So far the PVOD experiment seems to have reinforced that big budget features still very much require successful theatrical releases to be profitable.
For low-mid budget films however, streaming is now a perfectly viable option if not the likely home of them in a post-COVID world.
Actor-turned-filmmaker Ben Affleck’s directorial work has generally resided in the mid-budget range with his movies like the Oscar-winning “Argo” and “The Town” costing in the $30-40 million mark.
During a recent interview with EW, he explains that the kind of movies he makes will likely look and be released very differently in the present and likely near future and goes on to describe how he sees the future of cinema:
“Movies like The Town, movies like Argo, all the movies I made would effectively end up on streamers. There will probably be like 20 to 25 movies a year that are distributed and they’ll all be big IP movies, whether it’s the type of movies that Disney makes like Aladdin or Star Wars or Avengers, something where you can count on the low-end being half a billion dollars worth of business.
And I think it’s going to be very, very difficult for dramas and sort of mid-budget movies like [The Town] to get theatrical distribution. You’ll either see massive, massive movies getting huge wide-scale distribution or small movies doing little prestige releases in a few theaters but mostly being shown on streamers. I think that’s for better or worse, and you can draw your own conclusions, but that would be my best guess about the direction of the movie business just based on what I’m seeing now and experiences I’m having trying to get stuff made.
Who knows what the theatrical business will be like. What I think has happened is that people have grown accustomed during this time to watching from home. It benefited ‘The Way Back,’ for sure… People have now been acculturated to streaming and watching movies at home in ways they weren’t before, which probably accelerated a trend that was already taking place.”
Even before the pandemic hit cinemas had mostly forgotten mid-budget films in favor or major tentpoles or small indies, and that trend has only been accelerated by COVID-19. However the soft box-office for “Tenet” has spooked enough studios that the rest of the year has been mostly abandoned by big budget fare until more countries are able to get the pandemic under control.
