Box office: ‘Furiosa’ just barely beats ‘The Garfield Movie’ in disastrous Memorial Day weekend — the worst in decades

Netflix got into production (of content) because studios made it abundantly clear they wanted to pull everything back from Netflix. Since Netflix is a streaming service (formerly a DVD rental house), they naturally have no business model if they have nothing to stream.

Now, I don't know what the answer to theaters is. I expect a lot of people, some of whom are being paid millions and tens of millions annually, and a lot more being paid millions to come in for a few weeks or a months to offer an opinion (consultants) don't either, because nothing's changing.

I do know this: studios see theaters as their income. They've spent several decades changing the contracts they offer theaters, pulling more of the ticket revenue back to themselves. They view release as their payday, and theaters have let the studios turn the contracts for the prints (be they physical or digital) into loser propositions.

Independent theaters mostly came about, or at least certainly became the dominant form of cinema in America, due to antitrust action by the Federal government. At the time, the government was correct; it was a monopoly. Studios were vertically integrated and their movies showed in their theaters. If you wanted to see a Paramount picture, you went to a Paramount theater.

Regan softened that, because he never met a corporation or rich person he and his buddies weren't eager to help make more money. Then, in 2020, the US DOJ got the whole thing formally terminated, officially removing Federal obstacles to reintegrating cinema in America.

Honestly, that's really the only way I can foresee cinema, movie theaters, surviving any more.

There are a lot of problems with theaters in America. Horrible audiences that lack civility and manners, high prices relative to wages, and yes the content those theaters have to show is entirely dictated by studios.

But theaters aren't blameless. They're who signed the unfavorable contracts that pushed them into trying to squeeze cinema attendees with $20 popcorns and $15 sodas. They haven't leaned (or if they have, it's been weak and ineffective) on studios to find crowd pleaser fare to release.

And theaters, even now, even today, see "exclusivity" as their one and only playing card.

That card hasn't been relevant since the 40s. Before that, movie theaters didn't have much competition. What happened in the 40s? TV started deploying into American homes. Before, your entertainment options were the same ones that had existed throughout time (sit around talking to friends/family, someone does musical things, cards, you go play sports or for a walk, etc). If you wanted "an experience", you trekked out to the cinema and bought a ticket.

Then TV came out. Sure it was expensive, but it was a one-time cost. And the 40s and 50s were a prosperity period for Americans, so they bought TVs and turned the country into a TV nation. Suddenly, you could sit around watching Jackie Gleeson and Lucille Ball, Johnny Carson, and so on.

Theaters still figured their only card was exclusivity. Only theaters had movies. For a long, long time, there weren't reruns, and there certainly weren't rental stores or Best Buys or Netflix that had movies (along with other stuff) you could get to watch on your TV. Prints of movies would flow across the country, and there'd be second and fourth and seventh engagements of existing movies, especially popular ones. Because that's where you saw movies. In a movie theater.

That's not the case anymore. Which doesn't even touch on games and esports and the seventeen thousand other things any individual consumer could choose to do right now instead of going to the theater to buy a ticket.

Theaters need to figure out what their use case is. What they bring to the table. What about them is worth the effort in money and time for a patron to remain a patron of the cinema. And I bet if you walked into the board rooms of AMC and Regal tomorrow morning and asked them that, they'd blink blankly at you (before they called for security and had you tossed). They have no clue. They don't even understand the question. They built it, you see. They built a theater. That means we have to come.

Wall Street struggles with a similar problem. One of their (regularly ignored) maxims, which is often at fault when they have a nationwide downturn that impacts the entire economy, goes something like this: never assume there's a buyer for what you're selling. Theaters have dug themselves into this hole by assuming they're the only game in town. Or, at least, the best game.

They're not. They're not the best, they're not the only, and it's arguable if they even have any game. Bad or otherwise.

They spent the 00s remodeling into comfort. Wider, softer seats. That just reduced auditorium capacity, which hurt them some, but not as much as you'd assume since most studio contracts rake back 90 or 95% of the ticket sales for the first several weeks. It did hurt them with concessions, since they see that as a volume game. One they play terribly by cranking prices so far up.

Well, it turns out, comfort away from home has a hard time competing with comfort at home. People hear about recliners and whatever and roll their eyes; they have a nice couch and armchairs and the rest of it at home. Usually parked in front of their nice wide flat screens with the Best Buy special Dolby all-in-one sound system package.

If the studios vertically integrate the theaters again, that would save theaters. And really it wouldn't change all that much, since independent theaters are something like 10-15% of the theaters in the country. Even if the studios purposefully froze the indie theaters out from big releases, not much would change since the indies don't get many releases as it is now. And wanting to avoid hurting them would ignore the main issue; that "exclusivity" is the only card worth playing.

