You don’t have to look far to Hollywood to find creatives with strong opinions on movies released directly to streaming services. However, despite these strong opinions, Rare Director Christopher Landon has launched a Twitter controversy about sending movies to theaters and streaming at the same time. Use end of halloween‘as a starting point, but he also made a lot of reference to the film starring Vince Vaughn. Rarewho received similar treatment.
In short, Universal has once again decided to put end of halloween in theaters and on its streaming service, Peacock, on the same day. The day and date strategy brought back many bad memories for Christopher Landon, such as Rare it was released in theaters during the pandemic, but was also made available on Video OnDemand a few weeks after its release. This is what I had to say on social networks…
Ooooooh, I feel like another tirade is coming: today is the Day & Date exit strategy for Halloween Ends. Stop that. To piecere. Studios that don’t work: Stop fiddling with directors and their movies to try to support your new streaming services. It happened to me at Freaky and it destroyed us. We work so hard to make a fun movie. Blood sweat and tears. Months away from our families. And why do it? They love to use the term “two bites of apple”, but that’s just another way of saying “let’s use your movie as a guinea pig” for our streaming service. Sorry. I begged the studio not to. Surround the floats and protect them for the drama or just take part in the show. Don’t cut your hair. At least the Halloween folks have recovered. We got drunk. So yeah … bitter topic. PTSD. Dear Studies: Stop trying to suck two cocks at the same time. Honoring the sanctity of the theatrical experience. End of tirades.
There is a lot to unravel here. Let’s start with end of halloween. in 2021, Halloween kills, the second film in the most recent Halloween trilogy, abruptly changed course, opening the film on the same day in both theaters and at the Peacock. The decision was widely seen as being related to Covid, as many were still very uncomfortable doing in-person business. It grossed $ 50 million nationwide on its opening weekend, which was well below $ 75 million plus the previous stake, but was still a very high number for the pandemic.
The numbers haven’t been officially released yet this weekend, but we know it had a pretty strong opening night. The first estimates say end of halloween Will It grossed around $ 43 million at the box office this weekend. It’s been a good weekend for most of the movies, but it represents another downfall for this franchise. Many, of course, point to the film being in Peacock as part of the reason the gross total has fallen again.
As for Rare, the situation of this film is somewhat atypical. The film was released very early during the pandemic (November 2020). It won its first two weekends at the box office and got a simultaneous release on demand in its fourth weekend. Looking back, I don’t really know what the studio should have done there other than delaying the film altogether. Theaters were desperate for content to keep their doors open, and the $ 16 million they brought in around the world has come a long way. But as Landon alluded to in his tweet when he said the Halloween people have gone “all the way”, there are a lot of incentives and various clauses in people’s contracts based on box office performance, and the industry isn’t even close to understanding how streaming should take that into account.
I don’t know what the right answer to all of this is, because there are so many conflicting priorities. Is the goal to create a streaming service or just to make as much money as possible? There is so much uncertainty in the industry right now, which is why we end up with movies like Hocus Pocus 2 go straight to streaming and beat records, movies like Netflix knives out 2 get an unexpected theatrical release and creators like Christopher Landon get frustrated with the whole process.
Source: Cinemablend
