‘Borat 2’ Is Second Only To ‘Hamilton’ For Most Watched On-Demand Movie
By George Robbins
These past months have been difficult for everyone who has been trying to lives their lives the way that they used to before the pandemic began and things aren’t bound to change any time in the near future. This pandemic has fundamentally changed the way that business and personal matters are conducted and it has led to many different changes being put into effect that we will see staying in effect for quite some time. Many different forms of industry have already cemented the fact that they plan on changing things as time goes on that we now know we will be seeing companies acting very differently in the future. One of the biggest industries that have revealed their plans on changing in the future is the film industry which has seen a massive upheaval since the pandemic started back in March. As a direct result, they have since started working on ways to push their business agenda forward while working on fixes for dealing with the situation with movie theaters.
When this pandemic first began back in March, movie theaters, like all other businesses, shut down in order to follow the rules in place to keep people safe during the pandemic. Movie theaters were certainly higher on the list in terms of risk assessment and this meant that even when businesses were eventually allowed to reopen to the public, theaters couldn’t. Governments made their risk assessment decisions based upon a couple of different factors that led to their shutting down of larger populated businesses. It makes sense in terms of the overall spread of the virus as the pandemic was spreading due to the large concentration of crowds in centralized locations, of which theaters were that type of location. With this being the case, movie theaters remained shut far longer than most other businesses for months on end.
When theaters were finally given the okay to reopen their doors again, they had an even more difficult problem laid out before them and that was how they were going to bring back business. It turns out that movie theaters kind of need new movies to be showing on their screens if they want to get anyone’s attention. With no new movies to show, even if theaters decided that they would try to open their doors, they lacked any kind of incentive for customers to come in and visit that location. Therefore, even if they could open, theaters made the decision to keep their doors shut until studios gave them new movies to show. This, in turn, ended up resulting in studios deciding not to give movies to any theaters as they felt there would be no point in doing so if those theaters were not open.
What it finally ended up taking for movie theaters to get proper release dates for films was the decision for AMC to open their doors regardless of what would happen back in the middle of August. When they finally made this decision, studios stopped constantly moving their release dates around and found steady dates that they could try and release their movies. The first major studio to take that incredible leap with a new blockbuster that everyone was looking forward to was Warner Bros. with Christopher Nolan’s new movie ‘Tenet.’ The fact is that the movie had a lot going for it such as the mysterious plot that people had been teased by in the movie’s trailers and the press given by the actors which only further excited the people who wanted to go and see the film. Thus, the release of ‘Tenet’ would end up becoming the perfect benchmark for other studios to decide if they wanted to keep their movie release dates the way they were.
Warner Bros’. plans for ‘Tenet’ involved them having an international release for the film before they had a domestic release due to the state of the pandemic and how well it was being handled in various locations. Therefore, the movie ended up having a release near the end of August where the movie would end up premiering in the international market and then one week later, the movie had its premiere for the domestic market. The first weeks in both markets were perfectly fine given the state the world is in right now dealing with the pandemic and the movie managed to rake in about $150 million in those two weeks. What ended up following this however was a length of time where the movie just did not measure up to what the studio was hoping for, at least domestically, and it made almost nothing compared to its first week. What followed was just a length of time where everything seemed to be heading in the wrong direction for the movie industry.
‘Tenet’ may not have held up well in the domestic market, but it continued to do well in the international market as a whole which is how the movie has now managed to reach approximately $350 million. While this may be impressive, there are a few things to note here such as the fact that the domestic market only raised $50 million in capital and the movie also needs to make $500 million just to break even before marketing costs. Needless to say, things are not looking great for the movie, but things are even worse for the industry as a whole as a result of this. The main problem to come from the whole ‘Tenet’ launch is the fact that the film industry realized that people really aren’t comfortable with going out to movie theaters at a time like this and they feel uncomfortable trying to get a seat in a limited capacity setting. With theaters having limited seating for everyone, people have been trying to figure out just how to go and enjoy movies with people and the lack of movie variety doesn’t help.
When people would go out to the movies, they would go to see films that they had interest in seeing and as a result they would see posters for other films that were playing in said theater. When they would see these posters they might become interested in that film and maybe they would come back to see it which would help both the theater itself and the various studios playing films there. With the start of the pandemic, new movies were pulled from theaters and all upcoming releases were also changed so when theaters reopened, there was nothing playing in theaters whatsoever. With such a lack of variety, it was really only the people who wanted to see ‘Tenet’ who went out to see it upon release and therefore, attendance ended up dropping significantly in following weeks. Internationally, things were similar, but the pandemic is generally being handled better abroad so of course more people would go out and see movies.
