In a wide-ranging talk at a Goldman Sachs conference on Monday, Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel said that his company is in talks with Amazon Studios and Netflix about their plans for releasing films in theaters.
“We are having conversations with Amazon about, is it going to be 15 days, 25 days, day-and-date? There is no one way or another,” he said. “Certain movies even on Netflix now, they are going to do four weeks in theaters … There is no set model right now, because they are still figuring it out.”
The same could probably be said for almost all of Hollywood’s major studios. While Sony has kept a stable partnership with Netflix for streaming release of their films after their theatrical run, the other legacy studios — Disney, Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros. — have tried different experiments with theatrical windowing and choosing which films to skip theaters entirely. The goal — try to balance their theatrical film plans with the need to boost revenue for their streaming services.
But streamers like Amazon and Netflix have been even more opaque with their plans for theatrical release, which is notable particularly for Netflix given its lavish spending on some major blockbuster films. The Russo Brothers’ $200 million blockbuster “The Gray Man” starring Ryan Gosling got a reported 253 million hours of viewing on Netflix through the end of August and has a sequel greenlit, though it only had a one-week exclusive run in theaters before it hit streaming.
Meanwhile, Netflix hasn’t fully unveiled the release plans for “Glass Onion,” the sequel to Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” which the streamer paid $469 million to grab from Lionsgate. While the film has been set for a Dec. 23 release date on streaming, Netflix has not announced a date for a planned limited theatrical release.
Emanuel told Goldman Sachs that he believes Hollywood will be transitioning towards a future with fewer films in theaters, which would dash the hopes of cinema execs hoping for a return to pre-pandemic revenue at the box office. While the summer box office finished with a $3.35 billion total — about $1 billion short of summer 2019 — only 22 films were given wide releases in more than 2,000 theaters, compared to 42 in 2019.
John Fithian, CEO of the National Association of Theater Owners, said in a CinemaCon press conference this past spring that he believed that the number of theatrical releases would increase as studios get past lingering production bottlenecks created by the pandemic. But the long-term changes that the pandemic and changes in audience viewing habits have had on theatrical releasing in 2023 and beyond are still unclear.