Back in May 2022, Nightbitch was bought up by Searchlight Pictures and Hulu. This development returned director Marielle Heller to the arthouse studio that distributed her 2018 feature Can You Ever Forgive Me? It also signaled that Hulu was eager to get into the world of original movies. The streamer and Searchlight had plunked down a reported $25 million for the project, which was set to debut as a Hulu Original Movie. Hulu had only started releasing original movies in October 2019, but since then, it had become a go-to home for COVID-affected movies like Palm Springs, Happiest Season, and The United States vs. Billie Holiday. Plus, as of March 2019, Hulu, Searchlight Pictures, and 20th Century Studios all fell under the Disney umbrella. As made clear in Disney's December 2020 quarterly earnings presentation, the Mouse House saw these two film studios primarily as ways to fill up Hulu with (shudders) "content".
Cut to April 2024 and Searchlight Pictures just announced that Nightbitch will now go exclusively to theaters on December 6, 2024. That high-profile release date mirrors the early December launchpad of Searchlight's 2023 hit Poor Things, a sign of confidence from the studio. Hulu's film ambitions have begun to dry up and it's not the only streamer to start sending its movies off to theatrical releases. There's suddenly a welcome wave of streaming titles headed for multiplexes, including this weekend's Monkey Man. Let's examine some of these titles and how they reflect the current state of streaming exclusive movies, shall we?
Leading off with Nightbitch, let's look at how 20th Century Studios and Searchlight Pictures appear to be moving back towards theatrical-only releases. Hulu dropped 15 original movies throughout 2023, 10 of which came from these two film studios. For the first five months of 2024, Hulu will only be dropping four original movies, two of which (Self-Reliance and The Greatest Hits) got brief theatrical runs before their streaming premieres. Two of those four titles are Searchlight releases. None of them are 20th Century Studios projects. Searchlight only has one other movie (Dust) currently set for a Hulu launch. 20th Century Studios (as of this writing) has none, with upcoming projects from the studio like Ella McCay and Alien: Romulus (the latter of which was once set for a streaming bow) getting set for theatrical premieres.
It was always going to be challenging to transform Hulu (a place known for TV) into a launchpad for original movies. Disney's hesitancy over committing to this plan long-term was apparent when it pulled a slew of 20th Century Studios titles from Hulu in late May 2023. Dropping costly titles behind a paywall forever, that's just not going to fly. Plus, Disney's seen that even adult-skewing dramas like All of Us Strangers can make a tidy $19 million worldwide. Any money is good money for studios and theatrical releases bolster a movie's reputation before it debuts on streaming. No wonder Disney's brief foray into making Hulu the next Netflix is being abandoned in favor of letting Searchlight get back to releasing arthouse dramas theatrically year-round.
Meanwhile, Warner Bros. sent a handful of Max original movies (House Party, Magic Mike's Last Dance, and Evil Dead Rise) to theaters in the first four months of 2023. Meanwhile, Paramount Pictures pumped up Smile from a Paramount+ original film to a big theatrical title after it scored strong test screening scores. That film turned into a major box office hit and a new franchise for the studio. Mean Girls was another Paramount+ feature that Paramount eventually opted to just bump up to In 2022, Paramount+ housed 15 original movies, while in 2023, the service housed 12 of such titles. For the first four months of 2024, Paramount+ has housed only three original movies and there aren't a ton of other original motion pictures on the 2024 horizon for the streamer. Paramount+ still has some major TV movies on the docket (like Michelle Yeoh's Star Trek: Section 31), but like Disney and Hulu, Paramount has clearly fallen out of love with streaming-exclusive movies.
Looking back on it, there was a common problem with many of the original movies these streamers embarked on. None of them wanted to sacrifice the "big blockbusters" everyone assumed would continue to dominate in the 2020s like they did in the 2010s. So they sent a slew of smaller titles to streaming instead. These projects didn't draw a lot of eyeballs to Hulu/Paramount+/Max, etc. In fact, they're just the kind of movies that require the promotional might of a theatrical release to get on people's radar. Would Late Night with the Devil have become such a conversation starter if it had gone straight to Shudder? Probably not. Sending projects like Finestkind and Not Okay to streaming immediately just sent those titles off to die. They could never compete in the endless landscape of competition that currently exists in the streaming marketplace. Even the mighty Netflix couldn't get its original movie Maestro to have anywhere near the viewership of classic 1990s Mel Gibson/Tommy Lee Jones action features on the platform. Folks recognize those vintage movies because they were theatrical events. They're gonna choose what they know over a new smaller streaming movie nobody's heard of.
Plus, movies like The Holdovers and Where the Crawdads Sing have been doing well in theaters again. Studios have been reminded that more money can be made with smaller titles playing on the big screen than just dumping them on Hulu. Will we continue to see more and more projects like Monkey Man and Nightbitch get saved from the clutches of streaming premieres in favor of grand theatrical debuts? Let's cross our fingers that that's the case. Movie theaters need more movies, no doubt about it, and it clearly pays to bring these titles to the big screen. It's almost like that system's worked for over a century now or something....
No comments:
Post a Comment