Regal Cinemas Joins AMC in Refusing to Play Any Movies From Universal Pictures
Cineworld, the owner of the Regal Entertainment movie theater exhibition chain, has announced that they are joining AMC Theaters in refusing to play any films from Universal Pictures. NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell obviously struck a nerve when he said that when movie theaters open back up, they are expecting to release movies on both VOD platforms and in theaters concurrently. Shell explained that the reason for this was due to the success that they saw from Trolls World Tour.
In response to that, Cineworld said, “Universal’s move is completely inappropriate and certainly has nothing to do with good faith business practice, partnership and transparency.” The added:
“Cineworld’s policy with respect to the window is clear, well known in the industry and is part of our commercial deal with our movie suppliers. We invest heavily in our cinemas across the globe and this allows the movie studios to provide customers all around the world to watch the movies in the best experience. There is no argument that the big screen is the best way to watch a movie. Universal unilaterally chose to break our understanding and did so at the height of the Covid-19 crisis when our business is closed, more than 35,000 employees are at home and when we do not yet have a clear date for the reopening of our cinemas.
Cineworld’s roots go back 90 years in the industry and it was always open to showing any movie as long as the rules were kept and not changed by one sided moves. Today we make it clear again that we will not be showing movies that fail to respect the windows as it does not make any economic sense for us. We have full confidence in the industry’s current business model. No one should forget that the theatrical side of this industry generated an all-time record income of $42 billion last year and the movie distributors’ share of this was about $20 billion.”
This definitely is not a good sign for Universal Pictures. There’s a ton of money to be made in theatrical releases and with theaters refusing to play their films, the amount of money they pull in from their films will be significantly lower. This move will especially hurt its big-budget tentpole films.
For example, the production budgets for the Jurassic World movies have exceeded $150 million. The budget for marketing is around the same. Universal will not make $300 million dollars just off of VOD rentals. They do need movie theaters to push their movies to audiences. With movie theaters refusing to play their films, Universal will lose money on their big-budget films.
It’s weird that Universal didn’t even reach out to the National Association of Theatre Owners before making such a bold move. But, they’re in the shit now and you can bet they’ll be talking to smooth things over and figure this all out. In response to AMC, Universal said:
“Our goal in releasing Trolls: World Tour on PVOD was to deliver entertainment to people who are sheltering at home, while movie theatres and other forms of outside entertainment are unavailable. Based on the enthusiastic response to the film, we believe we made the right move. In fact, given the choice of not releasing Trolls: World Tour, which would not only have prevented consumers from experiencing the movie but also negatively impacted our partners and employees, the decision was clear. Our desire has always been to efficiently deliver entertainment to as wide an audience as possible. We absolutely believe in the theatrical experience and have made no statement to the contrary. As we stated earlier, going forward, we expect to release future films directly to theatres, as well as on PVOD when that distribution outlet makes sense. We look forward to having additional private conversations with our exhibition partners but are disappointed by this seemingly coordinated attempt from AMC and NATO to confuse our position and our actions.”
I imagine that Universal is starting to reconsider their position at this point because I’m sure more theater chains will follow suit if they don’t. What do you think!?
Source: Variety