Dont Tell NetflixDont Tell Netflix

By George Robbins

Disney is the home of family entertainment the world-over which has drawn in families for generations with their movies and television shows. This has given people the opportunity to be better than they ever were before growing up because countless people grew up learning new values. At least this was the intention of Disney films as people were growing up, whereas now, Disney is just remaking a lot of their older films in new mediums in order to make some way of getting more money over time. Much of these new projects are live-action films which are just remastered versions of their older animated films.

The newest iteration of an older Disney film to get a live-action face-lift was the movie ‘Mulan.’ The live-action version of the film just had a very long and painful process of actually being able to release to the public and it only succeeded due to Disney’s acceptance that the theatrical market is currently in shambles. For those somehow unaware, the movie theater industry has had a lot of trouble recently due to the pandemic. They haven’t really been able to bring in any revenue due to the fact that people haven’t been able to actually go out to the movies. This, coupled with the fact that they were given restrictions for when they reopened made it much less easy for them to start back up again.

Now that theaters have actually recently opened their doors back up again, they have been hopeful that people would brave the pandemic to go see movies. That hope was further increased upon the release of the much anticipated movie ‘Tenet‘ which finally made its debut to the world after about a one and a half month long delay. Unfortunately for those companies, those hopes were almost immediately shattered because the film is not doing so hot. Unfortunately, over the past couple of weekends, the movie has only made about $11 million domestically for a grand domestic total somewhere around $60 million. This is severely shy of studio estimates as well.

Movie studios have been giving it their all to try and bring in the money they have been losing by not releasing any films recently. ‘Tenet’ was on that laundry list of films until its international release about a month ago. After one week it had its domestic release and, unfortunately, what followed is what has already been iterated upon. The movie has not made as much as the studio expected it to which, in order to just break even before marketing costs, is somewhere close to $500 million. If things continue this way in the theater industry there will be massive losses like this all over the place. It is actually due to this that movies that have already had severely pushed back release dates were pushed back even further than before.

Needless to say, this doesn’t set a great precedent moving forward and now people are left wondering what exactly is going on in the movie industry. With Warner Bros. possibly ending up taking a massive loss in the long run due to this, it is clear theaters are not ready to be reopened. Without customer confidence, theaters are not going to get anywhere near the numbers they need to stay open moving forward. Studios are beginning to acknowledge this fact and because they still want to make money on their blockbusters, they are delaying them further. This is how Disney is choosing to handle their bigger films moving forward as well. Their smaller films, though, are another story altogether it would appear.

Not so much their smaller films, but the ones they feel will not make as much money as they feel other films would. On that list was a movie that was severely pushed up from its original release which was set for next year, ‘Hamilton.’ As many people might be well aware of by now, ‘Hamilton’ is a play that was put on Broadway which told the story of one Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America who played a huge role in the forming of the nation and had a relatively interesting life story to tell. It wasn’t a story many cared about, however, until Lin-Manuel Miranda made a musical based on it. Needless to say, if you’ve heard of it, you know just how popular it is.

The popularity of the musical made it a prime candidate for it to be made into some kind of movie adaptation. Unlike most other adaptations though, it was not turned into an ordinary live-action film. Instead, the movie was a live performance of the musical which was then edited down so that camera cuts and time constraints could be put into the performance. Because of the popularity of the show and the fact that it was a show that people could watch all the way through, it became extremely popular on Disney’s streaming service. It was supposed to have a theatrical release some time next year, but this ended up not being the case.

‘Hamilton’ had a release on Disney+ a couple of months back which turned out better than they expected it to and people flocked to the service in order to watch the film. Even though Disney wasn’t expecting it to do so well, it therefore turned out better than they ever could have expected it to. It was not the only feature film to end up having its release be on the Disney+ platform as ‘Mulan’ recently followed suit. The reason for this is because ‘Mulan’ was a live-action remaster which was supposed to drop in theaters back in March. The pandemic hit, so they moved the release date back to July and what followed was a series of unfortunate events where they just kept delaying it til’ they reached the end of August.

Eventually, they decided that they would no longer wait for a release window for a theatrical release of the film. Thus, ‘Mulan’ had its full release on the Disney+ service with a $30 premium on top of the subscription fee in the United States. Disney wanted their film to obviously have its release in China still, but due to Disney+ not being available in China, they had to find another way to do things. Fortunately for them, theaters in China are open so they had the movie release to theaters there while it released to Disney+ domestically. Unfortunately, the movie is just a central point for controversy no matter where you go and it was considered a failure on the Chinese market. This did not stop it from being kind of successful on Disney+.

Even though ‘Mulan’ has had nothing but controversy surrounding it since release, it has made Disney realize that they can make more money than they thought through their streaming service. The same goes for ‘Hamilton,’ because even though there was no real premium for it, people signed up for the service which brought in a lot of money. Both movies having mild success through the service shows Disney that they can make Disney+ work multiple ways. It shows them that many strategies are now open to them moving forward, especially with the state of the movie theater industry at the moement.