shy about it, but the financially sound choice would be to flip it over to $20 to buy and $6 to rent this Friday. I would even consider converting the rental buyers from last week to owners. Because this experiment just didn’t work. Disappointment all around, but in the big picture, it would be have the best financial upside for the studio. (I would also plan for a funky theatrical re-release on 200- 500 screens when things open up again… “See the movie that Coronavirus didn’t want you to see with an audience!”)

What was working on iTunes last weekend? $20 to buy. Nothing too unusual. Onward was #1, sale only, coming out early, though 1917, which has been out for sale only for 2 weeks, added rental on Tuesday (3/24) and pushed past Onward immediately. Birds of Prey is the current #3, coming to digital early, offering a $20 sale price only (rental on April 7, delayed from March 24, according to Vulture). #4 is Bloodshot, sale only, no rental until June. Closing out the Top 5 is The Gentlemen, which set a lower sale price at $15 with no rental until April 14.

I’m not suggesting there were not benefits to opening early for these films. But most of those benefits can be attributed to the theatrical marketing campaigns that had either been going for a while or were in the heat of pre-release. But the goal is not to be #1 on iTunes… the goal is to make the most money with your product. (My chop-up of the iTunes Top 20 is at the bottom of this piece.)

Warner Bros. has one of the experimentally dated releases now in digital, The Way Back. It’s #10. $20 for sale. Rental scheduled for May. It’s one of those titles that was not ever going to be a theatrical high flyer, unless it was an awards title, which the studio chose against months ago. I don’t know if the film sold 50,000 units ($1m) or 100,000 or 250,000. But I can read the tea leaves and estimate that it didn’t do much more in digital than it would have in the normal window model.

Whatever my tea leaves say, after one weekend of that experiment, the question of whether Wonder Woman 1984 would try to go direct-to-streaming was answered. “NO!”

I welcome the April 10 release of Trolls World Tour direct-to-digital, in some part because I expect it to confirm the flaw in the thinking in another segment of this discussion. If I were advising Universal for money, I would be begging them to take the one win that is really left for this movie, which is to become a hero to movie exhibitors and kill the digital release. I don’t think they need to be responding to threats by the National Association of Theater Owners. The movie was borderline before, is borderline now, and it will be borderline if they delay and wait for a theatrical release. But they have a chance to really change the story and make the future for theatrical – which they are dependent on – a bit brighter.

That leaves the third tier of day-n-date waiting for a brave sucke… uh, soul to try it out. A big, wide release movie going straight to paid streaming. And for everyone trying to make this a one-size-fits-all, Paramount selling off a movie they didn’t know how to market to Netflix. That ain’t a paradigm shift. That’s as old as the hills. (Anyone want to discuss Slumdog Millionaire?)

It will make my friends in exhibition crazy, but BRING IT ON!!! How I want to be in those numbers, when day-n-date comes marching in!

It used to be the thing that was going to far to compare someone to Hitler. And now, as he prepares to smother thousands of New Yorkers in their hospital beds, calling someone “Trump-like” is a nasty thing. But man, the people who really, really, really want to be right about The Future are very Trumplike. No matter how the facts are stacked and restacked in front of them, they insist that things must change because… well, people have been making these arguments for decades.

You know what? If the world is really ending, great. Let’s all go Wall-E and survive as best we can.

Here is a rundown of the value proposition amongst todays iTunes Top 20 today (3/26):

$20 to buy
Onward
Birds of Prey
Bloodshot
Dolittle
The Way Back
Star Wars 9
$20 to buy, $6 to rent
1917
Jumanji 2
Knives Out
Just Mercy
Spies in Disguise
Ford v Ferrari
$20 to rent
The Invisible Man

$15 to buy
The Gentlemen
$15 to buy, $6 to rent
Bombshell
Uncut Gems
$13 to buy, $5 to rent
The Fittest
$10 to buy, $6 to rent
Midway
$10 to buy, $4 to rent
Contagion
Charlie’s Angels

You know how you were 12 and the entire world was going to notice that zit on your nose and never see you as anything but a troll forever and ever?

That is the spirit that the authors of most of the coverage of Hollywood’s COVID-19 problem are embracing.

I mean… yes, the entire world could end and we could all end up in oxygenated cubbies with skin as pale as our genetics allow, eating highly nutritious meals out of vacuum-packed packages like toddlers. It could happen!

And every major exhibitor could be forced to declare bankruptcy… for the first time since the early 1990s… which is when the multiplex as we now know it took hold, because those exhibitors got out of leases through bankruptcies and rebuilt theaters with a lot more screens with big screens and fewer seats with better sound. How tragic!

For the record, movie theaters have gone through two further paradigm shifts, with digital projection and then enhanced seating pushing the ball uphill, not to mention the emergence of IMAX and the coming, and mostly going of 3D.

For movie journalists, the world is forever on the edge of high drama, because as the old joke goes, the stakes are so low.

And the stakes aren’t low for the people who make their living in whatever area of the industry at whatever time they are under attack. I don’t want to take the suffering that may/likely-will occur lightly. But… perspective.

Disney is the king of the theatrical jungle. Well, last year. But undisputed champs. $11.1 billion in revenue, including $4.7 billion in theatrical rentals on nearly $13 million in worldwide grosses.

So Disney has the most to lose in this COVID-19 drama, right? Probably so. Still, The Parks generated $26 billion in revenue last year. The company’s cable networks generated $16.5 billion. And ABC added another $8.3 billion.

Disney Parks have the very real possibility of losing billions, if not more than $10 billion during this. One month of revenue, even an off-month like March-into-April, is probably $2 billion.

Cable and ABC may actually increase earnings over this period, as there is no other game in town for advertisers, although obviously, the overall amounts being spent will surely be lower, especially for retailers. So maybe breakeven. Maybe a small loss.

Which brings us to the Movie division, which is facing a disruption, at minimum, of four rescheduled movies (Mulan, Black Widow, Artemis Fowl, Soul) which cost about $850 million to produce, would cost about $700 million to market worldwide, and were expected to generate more than $3 billion at the box office between them. At that low end box office estimate, the four films would break even in theatrical and generate profits in all post-theatrical revenue streams, plus ancillaries, plus having great pre-established value, eventually, on the streaming platform.

So of course, the obvious response would be, “Uh… just throw them on the app!” (Did that sound like a brain-damaged Cro-Magnon? It was meant to.)

Let’s do the simplest math. How many subscriptions would Disney+ have to sell to make up for the production cost alone, staying signed up for six months for these four titles? That would be about 18 million.

