Cinemacon: Exhibitors, Studios Squabble About the Cinema's Future

[AndyDursin]

These are not good times at the multiplex...

CinemaCon is supposed to celebrate the magic of the big screen and the power of the cinematic experience. Instead, this year’s Las Vegas gathering was a tense, testy affair that threatened to resurface old tensions between studios and exhibitors. All the frustrations of the past five years, during which a pandemic and two labor strikes left the movie theater business a pale shadow of itself, nearly boiled over.

Studios believe that exhibitors haven’t done enough to innovate. They think too many venues are outdated, and cinema operators haven’t embraced discount pricing to entice cost-conscious consumers. Theater owners argue that their business has been hurt by studios’ insistence on releasing new films on home entertainment within a few weeks of their theatrical debuts. Oh, and they’d like a lot more movies!

For their part, theater owners are frustrated that studios have trained audiences to view anything that’s not comic book related as a streaming only proposition. One studio executive bemoaned the exhibitors’ indifference, especially as the majors spend a ton of money flying talent to Vegas and cutting thrilling trailers for films (many of them unfinished). “It’s “us vs. them” again,” the exec lamented.

Theater owners, for years, have complained that they don’t have enough product to screen. Ticket sales weren’t down because people weren’t inspired to go to the movies, they insisted. Rather, studios were debuting fewer of them. (That much is true. Pre-pandemic, approximately 120 wide releases were scheduled annually but that number has dropped to high double digits.) The gap could be attributed, in part, to the loss of one major studio after Disney swallowed 20th Century Fox whole in 2019.

Well, Amazon MGM seems to be the last, best hope to fill the void. In the studio’s first-ever CinemaCon presentation, Amazon MGM chief Mike Hopkins boldly promised to get “15 big cinematic films annually into theaters by 2027 […] with 14 titles already lined up for 2026.” That’s a huge development for exhibitors, who desperately crave sci-fi, fantasy, action-adventures, romance thrillers and family-friendly fare to populate their screens in between the tentpoles. Now, they just need audiences to show up.