12/7/2023 0 Comments Movie intermission suggestions![]() ![]() The studios and their corporate overlords look at Netflix’s stock price and revenues and wonder why they can’t print money too. It’s why the company has a market cap of $190 billion or so. Its first-mover advantage, enormous movie libraries acquired from shortsighted Hollywood execs, and buzzy original series such as House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, and Stranger Things helped Netflix become a company that could generate more than $31 billion in revenue worldwide last year, roughly three-quarters the size of the combined take at the worldwide box office of every movie studio in 2019, the last pre-COVID year. Hastings and company deftly exploited the studios’ compensation structure, which paid rich bonuses when executive hit their financial targets.” “The budding streaming service grew at Hollywood’s expense. “Once it added new ways for viewers to watch movies and TV shows from the couch in their living rooms … subscriptions skyrocketed 63 percent,” Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski write in their book, Binge Times: Inside Hollywood’s Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix. The birth of streaming-specifically, the rise of Netflix’s online component-coincided with a decline in DVD sales that created an opportunity for Netflix’s honchos. In some ways, theatrical became almost a loss leader for home-video sales as Matt Damon has said, home-video sales helped prop up virtually the whole marketplace for “the kinds of movies that I loved,” movies for adults. VHS’s successor, DVD, peaked at $16.3 billion in annual sales in 2005, or nearly two times the domestic box office, before declining in the face of streaming. Hollywood fought tooth and nail against VHS-fearing both illegal piracy and customers legally taping the movies that studios had licensed to TV and cable networks-until it realized home-video rentals and sales were a gold mine. Studios were first hesitant to license their films to television networks and then realized the small screen was an untapped market. Hollywood has a history of treating evolving consumer habits first as a threat to theatrical dollars and then as a tool to be co-opted in the pursuit of earning ever-greater profits. They find themselves at an impasse that threatens to reduce the overall pot even further by putting in jeopardy one of the industry’s greatest assets: movie theaters. ![]() The studios say they don’t have nearly as much to distribute as the actors and the writers would like given the massive expenses they’ve incurred while standing up their streaming services. The actors and the writers want more of it, as well as limits on the use of AI. Labor stoppages are, first and foremost, about money, and the concurrent Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America strikes are no exception. ![]()
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