As far as I can tell, Netflix has never added more than 16 million subscribers in any two quarters… and they are selling to almost every country in the world.

Let’s move on to the “Put them on Pay-per-View” argument. Not a new one. Universal is trying it with Trolls World Tour. But do you know that no film has ever grossed as much as $50 million in PPV/VOD? Not one. And this has been a format for over a decade… and VOD has has a multiple week head-start on DVDs for years now. And yet… no.

But there are people who believe that Trolls World Tour – four years and a bunch of Netflix content since the modestly successful original film – will just casually triple that figure. And how about this comp? Angry Birds surprised a lot of people with a $108 million domestic gross. Three years later, the sequel did $42 million.

Of course, not all the VOD money comes back to the studio either. I’m just being petty.

And magic could happen. Teb million people could pay $20 million for Trolls World Tour and Universal would gross $200 million without spending nearly as much on marketing as with a theatrical release. Nothing close to that has happened in the history of films and streaming. The biggest boxing match in PPV history had five million sign-ups. Only three have ever had more than two million sign-ups. But maybe I am holding up the future with my Luddite ways.

But here, my friends and foes, is something closer to reality. Universal did the math. The cost of holding the DWA movie and doing a theatrical at a later date was probably a loser, with whatever hopes of profit being pretty iffy in either situation. So, they have a brand name—however low-end—and a moment in history, so why not take the chance? Eat shit now or eat shit later. Maybe they make magic. The two bets seem, even from the outside, pretty similar. If they lose $20 million or $50 million… well, who cares? Filmed Entertainment was a $6.5 billion segment of a $34 billion revenue company. $50 million a 1/10 of one percent of Comcast’s revenues last year.

And like Disney, Comcast has a bigger fish frying… their cable division that produces $11.5 billion a year, which is under assault from streaming. They will probably be safer for this period thanks to COVID-19. People are not anxious to change things up when they are under pressure. It is possible that this notion is flipped on its head, especially if we are still stuck in our homes in July. But for now, no one is out installing or uninstalling anything in your house real soon.

The truth is, I am looking forward to hearing the numbers on this VOD effort. The $20 price point is significant. The fantasy of “fight pricing” is completely over. The hope is that “just a little bit more than the cost of a movie ticket in a big city or two tickets in smaller cities/towns” will make people forget the are spending $20 for an iffy sequel while they are also paying $10 or $8 a month for tens of thousands of hours of family entertainment. And people with money to burn will do it. And I may buy The Invisible Man for my wife to watch without reminding her how absurd paying $20 to watch TV is. But I suspect that buyers will be on the margins. And there is no better way to find out than to test it. This is a test. And whatever the results, there will be an answer. Not playing theatrical is highly unlikely to be that answer…. like 10,000:1 against.

I don’t want to beat this to death. I suspect that I will be beating it some more very soon. But, the premise that this is some kind of opportunity for studios to hop off the theatrical window train is nonsensical. It makes sense if you believe in your heart that they all want to get rid of theatrical and were just waiting for the opportunity.

But for all the talk-talk-talk-talk-talk of studio execs and agents for, literally, decades, about saving the cost of marketing (anyone who talks about P&A like prints are a major part of that budget line for a wide release film anymore cannot be trusted) and going direct to consumer, it has never made economic sense.

The problem is not, as people will tell you, that getting people to spend a large amount of money—compared to home entertainment—to go out to movies that are no longer quite the way we remember them from the 1970s and 1980s is too hard and too expensive. But it is hard. And it is expensive. And it is unpredictable. But it is unpredictable in the positive and the negative direction.

The film industry with a theatrical window, a Home Entertainment window, and a permanent streaming window is one business. Creating content for streaming into your home is another. The financials are very different. And the consumer target is completely different. If you can’t see the difference, you shouldn’t be writing articles about it, confusing an easily confused nation of content lovers.

Individual sales of content died as a primary revenue stream about three years ago. Dead. There are still hundreds of millions of dollars in that business. Last year, there was over a billion. Sixteen years ago, $30 – $50 billion.

The Theatrical Window world and the Streaming world are not interchangeable because the math is not interchangeable. Just isn’t. No more than broadcast TV and theatrical… or streaming, for that matter. But media has a very bad habit of not thinking it out. It’s all just another two hours of entertainment to most.

I had a similar conversation about Sundance and other big fests and the streamers. If Amazon or Netflix is spending $6 million an hour for a TV series, why does anyone thing they would flinch with a $12 million bill for a two-hour indie movie? (The question of how long their model of TV episodes at $6 million a pop will last is another discussion.)

Bottom line is that hundreds of millions in produced movies being delayed is not going to close any of the major studios. Not even close. And it certainly isn’t going to make them change their theatrical model. Universal. the studio experimenting with Trolls World Tour, is also the studio that moved one movie eight months and another 13 months to find clear worldwide theatrical windows. But it’s f-ing Trolls that defines the future of theatrical? Are you nuts?

These studios are part of giant companies. None of them want to lose money. Disney is the most vulnerable because of the parks, which will lose a lot of money that will never be recovered. Mulan and Black Widow, with due respect to those who are going to make life-changing amounts of money from those films, are not only a financial blip on the Disney radar, they are troubles with a very good excuse. But Disney doesn’t want an excuse. They want MONEY. And so, they will wait.

But deadlines don’t wait. So media feels compelled to stir up hysteria. Some even believe this horseshit. But only because they refuse to open their eyes. It isn’t a huge challenge to figure out this math.

Is there a day in the future when there will be no movie theaters as we know them now? Maybe. Possibly. But most likely, only at the end of the cycle of original content that costs what is seen as—at whatever moment—a lot of money. When every movie is shot on an iPhone or some tool that is similarly inexpensive, the lines will blur. When the studio business is primarily spending, say, $50 million to release a $10 million movie, the lines might blur. But until then, Universal (and Warners) are making a freaking fortune doing theatricals of Jason Blum movies with budgets under $20 million… a fortune that doesn’t exist in VOD or streaming.

And here is the kick… after studios make money on a release, they have a post-theatrical piece of content that has much more value than a piece of new content almost ever will. To wit, would you rather have Get Out exclusively to sell your streaming service or 20 hours of Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone?

It is possible that COVID-19 is the end of the movie world. Or the theatrical world. Or whatever fantasy your local ink-stained wretch is selling.

But we are nowhere close to that being even a real discussion. Not even close.

No.

It’s not a complicated answer.

