LISTEN: Cinema United Chief Michael O’Leary on the Threat to Moviegoing From Netflix Buying Warner Bros.: ‘We Cannot Survive Simply on Blockbusters’
On today’s episode, Michael O’Leary, president and CEO of Cinema United, discusses the state of moviegoing and the reaction among exhibitors to the Netflix-Warner Bros. Discovery news. The leader of the world’s largest lobbying group for movie theater owners unpacks why exhibitors are so worried about Netflix taking the keys to Hollywood’s biggest producer of theatrical films.
O’Leary cites Cinema United research indicating that when one sizable studio absorbs another studio –aka Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox — the total volume of film production for theatrical release declines by 43%.
In addition to outlining the exhibition’s fears regarding Warner Bros., O’Leary discusses areas of common ground such as marketing where exhibitors aim to work more closely with studios.
“The marketing pinch is felt the most, it’s not in the top 20 movies. It’s not in the blockbusters, it’s in 21 thorough 100 — or what we call at Cinema United ‘the next 80.’ The box office drop post pandemic for those movies is three times as big as the box office drop for the top 20,” O’Leary says. “And those are the movies that are the smaller movies, the medium sized movies. They need the marketing. They need the time in the theater to build an audience. So that is an area where we should try and come together. Because the truth is, our industry cannot survive without those next eighty movies, we cannot just become simply a blockbuster industry that has a certain number of films throughout the year. It’s unsustainable. We have to bolster the rest of the slate.”
More to come
Listen to Daily Variety on iHeartPodcasts, Apple Podcasts, Variety’s YouTube Podcast channel, Amazon Music, Spotify and other podcast platforms.
O’Leary cites Cinema United research indicating that when one sizable studio absorbs another studio –aka Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox — the total volume of film production for theatrical release declines by 43%.
In addition to outlining the exhibition’s fears regarding Warner Bros., O’Leary discusses areas of common ground such as marketing where exhibitors aim to work more closely with studios.
“The marketing pinch is felt the most, it’s not in the top 20 movies. It’s not in the blockbusters, it’s in 21 thorough 100 — or what we call at Cinema United ‘the next 80.’ The box office drop post pandemic for those movies is three times as big as the box office drop for the top 20,” O’Leary says. “And those are the movies that are the smaller movies, the medium sized movies. They need the marketing. They need the time in the theater to build an audience. So that is an area where we should try and come together. Because the truth is, our industry cannot survive without those next eighty movies, we cannot just become simply a blockbuster industry that has a certain number of films throughout the year. It’s unsustainable. We have to bolster the rest of the slate.”
More to come
Listen to Daily Variety on iHeartPodcasts, Apple Podcasts, Variety’s YouTube Podcast channel, Amazon Music, Spotify and other podcast platforms.