Producer Jason Blum's Take on How Theaters and Movie Studios Will Be Different After Coronavirus
It’s been a weird and wild time for movie fans everywhere, as all this spare time would normally mean that we would be heading to the theatre to catch up on the movies we are most excited to see. But instead, theaters are closed, and movie release dates have been postponed. We are all staying home, those of us who don’t work in the medical, law enforcement, or grocery store fields, and we are relying on our TVs to bring us movies and shows to get us through.
I don’t know about you, but I truly can’t wait to get back to the movie theaters. I love the smell of the popcorn, the reactions of a crowded theatre on opening night, the food and soda, and the previews. But this indefinite shutdown has some wondering — how will the studio to theater process be affected by this? What kinds of changes will we see, if any?
Director and creator of Blumhouse Productions, Jason Blum, talked about his opinion on the subject in a recent interview on The Ben Shapiro Show. They were talking about the Blumhouse film The Hunt, which was supposed to be released during all this, but was instead released on VOD, along with two other Universal titles. Blum said:
I think it’s not realistic to think all the studios are going to wait four months before they put a movie at home. They just can’t compete, they’re going to have to compete with Amazon and Netflix and Apple in a different way. There’s going to be shifts. The consumer is going to be more used to staying at home. Something is going to give, there has to be something that’s going to happen post-corona. The movie business will look different after the coronavirus.
I do agree that studios can’t just put everything off until after this is over. There are too many movies affected by this. And why not release brand new content for people stuck at home? You may get more viewers than you would have in the theatre, competing with a bigger release that week. He then laid out how he thinks movies will run through theaters after all this:
I don’t think theaters are ever going to go away. The collective experience of going to a theater and taking in a movie, I think that’s going to be around for a long time. I think there’ll be less movies in theaters, there’ll be less of a selection, or I should say, there’ll be many many fewer movies in theaters with the window, and I think there’ll be many many more movies in theaters, but they only last for a week or two.
I agree that theaters aren’t going away. I know tons of people who love going to the movies as much as I do. But I have no idea if the movies that go to theaters will only be there briefly. I don’t know what it will look like, and I don’t like change, but hopefully things will work out for movie fans. What do you think?