COVID-19 isn’t a fart in the wind, which is about what it takes to get media to start screeching about the end of this or the end of that part of the industry. But this isn’t Armageddon either. Not even close. That is, unless it is literally Armageddon and most of us are about to die and some guy in a space vehicle is going to land and find that apes actually rule the planet. (Three years of Trump has been close enough, thanks.)

Every “stupid” journalist who has been drooling for a decade for everything to move to streaming while not remotely understanding the economics is dancing in their foyers (afraid to go out in the air for anything less than the quest for toilet paper), finally ready to be proven right. Ding, Dong, Theatrical is dead!

But this isn’t 1969, kids. It’s 2020. With the exception of the car wreck that is Viacom/CBS/Paramount, the major studios are all major corporations with multiple revenue streams, many of which are not reliant on people leaving their houses to go to the movies, visit a theme park or to buy branded merchandise.

As obnoxious as corporate overlords can be, they are really good at one thing… planning out an extended view of the future. The movie and TV business is too reliant on the mercurial tastes of the public to make this a comfortable skill for the industry in most situations. But right now, with what looks like a four-month and then maybe another two-month window of serious business disruption, the ability of the bean counters to understand how beans will be valued in 2021 and 2022 and not just this quarter (though, of course, they want consistent growth quarter after quarter) is a savior.

Again, I don’t want to underplay the reality. March and April have become a launchpad for a lot of box-office revenue and obviously, summer months May, June, and July are three of the strongest five months of the year. There is money to be lost.

BUT… the argument that this is a moment that suggests we dump the theatrical window because people aren’t going to congregate for a few months makes as much sense as doing “Medicare For All” right now because it will help with COVID-19. It’s just bullshit. That doesn’t make either argument bullshit (though I believe the “everything on streaming” argument is financial armageddon for the industry and only makes sense if you want the entire future of filmed entertainment to be low budget), but both claims are bullshit in the immediate reality.

Here is a bit of 2019 math.
Netflix Gross: $20 billion – $2.6b operating income
Disney Movies Gross Only – $11.1 billion – $2.7 billion operating income

Disney spend about $2.2 billion on production and another $1.5 billion or so on marketing their 12 big releases. And of course, this doesn’t include post-theatrical revenue or ancillaries or park value for Disney. Netflix spent well over $10 billion on production and over $2 billion on marketing to be Netflix.

But here is the thing… theatrical is not the biggest part of the revenue or profit streams at Disney. It is the smallest segment of the $69 billion a year in revenue created by the company. And yet, by itself, it is still a more profitable business than Netflix right now.

This is not a slam of Netflix. The company will eventually start scaling its spending to its revenues. But wild spending is how they have built this era of their remarkable, industry-changing machine and they are playing out that idea. God bless.

But theatrical is one of the areas that is easiest for Disney to deal with at this moment, even with COVID-19 messing up their schedule over the next 18 months (by messing up the next 4-6 months). Their big financial problem is the parks and that isn’t going to be fixed quickly. $26 billion a year and it is not hard to imagine $10 billion of that evaporating off this year’s P&L.

On the other hand, we don’t know what the consequences of this will be in other areas. Will cord cutting slow significantly as people stop caring about the cost of what is coming into their homes and just crave consistency? OR will cord cutting speed up because people have so much time on their hands, they can focus on making the move? But will they be slowed by not being able to get faster internet installation into their homes during this turmoil? We don’t know the answer.

With Peacock pushed to April and HBO Max pushed to May, have Comcast and AT&T missed their big opportunities to sell new products to America at a time when we can all use the free trial period to dig into the content? OR will people be so sick of Netflix and Hulu and Amazon Prime that new content will be more valued and must-get than it is right now? We don’t know the answer.

Will delays to the major sports leagues and movies and live events and human interaction in general lead to a fear that will take many extra months to overcome or will people rush back into life with an never-before-seen aggression when they feel safe sometime this summer? It could be the greatest July-October ever… or a sluggish one. We don’t know the answer.

Here is what I do know. If Mulan cost $200 million, the opportunity to get to $1 billion worldwide means that if Disney pushes its luck and it only does, say, $400 million, they left $250 million or so in returns on the table. This $70 billion annual revenue company can afford to eat the $100 million loss it may take this quarter if it means $250 million more in a few months… or 7 months… or a year.

Universal had led in this regard, first pushing the new Bond movie to its “natural” November slotting and then, under pressure with an even bigger franchise, pushing F9 and entire year to 2021. Here is the news, dumb ass… they aren’t doing that as a show of weakness in theatrical. It is a show of strength and how important the billion dollars in grosses mean in the ecosystem of a big movie.

Would I delay an indie film? Not by a day. (Well, if it’s next week, maybe… but not after.) I would push hard to promote the idea that it is being made available to audiences regardless of COVID-19. I would cut the VOD cost to try to push a bigger buy rate at this moment of attention to being stuck at home. But the indie theatrical world is a different beast than wide release.

And as I posted on Twitter the other day, the fantasy of Frozen 2 going on Disney+ early being a huge moment in distribution… check the facts. Disney is waiting, specifically, for their 17-week contractual window to end before pushing to Disney+. So the only window they are collapsing is their own DVD/VOD window/A d why? Because this is an opportunity to sell more Disney+ subscriptions and Frozen 2 is the best bait they have available to them right now. If they had the launch of Season 2 of “Mandalorian,” this wouldn’t be happening.

So journalists, do us all a favor and stop talking to agents who are screaming, as they are always screaming, about the end of the world. Screenings are cancelled, so embrace it. Studios, get good at streaming delivery to journalists so your content can be reviewed easily. Academy, start streaming movies to your membership… like you have for months… and teach those who aren’t on board how to work an AppleTV.

I could get further into the math of the future of streaming and theatrical, but that will wait for another day.

Be careful out there. Take care of yourself and you will be taking care of everyone. Use social media to listen, not just scream (except about Trump). And let’s enjoy this pause in our lives and get ready to seize the day when it’s safe to kiss your grandma again.

DAVID-55

There is something sad about a bad Pixar movie.

Like so many things Disney, Pixar is going through a generational change in the post-Lasseter era. The place is still loaded to the gills with talented people. But when you see a movie like Onward, you realize that something or someone was missing.

Onward is not a painfully bad film. Not at all. But it is painfully mediocre. It looks and feels like a DreamWorks Animation film, which is not a natural insult, but does speak to the idea that it doesn’t feel unique as Pixar films so often are.

