Movies Are In Trouble, Hulu’s Big Oscar Screw-Ups (Plural)
1. Movies Are In Trouble
Much has been made of the nicheness of this year’s Oscar nominees, even, I might add, in this very column.
It’s a very valid critique, and it’s why Disney needed to fish out all those views from laptops and smartphones in order to push their ratings numbers over the finish line for a micro-improvement of just 200K viewers from last year.
But that is not why the movie industry is in trouble.
To begin with, there are just fewer and fewer theaters—an estimated 5,000 screens have shut down since 2020, or 12% of the 2020 total.
Worse still, most of the theaters affected were smaller, independently owned cinemas, of the sort that would show movies like Best Picture winner Anora.
Meaning that even if someone had seen a review of Anora and wanted to see it (RAISES HAND) it was unlikely to be playing anywhere nearby.
But that is not the full reason either.
Because the other reason movie theaters are closing is that people just don’t like them anymore.
And that’s an even bigger problem.
Why It Matters
A fascinating new exclusive study we did in conjunction with MX8 Labs found that 46% of respondents prefer watching movies at home, while only 15% prefer theaters.
Convenience was the main reason cited (78% of respondents) which at some level could be inevitable in an era where 75-inch or even 85-inch screens are quite common and where the closure of smaller theaters means longer drives to crowded multiplexes. (I took it as telling that “convenience” was a factor for 85% of those with a Bachelor’s degree and 90% of 55-64 year olds.)
I’d further posit that “convenience” is not limited to the amount of time and effort it takes to get one’s self to a theater but also to the ability to watch longer movies like Oppenheimer and Killers Of The Flower Moon in pieces, possibly even over the course of several days.
That said, the theater experience itself was also found to be unpleasant by a sizable majority of respondents, with 70% citing crowds and/or noisy theatergoers. This is a much remarked-upon phenomenon that seems to be part of a vicious cycle with home viewing: people watch at home and get used to talking and consulting their phones. They go to theaters and replicate that behavior, impervious to the effect it is having on their fellow moviegoers.
Take all these factors together and it’s not a good time for the movie industry. The demise of smaller theaters coupled with streaming services cutting back on the number of films they buy (as Brandon Katz recently outlined for us) means the economics of indie films aren’t there anymore.
Nor are the economics for anything other than blockbusters that can be sold internationally, and even those are starting to show signs of wear and tear, as audiences grow weary of yet another superhero or Marvel comic movie.
I’d posit that the theater issue looms larger though. That’s because going to an actual movie theater is what made movies special. There’s something about the giant screen and sitting in the dark and watching with a crowd that elevated the experience to something more than TV.
And so when movies are watched in the living room, often in chunks of an hour or so (e.g. not in the way the filmmaker intended them to be seen) they lose their magic and become just another form of television, a slightly shorter mini-series.
Which is a problem there’s no turning back from.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are the movie industry you’ve got a bunch of Herculean tasks ahead of you. First and foremost you need to figure out how to make theater-going fun again while getting people to become more considerate of their fellow humans. There have been some attempts at the fun part—all those theaters with Barcalounger-style seats and food and beverage service—but that just raises the price point to a place where it’s a special occasion experience not a weekly one.
You also need to find a path to profitability for accessible indie films.
Take A Real Pain, for instance, a film that netted Kieran Culkin the Best Supporting Actor award. There’s nothing that screams “indie film” about it. The stars, Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg are well-known and the storyline is not that out there— it’s just another buddy comedy at heart, albeit one with the Shoah as background. (Hint: A24 has had some success here. Figure out what can you learn from them)
Your final task will be to cut back on the overreliance on sequels and genre movies. Not eliminate them, but just find alternatives, because, as noted, audiences are getting tired of them.
None of this will be easy—in a good movie, the hero’s journey never is.
But if you want to keep playing a significant role in the world’s culture, then you need to strap on your pack and your sword and get out there and start slaying some dragons.
2. Hulu’s Big Oscar Screw-Ups (Plural)
The phrase “you just had one thing to do…” certainly sprang to mind after Hulu suffered a pair of very public screw-ups around their Oscars broadcast on Sunday.
Which is remarkable given that the one thing they did not actually screw up was the thing that has bedeviled streaming services attempting live broadcasts for many years—the inability to handle a surge in viewership, which inevitably leads to a crash.
They also, as far as I can tell, did admirably in terms of lag time—the amount of time the streaming broadcast lags behind both the actual event and the over the air broadcast of said event.
What actually happened on Hulu’s end is still somewhat unclear. But from a consumer perspective, I can give you a first-hand account: I turned on my TV to find I was logged out of Hulu. Figuring it might have been due to a recent software update and not wanting to deal with re-logging in, I switched over to Roku, only to find I was logged out there too.
What followed was a half hour of frustration: Hulu kept telling me my email was “invalid.” Then they made me go to the main Disney site and change my password. Then I’d get to the part where I had to type in the secret code from the screen onto my laptop to verify, only to be told that verification had timed out.
At some point it let me log in via my iPhone app, but by that point, I’d missed the first 35 minutes.
But wait, there’s more!
Because as the show ran long and the hour grew late, Hulu just logged me off, shades of the 1968 “Heidi Game”, unceremoniously proclaiming that the broadcast had ended, even though Best Picture had yet to be announced.
That one was particularly baffling given that Hulu, unlike circa-1968 NBC, is not on any sort of linear schedule.
Why It Matters
Following Netflix’s screw-ups during the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson boxing match, Tubi had seemingly restored everyone’s faith in the ability of streaming services to handle live events, with its near-flawless handling of the Super Bowl, the biggest of all live events.
So for Hulu to fail so badly on two seemingly unrelated fronts was both baffling and a black eye to the streaming industry. (And it was not just me. It’s estimated by multiple sources that close to 50K Hulu subscribers had log-in issues at some point.)
I have no doubt, as I told Digiday’s videomeister extraordinaire Tim Peterson in an interview this week, that a percentage of people who were on the bubble about giving up cable looked at what happened and thought that another year of set top box viewing was definitely in order.
It also gave sports leagues everywhere a better bargaining position with streamers because they could now pull out the “how will we know you won’t screw it up” card. And that card now has columns that extend beyond “can’t handle surge in traffic.”
It also highlights the fact that Disney needs a free option. All of the streaming services do. They need it for the Global South where most of the population doesn’t have money for any sort of subscription service. And they need it for the affluent West where people are cycling back and forth between subscription services, and the FAST can serve as both a customer acquisition tool and a way to add viewers to their anemic ad-supported numbers.
Which will be key during future big live events like the Oscars, where making viewing free is a fantastic marketing tool, as viewers don’t feel coerced into signing up for a service just to watch a single event, while also leaving them feeling far more charitable should some mishap occur.
What You Need To Do About It
This is pretty obvious: if you are a streaming service with any sort of even semi-high profile live event, you need to go all six sigma and ensure complete flawlessness.
Check, double check and then triple check everything.
The old ounce of prevention thing, dialed up to 11.
If you are Disney, you might actually want to thank the president. Because all the drama in DC this past week certainly helped to divert a world of attention away from your double whammy screw ups.
Silver linings and all that.