If Disney and Warner and Universal and whoever else all buy up some theaters, they'd take over operating costs. They'd see the theaters as what they are; an essential part of their exhibition business. One they'd now be financially responsible for supporting, as opposed to now where they just see theaters as a necessary enemy that wants to take away profit the studio sees as theirs.

And regardless of that, all the theaters need to get more creative. They need to look for reasons to exist. Look for needs they can fill, find customers they can service.

The point of an auditorium is as a showcase. It's a big (supposedly quiet and undistracting) room with a dialed in A/V system. Why are studio movies the only thing they show?

I read all these articles about Taylor Swift's latest concert having done gangbusters by making a big deal with theaters nationwide. She recorded a show, and showed her show (the concert) in those theaters. People who couldn't afford several hundred dollars (seriously, that's what concerts cost now) to see Swift could pay $20 to sit in a participating theater.

I've been to concerts. You usually have to stand the whole time, it's often outside where there's weather and insects, plus there's the whole audience thing. And the cost. Hundreds of dollars. At twenty bucks, where you get a seat you can sit in, with AC, I'd wager most of the Swifties had a better "concert experience" at the theaters than they did at the stadiums.

There are a lot of music acts. Now that there's a high profile example to show off, since people are terrible at imagining possibilities, would it be that hard to work out deals with most of the tours? All it takes is an event camera crew, some plugs into the sound board, and then an editor or two for a week after the show and they've got a whole concert they can press play on.

Theaters could get clever. They could offer to fund the filming in exchange for exhibition rights, work out profit sharing where they recoup their production costs and then split the ongoing revenue with the music act.

Fathom is famous for broadcasting stuff to theaters, but they're mostly broadcasting in low resolution. Not 4K, not by a long shot. There's social media mentions all over for showings where it was basically a DVD that got popped in and pressed play on. A DVD they wanted $20+ a ticket for.

If theaters would upgrade that, and show actual quality, and work out a unified scripted marketing campaign, they'd have a shot at making rereleases and celebration exhibitions an event. Further, they could tie into the concert thing and do it for other stuff. Sports perhaps. You could go to the bar and watch your team, or you could go to the theater and watch your team on a big screen.

Back when Game of Thrones was a cultural phenomenon, there were a scattered few theaters who figured out how to make deals to show certain episodes on release. So you could watch the season finale at home, or go get that "social" experience some people like. Theaters could investigate that angle more.

Indie movies are a thing. Every year, the cost of entry to "make a movie" drops. Kevin Smith famously had to obtain and max out a lot of credit cards to be able to make a movie at the beginning of the 90s. Because he had to rent a camera and buy multiple tens of thousands of dollars forth of film, and then pay to develop all that, and then pay some more to get a film editing machine to let him cut and edit all the footage into Clerks.

These days most people can drop a grand and, so long as they know what they're doing, have something they can film with that'll get them all the way to exhibition.

A packed theater for a big release might see each seat paying the theater less than a dollar due to the contract. So a hundred people is a hundred bucks. Maybe less. Which is why theaters are so angry so many people who do still go don't want to fork over another thirty each for a drink and snack.

An indie movie will probably be quite happy to sign a much more equitable contract. 50-50? Maybe even skew in favor of the theater? Fill ten seats in that hundred chair auditorium, but if each seat is worth ten bucks (not one) the theater made as much ticket revenue as with the big release. This is of coruse where they'd protest they want volume to help concessions sales, but when people already aren't going, and are already unwilling to happily shell out for overpriced popcorn and soda, I'd say we pretty much are at the point where it's time to Try Something New.

And another complaint about those indie movies the theaters will raise, "those are small little pictures." Meaning, reading between the lines, there's no Big Studio Marketing Campaign the theaters expect will drive traffic into their auditoriums.

What's stopping theaters from running their own marketing? For any of these ideas, or any new ones. Theaters exist in a locality. Know your market. I bet a theater in a podunk football town might do all right if they advertised showing the Big Game in one of their auditoriums. Same as how I'd expect college towns (as one obvious example) might do alright if they started showing student and indie films.

My whole point is theaters are sort of in meme territory. Where they've signed away most ticket revenue, tried to compensate by dialing concessions prices so far into Fantasyland that the light from reality is a distant memory, and then thrown their hands up while saying "welp, we tried but now we're all out of ideas."

If they want to fade away and die, then yeah they're done. Give up. Sell now, sit back and laugh as the theaters vanish.

Or, they could do what "the market" says "the market" is best at, and figure out how to compete. I just have a hard time believing there's nothing they could do to find and offer value. But they'll have to get involved in their business, rather than sitting back passively thinking that they built it and that was the hard part.