Then you add a great voice cast, most of who, are doing “cartoon voices.” Basically, they were all – except Tom Holland – doing “louder, faster, funnier,” except it wasn’t. And as one sifts through very familiar voices that don’t seem themselves, you realize that a part of the Pixar brand has been perfectly cast actors pretty much playing themselves. Don’t get me wrong, I worship the ground that June Foray and Mel Blanc and Maurice LaMarche and Tom Kenny (amongst so many) walk on. But that is a style of voice acting you don’t get with Pixar. Even when Richard Kind did Bing Bong in Inside Out, it was a performance, but it sure was Richard from the very first groan. Here, I was trying to figure out from the get go why Julia Louis-Dreyfus was doing “Midwestern Mom Comedy Voice.” I wanted to hear her as her interpreting the character. And why was Chris Pratt doing Josh Gad when they could have just gotten Josh Gad and gotten all kinds of unexpected colors. Even Octavia Spencer… She snuck herself in a little, but mostly was caught acting. I love all these actors… but I wanted what they bring that is special: themselves.

Then you get to the movie, which I won’t spoil. But the story is a classic notion of self-discovery… but so simple that it may have been better suited as a short.

For Pixar, which has been so much more sophisticated and demanding of the audience than cartoons are supposed to be, there were very low stakes. The opportunity to meet your father who died before you can remember is a big heart-tugger. And yeah, they tug. But why does it matter so much to THESE brothers? What was missing in their souls? I don’t know. They seem incredibly well-adjusted, albeit teens.

There are movies where I absolutely am squirming in my seat trying to figure out why certain choices were made. Not here. It was solidly predictable. Well made. Great actors. But I wanted to truly be surprised.

Even the choice to set it in this oddly semi-magical not-self-aware world felt like someone forgot to cut that part in a meeting. There were gags to meet the challenge… but they were just gags. A mushroom house is only interesting if there is a reason why people live in a mushroom house. This was more like The Bradys of Magic Town. Sometimes there were juxtapositions. Sometimes there weren’t.

I loved the little pink pixies that I won’t describe more of because they are so fun.

But I felt from start to finish like I was watching a skillfully made film that wasn’t magic. Can’t throw a rotten tomato… but not a fan. And I have felt that magic, repeatedly, from Pixar shorts. I am not a cruel taskmaster on this.

I know nothing about the production of this film. But as I was watching, I was thinking, “Would Lasseter have spoken up and moved them in a different direction?” My guess is yes. Whatever kind of perv he might be, his track record as a producer is breathtaking… much better than Weinstein or anyone else this side of Kevin Feige. There is a communal process to developing and building these films at Pixar. And this time, something seems sorely missing.

So now, I wait for Soul…

In the early evening of Sunday night, March 1, about 12 days after cutting the cord, there is a headline in my e-mail inbox. AT&T has yet ANOTHER offering for streaming. How many ways can one company flip-flop on their plans for The Future?

But seriously… this is becoming a real problem for AT&T, as the people who have been cord-cutting up until recently have been focused on the details of making this choice, and when you significantly change your offering four times in a year, there is a loss of trust that becomes more and more corrosive.

Still, as someone who is in the early stages of being a cord cutter, my family and I still want to have easy access to more than we could ever consume. We are greedy. And we are willing to pay a reasonable price. So digging into the “AT&T TV” offering (that’s the name, don’t get to used to it!), I went…

This is for the XTRA plan. That’s almost all the programming they have. That first three months is with free premium channels, which adds $54 in months 4-12 and then goes nuts, up to $186.49 in the second year to which this program commits you.

There is an offering for internet access at a discount from what I pay now, $40 a month for fiber optic for 12 months and then up to $60 in the second 12-month commitment window. That would save $240 in a year… except that they have a new $10-a-month fee for the modem/wifi, so that eats the entire savings. (Without getting internet in the same package, the monthly cost in the first year rises $10, but in Year 2, is exactly the same.)

The first year of this whole package is a wash, pretty much, with the set-up I already have. What is attractive about this is what seems to be a more convenient set-top box with a single remote doing all of the work, and no need to flip to HBO or Netflix on another app. But there is another catch to that. There is an equipment fee of $360 for boxes for each TV. That can be paid upfront or monthly over the course of the first year, the point being that the Year 2 cost includes that $30 a month falling off the bill. So if you stretch that cost out over two years instead of one, the monthly cost in Year 2 is a bit over $200 a month.

I am having déjà vu. BAD déjà vu.

The increased cost from where I am now would be about $850 over two years or about $35 a month for those 24 months.

Is this offering worth it?

Well… (sigh)… I’m paying $20 a month for Comedy Central and the Nickelodeon channels on Philo and that feels insane… but I want to watch those shows. (That $20 is included in my monthly calculations.) For better, both of those channels would be on the system with AT&T. HBO too. Integrated. Easier. Better remote.

Just because there is a more complex remote doesn’t mean the interface will be as good as YouTube TV or others. I did a trial of Fubo last week to watch the NFL combine (not available on AT&T TV, either), and I loved how they did forwarding (you could see the show as you moved forward in 30 second chunks… so much better than anyone else), but what will AT&T TV offer? No idea. And it is super-odd how little detailed info is readily available in this pitch. But it’s what it is.

There are other benefits for brand new AT&T subscribers in the form of up to $250 in gift cards. And other concerns, like the mention of the upcoming HBO Max as something that will make “special offers” to AT&T TV subs… but not free access… but HBO is currently priced at the same monthly prices as HBO Max and that is built in, so won’t you feel completely screwed if they want to add more to your bill for the exact cost equivalent?

You can cancel this new AT&T TV service within 14 days without a penalty. So I think I have to do that. Because the real question for my household is whether the improved remote and, one hopes, a more streamlined experience with all the channels, is worth a buck a day for the next couple years. It may be. It could just as easily not be.

But I have to say, AT&T makes it hard. It’s hard to trust them on consistency right now. It’s hard to look at the second year explosion of cost and not be angry and feel that you will be screwed.

The month commitment for two years is, simply $165.24 a month for 4fourTVs at the XTRA level. ($5 a month for every TV past the first for the equipment, so you could get it down to $150 a month for one TV.) This is just too high in 2020.

$130 a month… maybe $125 a month… and this thing becomes a real hit.

The journey to a box-free television life continues.

There is something almost as exciting about gathering up all the DirecTV hardware all over the house as there was in having it installed. It’s all gone to FedEx (no remotes requested) for free delivery back to the home ship. Shelves are more open. Fewer wires float around our TVs.

