The future of streaming is… theatres?

It’s been an up-and-down year for streamers as they struggle to diversify revenue streams. Now a radical, unprecedented idea has come to the fore: Playing movies in movie theatres.  

What happened: Netflix’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery made US$9.2 million last weekend despite playing in less than 700 cinemas across Canada and the US, making it the best-performing film of the weekend on a per-screen basis. 

One analyst told Bloomberg that the film’s success shows this was actually missed opportunity for Netflix, suggesting that the streamer should have instead done more marketing around the film and expanded its run to more screens and more weeks.   

Meanwhile, chief rival Amazon recently announced it plans to spend over US$1 billion annually on movies that will get full theatrical runs before making their way to Prime Video.   

  • Amazon is all in on theatres and wants to pump out between 12 and 15 movies to theatres annually, giving it as many yearly theatrical releases as most major studios.
     
  • Netflix remains wary of the same approach. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos recently balked at theatrical runs, citing marketing costs and the potential to drag down subscription value. 

Why it matters: Streamers were supposed to change how we watched things. Now, their movies are going to theatres, they have commercials, and you have to pay out the wazoo for multiple channels to watch all your fave content. That sounds pretty traditional to us. 

Bottom line: The players may have changed, but the showbiz industry is about the same.