Grace Maharaj’s Post

As great as it always is to celebrate the industry's highs and strengths, it's also important to keep short-term perspective on where Hollywood, theatrical exhibition, and the box office stand going into what looks like a challenging holiday season amid the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). To that end, Rebecca Rubin tackles the situation in her latest for Variety as 2023 nears its final months and a more-volatile-than-expected 2024 peaks around the corner. Hopefully, the amount of additional release delays is kept to a minimum, but a great deal hinges on the labor strike resolving very soon. I'm honored to have a few thoughts shared in Rebecca's story. “It’s been very clear for years that exhibitors need to step outside the box and find alternative content when studios aren’t putting out a tentpole,” Robbins says. “Whether it is COVID or the strikes, things keep delaying a consistent level of content hitting the big screen.” “The lack of any resolution in labor conflicts is bad news for movie theaters,” says Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at Boxoffice Pro. “The longer the strike goes on, we approach that worst-case scenario of impact. Some movies don’t need actors to promote them, but smaller releases could benefit from having stars on the press circuit.” AMC Theatres Cinemark Harkins Theatres IMAX Regal Paramount Pictures Sony Pictures Entertainment Universal Pictures The Walt Disney Company Warner Bros. Discovery The Boxoffice Company Boxoffice Pro #boxoffice #SAGAFTRA #AMPTP #movies #cinema #theaters #film #entertainment #trendingonlinkedin

NEWS AND INFORMATION MOVIE RELEASE DATE CALENDAR FOR 2023 (By Patrick Hipes) The North American box office has been a challenge to track the past couple of years, first with movie theaters shuttering along with almost everything else due to the Covid pandemic, and then in 2023, just when thing were returning to normal, a pair of Hollywood strikes has further complicated studios’ release-date strategies. Still, as of last weekend of August, the 2023 domestic box office is already past $6.6 billion in grosses, up 25% over the same frame a year ago, and there are still busy festival and holiday seasons to help boost awareness — and attendance. Click on the below link to check out 2023’s latest U.S theatrical release date schedule for the major and specialty studios, and keep checking back for the latest updates: https://lnkd.in/gh77WYvm — #MovieNews #BoxOffice #entertainmentnews #entertainmentindustry #MovieReleaseDates

How Going to the Movies Is Changing, in Charts Hollywood’s new normal involves fewer wide releases, more big screens and novelty popcorn The stakes for the industry are particularly high during the summer season, which typically makes up some 40% of domestic ticket sales in a given year. There have been fewer wide releases—movies opening or eventually playing in 2,000 or more theaters—out this year. Just 54 wide-release films have been released so far in 2024, which is about 80% of the average number by this point in prepandemic years. When customers do go to movies, they increasingly prefer “premium large format” and IMAX screens, both of which now account for a larger share of box-office sales than they did before the pandemic.

There may be quite a lot of cinema freeholders looking for new operators over the next couple of years. Why would freeholders/Landlords jump from the frying pan into the fire with another over-leveraged operator who will want cash to invest in return for a new lease they very well might CVA before the paint is dry? Perhaps they shouldn’t, perhaps there are very few risk free operators out there for them, perhaps they should follow Ashfield council’s example and get John Sullivan to set it up so they can run themselves. They can even set up a SPV to lease it to and charge themselves rent. Seems less risky in the short term until this all plays out. https://lnkd.in/dYhAAZJE

Corridor just successfully tested a technique used in films like Mary Poppins that had been lost for decades and works better than green screen (and if it becomes available enough would likely be significantly more accessible than LED volumes) for background replacements which is very, very exciting 👀 (TIL that while they do have a linkedin page they never post on there so I have to post the link myself to show you guys!) #virtualproduction #greenscreen #sodiumvapour #corridordigital #backgroundreplacement #LEDvolume #compositing #VFX https://lnkd.in/ehBziUrS

13 Tips & Tricks for Visiting Universal Studios Hollywood in LA

Leveraging our comprehensive mobility data, we looked at foot traffic during Deadpool & Wolverine's opening weekend to determine which markets had the highest increase in foot traffic to movie theaters for the blockbuster's premiere... Click below to read the story! #consumerinsights #consumerintelligence #foottraffic #movietheaters

Q: Why is it unusual for movie studios to own movie theaters? Sony Pictures Entertainment acquired the eclectic dine-in theater chain Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, an unusual example of a studio owner buying a theater chain. But why isn’t it more common? We asked reporter Robbie Whelan. A: “For starters, from the late 1940s until 2020, most big movie studios were prohibited under federal law from owning theater chains. A law from Hollywood’s Golden Age was meant to reduce the control that the original major studios like Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures maintained over the industry by owning both the means of production and distribution of movies. That law didn’t apply to Sony, a relatively new entrant in the world of film distribution. These days, however, there’s a simpler explanation for why studios haven’t shown much interest in owning theaters: Theatrical exhibition is a business in decline. Most theaters were shut down during the pandemic, when the anti-consolidation law was overturned, and most big media companies pivoted hard over the last five years to the direct-to-consumer model, investing billions in building their own streaming services, which have since majorly eaten into the profits of theaters. Sony, which is sometimes referred to as an ‘arms dealer’ of content that is then distributed by other companies, has mostly resisted the trend of investing in streaming, preferring instead to license its content to established streaming services like Netflix. Buying Alamo makes a bit more sense for Sony compared to others, because Sony doesn’t own one of the major streaming platforms that might cannibalize the sales of tickets to its movies at the box office.”

Lots of misunderstanding out there about how the Paramount decrees worked and what their demise did or didn't have to do with Sony Pictures' recent acquisition of Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. A lot of what folks are saying is just plain wrong. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court made the consequential decision to break up the studio system’s old vertically integrated oligopoly, in which a handful of big companies not only controlled the production and distribution of movies but also had a huge hand in exhibition by owning theater chains. The landmark antitrust case altered the structure and trajectory of the entertainment industry, marking a pivotal moment during Hollywood’s Golden Age. The result was a series of settlements between the companies and the government that forced studios to divest their theater assets and blocked other anti-competitive practices. But while the decrees — which were lifted a few years ago — have long been popularly understood as a blanket prohibition on studios investing in theaters, the reality is more complicated. Lots more in my writeup for the Los Angeles Times' Wide Shot newsletter. #entertainmentbusiness #boxoffice #movies #insideout2

13 Tips & Tricks for Visiting Universal Studios Hollywood in LA