The reality for my family is that we still want access to everything. And everybody’s everything is something else. For us, it’s all the movie channels, all the broadcast networks, cable news, cable kids shows, and the top cable channels. That last one got more complicated than expected.

Our baseline of choice is YouTube TV. We have four TVs in our home, so if we want to have all of them on – very rare, but it happens – they are really the only choice. So here is our new monthly bill.

YouTube TV $49.99
Showtime $11
Starz $9
AMC Premiere $5
Sundance Now $7
Epix $6
HBO Now $15
Philo $20
TOTAL: $123

After a few days of settling into the YouTube TV life, I realized that Comedy Central and Nickelodeon were not part of YouTube TV. I watch The Daily Show and the David Spade show every day they air and as much as I craved my weekly Amy Schumer Show or Broad City, I now find myself looking forward to the weekend Nora From Queens. And my son is into a couple of the shows on Nick, though truth be told, he would live without them. Me, not so much.

So I took another dip into the small bundle delivery companies. In the couple weeks since this cordless journey began, AT&T TV Now (they need to pick a frickin’ name and stick to it) had improved its number and added the Viacom networks. And HBO/Cinemax is part of the package. Their monthly…

ATT TV Now w/HBO/Cinemax $80
Showtime $11
Starz $11
Epix $6
Extra Movies $5
TOTAL: $111

Take Sundance Now and AMC Premiere off of the YouTube TV bundle and they are the same monthly price, but without having to have a second app for Viacom and with Cinemax, which HBO Now does not include (which will be moot in a couple of months, when HBO Max arrives).

With that, the AT&T TV Now free trial begins.

It took less than an hour to decide to stick with YouTube TV. The interface was plainly inferior… at least for me. We are an AppleTV family and on that platform, there is no fast-forward or rewind available with live streaming TV. There is something cool about being able to stroll through “stations” on the app, but because you get no control of the line-up of stations, it is much like switching channels in the 1980s… going past a lot of stuff you have zero interest in seeing.

Also… I don’t trust that the AT&T TV Now program and pricing will remain stable. I just got out of a very long relationship with DirecTV and one of the keys to us staying together was stability with incremental improvements. There were channel numbering changes that still irritate, but mostly, things stayed put.

The AT&T TV Now free trial made it two days. Cancel.

Beyond that, there are still some serious frustrations in this process. If you want the Viacom cable nets, there are very limited options. Philo is a cheap way to get a small bundle at $20 a month, but $20 a month for the Viacom nets feels like a lot of money in this ecosystem. Why doesn’t YouTube TV have Viacom cable channels in its line-up? Probably money. Make it a $6 a month option? I’d be all over that.

Other quirks show up. Like if you held onto a network show on YouTube TV for a week and want to do a two-hour binge after the next episode drops, you get to deal with ads that can’t be passed. Worse, the ads on the show are the same five network promos over and over and over again, not unlike the bad old days of cable and satellite VOD. There are now a series of NBC shows I will have an involuntary vomit reaction to after seeing the same ads so many times in a hour or two. This is good for no one.

Being on the AppleTV box all the time also reminds you of how little you are clicking on other apps you are paying for monthly and how you would prefer them to work. For instance, why does HBO Now not offer up the most recently aired new shows, especially when we are all trained to do appointment viewing with HBO? If I have time, I may wander around the HBO Now site, looking for something to consume. But on Sunday night, I want to go on there, see what is new or when it is coming online… period. Why do I need to click through three or four windows to find out (and still not really know for sure)?

That brings up time zone programming. I probably could fix this by cheating somehow. But with DirecTV, I consistently had shows sitting on my DVR three hours before their first West Coast appearance. HBO, Showtime, Comedy Central, Bravo, etcetera. No more. This is not a deal breaker, but my biggest question is, “Why?” Isn’t this The Future? If I am getting shows, even scheduled shows, pretty much on demand, why does CBS or HBO or anyone really care whether I get it at 5pm or 8pm? Isn’t the goal to get me to watch it, as opposed to get me to jump through hoops?

And don’t even get me started on the AppleTV remote… or do. Next time.

I didn’t know exactly what to expect from The Invisible Man when I sat down. The ads told me that the woman at the center, played by the always-compelling and more-interesting-than-your-average movie star, Elisabeth Moss, was not imagining it all. They told me that, eventually, others would suffer the wrath of the man formerly known as visible and that he was a manipulative prick. They told me she would fight back.

Okay. Did they give away too much? Could I predict what was going to happen in every act?

Lights down. Film starts. Our hero is in bed with the man we assume will torture her for the rest of the film. She wakes up. She moves away from him very carefully. I won’t play out the sequence, but what doesn’t happen is the filmmaker showing us much about him. That would be the normal play. We know he will end up being invisible somehow… probably not just in her imagination. But unless we have been misled, he isn’t going to be the center of the film. So we need to know… No, we don’t.

The house is very Sleeping With The Enemy, circa 2020, meaning lots of cameras and keypads and ways for him to control her. But what we don’t get from 1991 is the guy. This is post-feminist movie feminism. Fuck the guy. He is the asshole bad guy. He doesn’t deserve the screen time. All we need to know is how she feels. And I am not being facetious. Another controlling male asshole is not interesting. But she is complex.

We are in a movie that is very much a genre piece, but loaded with the unexpected. This woman isn’t worried about whether she has the towels right. She is 100% clear on the game that she is stuck in and she wants out, even if her trauma from this idiot is still controlling her life.

Let me note, before moving forward, that the film is very nicely shot for a Blumhouse production. It looks like a studio movie. It is clean. The shots are simple and compelling. This director is not trying to prove he can direct.

The other advantage of the way writer-director Leigh Whannell chooses not to set things up is that we are piecing together details through the rest of the first act, as our hero, Cecilia, hides out.

The end of the first act is the element set up in the ads and trailer. Her evil ex has left her a nice chunk of money, suggesting all will be okay. But we know, thanks to the ads, that the invisible asshole is coming to make her life hell.

I won’t spoil anything, but throughout the second act, I was surprised by small turns that were taken. After all, an invisible man with a lot of time and money has all kinds of crazy power. We have no idea what he really wants, learning his motives increasingly as the movie goes along. Whannell doesn’t go creepy-pervy, offering moments of invisible POV, but not the leering stalker kind, even when we are POVing two women asleep in their underwear.