Christopher Nolan made a point to speak out about how studios are reacting to all of this lately and said that studios have taken the wrong issues away from the ‘Tenet’ release and that they should be reacting differently. After seeing that nobody was going to be going out to see movies for the most part, almost every single movie in this year’s line-up ended up being pushed back tremendously. Nolan believes this is the wrong way to do things as they could better help theaters by coming up with better solutions to draw people in rather than move around release dates just to try and outlast the pandemic. The truth of the matter is that while studios can wait out the pandemic, theaters will end up going bankrupt soon enough with AMC even reporting a 90% loss in revenue since last year. This will only end up harming the movie industry as a whole where a large part of their revenue comes from the theatrical release of their films. It would make more sense for them to try and work alongside theaters at this point to come up with ways to get people back in the limited number of seats theaters have.
This is not the only problem being dealt with by theaters at the moment either as they have had a new trend to deal with among the industry which may further end up harming them. Recently, it has been discussed amongst various studios as to whether thy have wanted to go with straight to digital releases rather than waiting for things to smooth out with theaters. This has been a topic of discussion for quite some time now as studios like Universal have apparently been thinking about this very thing for years now and the pandemic has given them the perfect opportunity to do so. Now that many major studios also have streaming platforms of their own, they have also been discussing putting their own content straight up on those platforms. While this may sound like they are completely abandoning theaters for digital releases, it isn’t in their plans to do this. Studios have already made it known that they don’t plan on making digital their main release platform and companies like Disney have said that they will now be making decisions based upon the film they actually want released.
Essentially, Disney plans on having a Board of some kind decide on whether a film should inevitably have a theatrical release or if it should be given the full theatrical release treatment that their usual films get. Of course Disney is now in control of some of the most iconic fictional characters in existence so it would only make sense that they would try to make those films release in theaters while they put the lesser known one off projects on their Disney+ platform. The way that Disney has phrased it thus far is that some movies are just better suited for an at-home experience as opposed to a theatrical one which is apparently how they will make the decision as to which movies go where. They have already made decisions which have put some of their newer films up on their streaming platform and those have been pretty successful thus far. The two films that Disney uploaded to their service over the summer were ‘Hamilton’ and the live-action version of ‘Mulan.’ While the latter may have been surrounded by controversy, it has been a successful venture so far and the former has even managed to become the most watched film on digital thus far.
Disney was not the first company to put some of their titles up straight-to-digital, but it is not surprise that their movies have been among the highest watched this year. It also kind of helps that Disney has built up its reputation over the years to the point where even if things aren’t going well for them, they could still be seen in a good light by their fan base. That aside, they have been nailing it with their Disney+ service ever since it launched around this time last year and it has caught way more attention than people gave it credit for initially. This made no sense to begin with as everyone knew that a service with every single Disney owned movie and show on it would be an instant hit, but apparently Disney didn’t have so much faith in it. After their releases over the summer though, they have since changed their minds.
While it was pretty much anticipated that Disney would be making big moves like this, even during the pandemic, there were some things people never would have expected out of this year. Chiefly among those things nobody would have expected to see was the fact that the world finally got to see ‘Borat 2’ being made. The thing was that the movie was expected to never be made because the star, Sacha Baron Cohen, has said that he wouldn’t play the character anymore because he was too recognizable in the eyes of the public. Not too long ago, we made the discovery that someone had seen Cohen in his costume for the character driving around and thus we all became excited for the idea that the character would be making a comeback. What we didn’t immediately know was that the movie was not only finished already but that it was already screened for executives so that they could decide when and where it would be screened. Even more surprising to people was the fact that they would get to see the film before October was out.
It turned out that Amazon had purchased the rights to the movie and they were already getting ready to premiere the movie on Amazon Prime Video before we even knew of its existence. Following the announcement of the upcoming film, people immediately started getting ready to watch it and upon release, the movie caused a massive spike in viewership on the Amazon Prime Video service. The movie has now reached the point where, in just two weeks, it is about to surpass ‘Hamilton’ in terms of the most watched straight-to-digital films. It is no surprise to anyone that the controversial film would bring in such an enormous crowd, but the rate at which it did so is even more interesting as it shows the potential straight-to-digital can have when it comes to anticipated films. It is most certainly an interesting situation to watch unfold as time goes on.