After initially being delayed half a year, Marvel Studios recently pushed back its “Black Widow” to May 2021 – the solo hero movie now targeting an opening a full year after it had originally intended to be released.
The ongoing pandemic is to blame and is still impacting cinemas around the world. Exhibitors are understandably very happy with the decision by Disney to delay until the theatrical market space stabilises, as opposed to doing what they did with “Mulan” and “Artemis Fowl” and skip cinemas for the Disney+ service.
One person who isn’t as pleased is major Disney investor Dan Loeb who, in a letter to CEO Bob Chapek (via Variety), suggests that the company should just forego its planned theatrical releases and move them to streaming instead – a move that he says would definitely attract subscribers and generate them more profit:
“Given the relationship that Disney has with the entertainment consuming public thanks to franchises like Marvel and Star Wars and Pixar, they can leverage all of those to increase their subscriber base.
What Netflix has is this immense subscriber base that allows it to invest in an enormous amount of content and amortize that to get more subscribers. Disney isn’t there yet, but they need to get there as quickly as possible. If they don’t get critical mass in their subscriber base, they will be permanently disadvantaged versus Netflix.
My understanding is that the old-line executives don’t want to go over the top with their big tentpole movies, which is why they announced they were pushing ‘Black Widow’ and other movies to 2021. I don’t think they appreciate the tiger they have by the tail, which is to say the value they can drive by moving into a subscription model, which has been adopted by everyone from Microsoft to Amazon. It’s so value accretive.”
Loeb also says he thinks moviegoing will survive, but it will be altered and “much more of a novelty experience in order to really distribute things” – comparing it to Yahoo email accounts and hard copies of the Yellow Pages, while most of the world is going largely toward online distribution.