When I read through the Rotten Tomatoes list of reviews, I saw one person wrote, “The Invisible Man lacks for truly terrifying moments.” I don’t know what this person’s standard is, but I wondered to myself if they complained that the rape in Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible wasn’t hard enough to watch.

What makes The Invisible Man work, in spite of being weirdly old-fashioned, aside from its politics, is your relationship with this woman, Cecilia. She is so fragile. She is so full of self-doubt. But she is a fighter. And the people she chooses to be around are all fighters. The idea of being desperate to prove something that no one else can see and not seeming insane is a great one. But smartly, she isn’t just trying to prove she isn’t nuts. She is motivated on a personal level as well. And that keeps it interesting.

This movie also takes its time from start to finish. There are a few bumpy beats. But there are also expected, cliche beats that we know are coming that Whannell simply decides to let pass and an instant, the better idea sneaking up on us right in front of our eyes.

I was impressed. I am pretty sure I will stop and watch it when it shows up on the dial a number of times, wanting to dissect certain sections. It’s not high-level Hitchcock or De Palma or Alex Garland or Verhoeven, to whom the film owes a great debt, although it chooses never to be as joyously perverse and Verhoeven. Ii is also like an inverse Hollow Man, even though the man is still the invisible one. That film loved its gags. That film loved its perversions. This film is about a sane woman who really wants to move past all that after realizing how crazy and dangerous her genius romance is.

There were a bunch of turns that I didn’t anticipate and that is a lot of fun for someone who sees as many movies as I do. There are plenty of movies with great ideas that don’t deliver. There are movies that deliver on their limited ideas. This film has an interesting idea on top of a classic genre idea and gave me something I hadn’t seen before and had fun chasing along with.

I was planning to cut the cord a year ago. My DirecTV bill was around $180 a month and they announced that they were going to raise the price another $10 a month. DirecTV Now (as it was then known) was around $50 a month. HBO was free with my AT&T unlimited phone plan. Showtime and Encore and Cinemax would add another $30 to my streaming plan. So what was I thinking, hanging on to DirecTV?

I was a happy DirecTV customer for about 20 years. I switched to DirecTV from cable when they added local channels. In Los Angeles, we were in that first wave. And I wanted Sunday Ticket, the NFL access program that meant I could watch my favorite team at home every week instead of going to sports bars at 10am on Sundays. In 1994, it was $139 a season. (Currently, Sunday Ticket is $289 and $389 if you want Red Zone or streaming.) I first signed up in 1997.

I installed those early DirecTV antennas with one wire coming down to my apartment myself (badly). As the service expanded with more valuable complications, the antennas changed and DirecTV installed them. I think I have had four or five over the years.

In the early days, the DVR was actually a TIVO. Then it was branded in-house. Then the box became a product that we leased, instead of owned. The boxes were the size of a small DVD player, one for each TV. I had external hard drives in my living room and bedroom to expand the amount of space on those DVRs (which would only ever work with the specific DVR it was set up with, so when those DVRs went bad, all the content was lost).

The internet brought home sharing, with the DVRs on a network. And soon, a central DVR with two terabytes of space that serviced all the TVs with only a small box (8′ by 5″) connected to each TV.

And of course, my relationship with DirecTV lived through the transition from square TVs to HD wide screen… then 1080… then 4K… and broad VOD. But one thing about DirecTV… they always demanded to be paid for all kinds of little things. My “Premier” package is $170. Add on $9 a month for a protection plan for the equipment I lease. $10 a month for the centralized DVR, plus $3 a month to use it and $7 each for added TVs. For my family, that’s $44 a month, or more than 25% added to the fee for Premier. At least they stopped charging for HD and local channels, which they did for years.

Last year, I was going to cut the cord and was offered a deal that took it down to under $100 a month. And I stayed. There are limitations, but basically, I have been happy with the service and have used it for a couple decades, through thick and thin.

Last week, I found out that $40 of that discount had expired. On top of that, I updated my AT&T wireless account for more data service freedom—I was one of the early “unlimited” wireless service customers who eventually found out that the service was not actually unlimited. Still irritates—and found out that the new wireless deals didn’t include HBO, for which I had been getting a monthly credit on my DirecTV bill. So that was another $13 hike coming up.

I called again. Again I was sent to a special operator. The bill this month was $173. They would cut it to $140. I said, “Turn it off.”

That’s a scary moment. The end of a relationship. I wouldn’t call it an abusive one, either. It was too expensive, but I got a lot out of it. Access and convenience.

For many years, I would do the math in my head and figure, “Okay… that’s $30 too much a month, but it’s only $360 a year and we waste so much money on nothing and we really use this and it works well for us, so… okay.” But two things changed in the last year or two for me.

We finally got fiber optic internet at the house and this means that I don’t have to worry about the quality of the streaming experience. There will be a day when something goes wrong and I will be irritated, but basically, our home internet access is close to perfect. Also, over these years, we had most of the nooks and crannies of the place – a 1908 building with a lot of cement that blocks signal – either hard-wired or connected via wi-fi extenders. This was a function of streaming services and videogaming that have been more and more hungry for consistent connections.

Here is a list of what is hooked up in our home:
3 hard-wired televisions
3 hard-wired Apple TVs (more on how we made that choice later)
1 hard-wired PS4
2 hard-wired DVD players
1 hard-wired tv sound box
2 hard-wired wi-fi extenders
1 hard-wired work computer

1 wifi-connected television
1 wifi-connected AppleTV
1 wifi-connected PS4
5 wifi-connected Alexa products
6 wifi-connected lamps
2 wi-fi connected iPads
3 wi-fi connected smart phones
1 wifi-connected Ring doorbell

Guest wi-fi
And all the streaming on the TVs and sometimes, the portables.

That’s a lot to rely on when your wi-fi goes out every time it rains hard… even in Southern California, where it only rains occasionally.

Second, the small package streaming offerings became legitimate. Years ago, you may have read me raging against start-up companies that sought to sell streaming access to local stations by manipulating the rights of broadcasters. I consider that stealing – no matter how much broadcasters have taken advantage over the decades – and never wanted a part of that.

In the year since I originally considered cutting the cord, the small package streaming world has gotten less attractive, not more. The tech has improved in some cases. But the pricing has gotten worse, unless you are looking for the most limited packages. Playstation Vue, which my 2018 research would have made my #1 choice, has closed shop. DirecTV Now has devolved into AT&T TV Now. Prices have gone up, coming closer to echoing the cable packages. Obviously, if you want less content, you can pay less. But my family wants all the movie channels.

