Let's all go to the Disneyplex Theatre!
Aug. 14th, 2020 06:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneDOJ trashed the Paramount ruling that prevented studios from owning theater chains.
70 years ago, there were 8 movie studios that produced a vast majority of movies seen. Now Disney by itself produces 40% of the box office gross. Obviously things are different in the Year of the Plague, but you get my point. Seventy years ago, a consent decree was entered in to by Paramount and the other studios that they would divest themselves from the theaters they owned because they were complete vertical monopolies. And where they weren't owning the theater, they were forcing others to buy complete package bundles: a movie, plus other movies, plus short features - where all the theater wanted was the first movie.
Disney is already doing this, screwing over boutique art houses by locking up movies like The Fly and The Day The Earth Stood Still, doing their '20 years in the vault' shit. There's no reason to do it, it just makes it more valuable when they start a restore in 15 years and re-release it in 20. But it completely screws over art houses who rely on such films for festivals.
It really hurts movie lovers like me and my friends. I was the president of a club called the Phoenix Fantasy Film Society for over 30 years. There was absolutely no benefit to the theaters for this consent decree to be cancelled by DOJ, the only benefit is to people like Disney that allows them to grow ever more larger and rapacious.
Meanwhile, I have my doubts that my local theater chain will survive the pandemic. They have three large complexes, one near me and two in Las Cruces. They're not a great chain and exist only in New Mexico and frankly, they're kinda stupid about their schedule timing and their movie selection. BUT THEY'RE ALL I HAVE. Let's face it, how can you safely see a movie? The basic dynamics can sort of be done safely - IF YOU WEAR A MASK ALL THE TIME. The problem is a vast amount of theater profit is driven by concessions, and you can't wear a mask and munch strangely-flavored popcorn and suck down high-fructose corn syrup. So their profit margins are going to be really bad. And it's not a huge amount of money to set up a pretty decent home theater these days and relive the glories of movies past at home with much better concessions for a lot less, and non-sticky floors! (I hope!)
And if our local theater chain dies, I can't see Disney swooping in. Maybe Cinemark will expand up from El Paso, but everyone is hurting. Disney itself is down over $5,000,000,000 last quarter: some people theorizing they could get bought up by Amazon, Alphabet, or Apple! That would be an interesting turn of the mouse!
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/why-movie-theaters-are-in-trouble-after-doj-nixes-70-year-old-case/
70 years ago, there were 8 movie studios that produced a vast majority of movies seen. Now Disney by itself produces 40% of the box office gross. Obviously things are different in the Year of the Plague, but you get my point. Seventy years ago, a consent decree was entered in to by Paramount and the other studios that they would divest themselves from the theaters they owned because they were complete vertical monopolies. And where they weren't owning the theater, they were forcing others to buy complete package bundles: a movie, plus other movies, plus short features - where all the theater wanted was the first movie.
Disney is already doing this, screwing over boutique art houses by locking up movies like The Fly and The Day The Earth Stood Still, doing their '20 years in the vault' shit. There's no reason to do it, it just makes it more valuable when they start a restore in 15 years and re-release it in 20. But it completely screws over art houses who rely on such films for festivals.
It really hurts movie lovers like me and my friends. I was the president of a club called the Phoenix Fantasy Film Society for over 30 years. There was absolutely no benefit to the theaters for this consent decree to be cancelled by DOJ, the only benefit is to people like Disney that allows them to grow ever more larger and rapacious.
Meanwhile, I have my doubts that my local theater chain will survive the pandemic. They have three large complexes, one near me and two in Las Cruces. They're not a great chain and exist only in New Mexico and frankly, they're kinda stupid about their schedule timing and their movie selection. BUT THEY'RE ALL I HAVE. Let's face it, how can you safely see a movie? The basic dynamics can sort of be done safely - IF YOU WEAR A MASK ALL THE TIME. The problem is a vast amount of theater profit is driven by concessions, and you can't wear a mask and munch strangely-flavored popcorn and suck down high-fructose corn syrup. So their profit margins are going to be really bad. And it's not a huge amount of money to set up a pretty decent home theater these days and relive the glories of movies past at home with much better concessions for a lot less, and non-sticky floors! (I hope!)
And if our local theater chain dies, I can't see Disney swooping in. Maybe Cinemark will expand up from El Paso, but everyone is hurting. Disney itself is down over $5,000,000,000 last quarter: some people theorizing they could get bought up by Amazon, Alphabet, or Apple! That would be an interesting turn of the mouse!
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/why-movie-theaters-are-in-trouble-after-doj-nixes-70-year-old-case/
no subject
Date: 2020-08-14 01:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-14 01:39 pm (UTC)In Phoenix, we had two theater chains, three when I was a kid. LOTS of independent theaters when I was young. Now one chain that was a local that grew slowly to become a regional, Harkins, plus AMC which is on shaky ground. The part of the U.S. gov't that watches to see if mergers would be anti-competitive has been completely asleep at the wheel for the last 20+ years and lets them go through with barely a nod, so all of these studio mergers went through with no opposition. And now it looks like we're likely to have theater consolidation on a ridiculous scale down here.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-15 08:07 am (UTC)I hope this decision was incompetence and reversiblie, because the alternative, at this point, seems to have been that there were incentives involved for the judge to rule in a particular way.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-15 01:56 pm (UTC)The problem was that it took major anti-trust law suits over several years to get the original settlement in place, agreed to by the studios. With what modern lobbying and dark money can do? I don't have high confidence that this genie can ever be put back in the bottle until major political reform happens.