The Big Picture In the final two years of the 2010s, the domestic box office hit yearly hauls of $11.8 and $11.3 billion, with the former gross in 2018 being the biggest single-year gross ever in North America. It was an encouraging sign for the North American box office and the state of theatrical cinema, a sign that people were not abandoning movie theaters even with a plethora of entertainment options out there.
This short-sighted and selfish thinking extends to these studios shamefully walking away from negotiations with SAG on how to resolve the actor’s strike, but it’s also apparent in actions from the major studios undertaken from 2020 to 2022. Such actions have permanently impacted the box office landscape and have helped to ensure that it’ll be tougher than ever for the box office to reach pre-pandemic levels. Most notably, Warner Bros.
Studios Refuse To Give Theaters Lots and Lots of Movies COVID-era releases aren’t the only thing demonstrating why studios have become the greatest enemy of movie theaters. In the post-March 2020 world, studios have also shown extreme hesitance towards delivering constant new movies to theaters occupying a wide array of genres, which would allow for a slew of different audience members to come to theaters.
This corporate consolidation has put so much power into too few hands and has ensured the fate of the theatrical cinema landscape is down to only a small number of major entities. That’s a terrible concept in any context, as it gives consumers fewer options and makes things super risky for theater owners . The underlying awfulness of this media practice, which accelerated during the pandemic , has gone hand-in-hand with every company now wanting to be like Netflix.