And so, we have cut the cord. The savings, as it all works out, are about $20 a month. Saving $240 a year isn’t bad… but against the expenditure of $1300+ a year for service, it already feels like we are back to, “maybe the same old thing is worth a little more money.”

This first few days have been interesting… but that conversation is for the next entry.

I’ve been anxious to write this column… and avoiding it… for a week.

The biggest problem is that I don’t want to be guilty of what most of the writing on the Parasite win has been… a clear reflection of a predetermined set of beliefs that would have been reflected in a specific way, regardless of the result.

A few writers have been cautious. Most told us what was right about The Academy because of this win and would have told us what was still wrong with The Academy if something else had won. (A few were just thrilled and bless them for being happy beyond the constraints of intellect.)

I remained stubborn and wrong about the conclusion until it was proven. It’s happened before.

I should have flipped completely when a few middle-aged and older white men told me that they had decided to vote for Parasite because they love the movie and it was a much more interesting Oscar night story than 1917 or anything else. Switching votes is a clear signal. Like everything else, a few voices don’t make that the narrative. But like a similar hum that made it clear late in the game that Crash would push aside Brokeback Mountain, I should have taken it one notch more seriously. I believed, in both cases, in the traditional… that homophobia was going to win this day in 2005 and that the International Film win would block the way for Parasite this year.

So the question remains… what did happen? What events coalesced? Are we witnessing change or something more familiar?

I have heard and read a lot of theories. Sadly, one was sold by The Academy itself, which is such a breach of propriety they should be deeply embarrassed by the choice to do so. (No longer a feature of Academy leadership.) Of course, their answer is that they are responsible for this popular outcome, as the 2020 program brought in more international members… which avoids the fact that the expansion of membership was not presented as an expansion of international membership until the last year or so (after most of the media avoided noticing for years) and even then, there is no acknowledgement that 2020 has failed for Americans of color in the industry.

But how have movies won Best Picture in the last 11 Oscar seasons, since the expansion? (History before that is not really relevant to this conversation.) I count three ways. (Feel free to add, “the competition wasn’t very strong to many of the years.)

1) It’s THE Movie – Start to finish, the movie is inevitable. This is one of the classic roads to a Best Picture win, though it has become almost extinct since the expansion to more than 5 BP nominees. In the 11 seasons since the expansion, I would say that only Seasons #2 and #3 have any real claim to having a start-to-finish leader (The King’s Speech and The Artist). Of course, there were competitors and there are people who seriously felt The Social Network would win over The King’s Speech… but King’s Speech went into the TIFF as a frontrunner and Social Network made people doubt it, but then King’s Speech asserted itself. It also benefited heavily from Oscar Winning Method #3. All that said, in these last 11 years, there has been no Schindler’s List or Rings 3 or Chicago, which overwhelmingly seemed destined to win from Day 1.

2) The Default – The Solid, Respected, No-Conflict (in the Academy) Choice. Spotlight. 12 Years A Slave. Green Book.

3) The Whip. When one non-BP category becomes the clear winner and it leads to the BP win. The Hurt Locker & Kathryn Bigelow. Argo & The Affleck “Snub.” Birdman and Iñárritu. The Shape of Water and Guillermo del Toro.

Aside from Parasite, these categories – which obviously have some mix-match to them – leave out only one BP winner since The Expansion, Moonlight. To be clear, this happened organically, for me, in the process of writing this. It was not my expectation. But it’s also not very surprising.

In all 11 case studies, there are mixtures of The 3 Categories. Only The Artist, Argo, and Birdman are really without a showcased moral cause (like stuttering or homophobia or racism or post-traumatic stress syndrome). But I don’t think being the issues in these other 8 films drove them to Oscar. 12 Years A Slave, obviously, covers one of the most horrible moments in world history… but again, though the movie is brilliant, I don’t think that was the key to the win. The Academy wasn’t standing up to the Catholic Church by selecting Spotlight.

And so, with Parasite and Moonlight, there are elements of the other Categories in their wins. Both films have enormously appealing directors, though Barry Jenkins didn’t take home Best Director. Both films had a solid, unexpected constituency – older white voters – from early on at Telluride, though not quite enough to be The Default or to be THE Movie from the start.

What both movies did have, from early on, was a strong moral argument being made in both social media and the press (the other media) throughout the season about the value of their potential wins. And in both of these cases, those arguments often went negative about other films and about Academy membership.

It may or may not be a coincidence that both of these wins occurred while #OscarSoWhite was being thrown around. In the case of Moonlight, it followed the season in which #OscarSoWhite was originated. This season, with Parasite, there was one nomination amongst the 20 actors for an actor of color plus no female Directors nominated, with only Bong Joon-Ho representing non-white color.

Another element of this is that the films that seemed to be the primary competition for the eventual winners and, in both cases, seemed to leap to the front of the pack from the first day they were shown, did not have an answer to the “too white” attack OR to the kind of emotional energy that Moonlight and Parasite built to late in the season.

I don’t think the late accusations that 1917 overlooked the Black contribution to the UK’s WW I effort meant much. But 1917 is an almost completely white movie. You can’t really avoid it. La La Land had non-white characters featured… but in the end, it was a movie about a white girl and a white guy.

What happens a lot in Oscar races, in my view, is that there are dozens of moments of opportunity/danger and no one knows which elements will become keys or just pass by. This is one of the reasons why the season is so dense and repetitive. FOMO. No one wants to be left out of anything, even if that thing is minor, because you never know when that turns out to be a turning point for some unexpected reason.

It’s a very complex idea, trying to measure how negative energy affects the Oscar race. In my view, this was the fourth season of negative arguments having a major footprint in the award season. The seasons with the most negative noise were Moonlight/La La Land and Green Book/Roma. It was a split decision, in terms of a win and a loss. But Roma was never fully the cause of the anti-Green Book group, which may have been the reason why Green Book could not be brought down. But both of the “anti” films are still mocked beyond reason.

One of the things that is interesting about both Moonlight and Parasite is that they became the most positive of the campaigns. In ways both similar and different, they became the positive story in their seasons that voters – white and old and male and otherwise – decided to vote for. (One angle that I hate is the attempt to claim that any Oscar winner somehow got there without the majority group in The Academy, regardless of whether that majority should exist or not. It both insults and misreads older white men and insults and misreads women and POC, assuming they vote in a monolithic way that squeezes past, somehow, older white men. It’s bullshit.)

In the case of Moonlight, its season competition was not exactly Avatar against The Hurt Locker, but the box office disparity was not dissimilar. La La Land was a massive hit… the 2rd highest grossing non-animated musical of all time at the time. It was a bigger hit than Chicago and the biggest non-animated musical not based on a Broadway show in history. Moonlight had grossed $23 million worldwide at the time it won.

But the argument was made – and still is – that La La Land was not daring… just another massive hit original musical made for the big screen. Absurd. And don’t even get me started on the original choices in the filmmaking itself. It wasn’t reckless to not like the film… but claiming it was easy was to take it someplace recklessly unfair.

All that said, Moonlight is beautiful and poetic and daring. I am in agreement with all the positive arguments about Moonlight. And I still think that Naomie Harris was robbed. (The winner of Supporting Actress was the always great Viola Davis and so no one complains about that one.)

A24 pushed hard for Moonlight and in all categories. As a result, they got 8 deserved nominations and played deeply to all Academy fields.

How much of the negativity around La La Land, much of which was attached to positive arguments for Moonlight, help Moonlight win? We will never know. But in the year after #OscarSoWhite, it was the first time we had really seen this form of a disqualifying argument. It wasn’t about a specific flaw or incident. It was about everything that La La Land was about… so it was virtually impossible to answer without sounding defensive and/or racist.

Even if La La Land took, say, a 10% Academy voting hit because of the push in media and social media, in order to win, Moonlight needed to be embraced in a positive way by a large percentage of Academy voters. And that achievement suggests that A24 and Barry and the entire team got the voters excited about the prospect of their film winning. It became the best story of that season.

This is where it is always tricky, as people seem to want everything to be, not ironically, black or white. If you believe that Moonlight was a good thing and Green Book was a bad thing, the answer in your eyes is not in the subtle shifts created by the circumstances of each season, but the “need” to hold a greater meaning that defines progress or regression.

In time, moments that actually are a shift in the mindset at The Academy become clear and most are just very specific moments in Academy history. After 11 years of The Expansion, I think it is completely legitimate to assume that there is a disadvantage in being too successful at the box office. Of course, that doesn’t mean that one of the Top 3 box office grossers amongst BP nominees will not win someday. Who knows? (No one) Maybe next season. But when something repeats for 11 seasons, especially after a very long history of only the top box office grossers winning, you can start to assume something real has changed.

(My personal assessment is that The Expansion added lower-box office, higher-quality movies to the equation and allowed Academy voters to remove the “wasted vote” yoke that narrowed the idea of what could win in years past. No matter what the box office, if you can get yourself nominated, you could be the winner.)

Likewise, we have seen three International film nominees/winners nominated for Best Picture in these last 11 seasons. One has won. Trend? No way to know today. I would say that a season with two International nominees would be far more indicative of the influx of international voters causing a permanent change of tone than this 1 win.

And we really have no idea what the impact of Netflix will be on The Oscars going forward… or whether Apple or Amazon or HBO Max or Peacock will push more than two streaming nominees into Best Picture in the same season. So far, it is just Netflix. They have gotten in with 2 relatively cheap films and one massively expensive drama. The math can be debated. But none of these players can’t afford to push their direct-to-streaming (with qualifying run) films into the Oscar race. What happens then? And now that voters are used to Netflix being in the game, does comfort breed comfort or contempt? Only time will tell us.

But Netflix is a digression in this piece…

Bong Joon-ho reminds me of Guillermo del Toro. It’s hard not to fall in (non-romantic) love with these guys. (Maybe romantic for some.) Brilliant, kind, funny, and super-passionate about film. Part of the Parasite win was Bong immersing himself in the Los Angeles scene for months. It never felt awards slutty. And no one got bored of him.

And the 1917 loss was not just about the movie or the negativity but about Sam Mendes, who I quite like and find surprisingly down to earth.. but he isn’t Bong and he was not as accessible as Bong (in part because he only finished his film in early November). 1917 also suffered from being written off, sometimes illogically, as nothing more than a single-shot stunt. It also suffered from coming out late in that most Academy voters probably saw it on a DVD or streaming onto their TV, which is far from the experience of seeing it on a large screen.

That said, I believe that Parasite won and not that 1917 or any other movie lost it. As one voting friend insisted to me, Parasite was the better story. And I think that is right.

We get so caught up in the the idea that everything is political, but I believe that The Academy is uniquely apolitical, in the way politics is about the outside work and meaning. It is very political internally. But I go back 40 years and I don’t see a single Best Picture winner that is acutely a statement on the politics of the world. I don’t think that changed this year.

So… why did Parasite win?

There are many reasons, but it became The Story. You may have preferred another film, but the person you wanted to see on the Oscar stage multiple times was Bong. And even if it wasn’t your first vote, it was probably in most Top 3s.

And here is another twist… did Netflix break the ceiling on choice even more by getting two films into Best Picture slots, further pushing aside what has long been Academy reticence about voting for any one film to win both International, Doc or Animation AND Best Picture?

It’s not completely unlike the American political system. And some will disagree with this. But I think once we had a Black two-term president, no group is off the table. Not a Woman. Not a Jew. Not a Billionaire. And unfortunately, not even a racist pig. Prejudices didn’t disappeared. But (most) people seem to value their vote aside from their prejudices now. Evangelicals voting for Trump… incomprehensible. But reality.

White old men voting for Parasite happened. Other people too. Maybe they made the difference. Maybe they didn’t.

One last thought. Six of the last eleven Oscar Best Picture statues went to distributors not associated with the majors. Of those 6 wins (amongst five companies) only two distributors are still operational, Neon and A24. Weinstein and Open Road are gone and Summit was subsumed into Lionsgate. Go back another 11, goodbye Miramax and DreamWorks. Another 11, Miramax and Orion.

Things change more than we realize. Companies come and go and we live in a kind of denial. Fashions change and movies that were breakthroughs in their moment become albatrosses of some political past that we finally feel we should be past.

A lot of normal circumstances led to Parasite‘s win last Sunday… and a lot of magical moments and energies that belong to no other film in history also led to that moment. There is nothing wrong with that. It is why we all still care what happens at The Academy Awards, a show that was started for all the wrong reasons and like so many great old people, has become somehow more dignified and respected after so many years.

To hope for deeper meaning is a fool’s errand. To enjoy what happened, for the film, for South Korea, for Asians worldwide, for Bong, for one lovely night.. that it what it means. Inhale the magic deeply. Don’t attach expectations. Don’t seek a trend. Another group of artists will be on the stage next year, hoping to feel magic. It’s not being an ostrich. It’s Oscartown.