-Suppose for a moment that the lights of
this theater of ours went dark.
What then?
What would serve instead?
Covid-19 isn’t the first time Hollywood has been
disrupted by a pandemic.
The 1918 flu influenced the strategy of studio titan
Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures.
-Zukor sensed an opportunity when the pandemic happened.
So many movie theaters were closing and,
and the, the exhibitors were losing their shirts.
This fit very well into his plan for vertical integration.
And so he’s now controlling two aspects of
filmmaking: production and distribution.
What he needed now was a chain of theaters that were
obligated to only show his films and keep all of his competitors out.
Movies had only been a force in American culture for about a
decade when the flu hit the United States.
Mann says, like today, the Hollywood ecosystem struggled to
manage the threat of outbreaks.
-Douglas Fairbanks, one of the top swashbuckling heroes of the
screen, refused to wear a mask in his public appearances.
And this was, you know, because he didn’t
want to appear weak or timid.
Not long after that, his lady love, Mary Pickford,
who is the biggest star of the screen, she gets the influenza
and is very, very sick for a, for a number of weeks.
Harold Lockwood, who was a big, big star
at the time, he actually died of, of the influenza.
Despite trying to impose social distancing at theaters, many were
forced to close, and Zukor’s Paramount acquired some of them,
helping to create the studio system.
-And the Golden Age of Hollywood comes out of this very efficient
factory model of production.
It is predominant in the industry.
The economic impact of the 1918
pandemic on Hollywood and, and on American filmmaking
was significant.
-You know, I’m glad we have television, but I wish we’d get some
modern, up-to-date feature films or Broadway stage plays.
Something like that.
Today, the consumer is in charge.
When the Covid pandemic disrupted Hollywood last year,
studios started bypassing exclusive theater releases...
-Get over here.
...allowing audiences to stream new movies at home.
-Universal Pictures released the animated movie “Trolls World Tour”
exclusively on demand, taking in a record $100 million in three weeks.
-You’re going on a journey.
All you have to do is follow my voice.
-WarnerMedia was saying, uh, this is pandemic rules, nobody’s going
back to the theaters for all of 2021.
And, at the same time, WarnerMedia is saying, we’re the
future, streaming is the future, this is the model.
-Going to shake up this world.
-The innovation has arrived.
-Zukor would be cheering on Netflix and HBO Max and, and all of these
streaming services because they’re using his model in many ways.
They’re controlling the production, the distribution and the exhibition of
these moving pictures that they’re creating.
And that was the most efficient model in 1919, but it was
also the most efficient model today.
While WarnerMedia has since announced it will return to theatrical
releases in 2022, it’s clear the moviegoing landscape has
changed.
-One of the unintended consequences of Adolph Zukor’s
new model was that many independent filmmakers, the vast
majority of them, could no longer compete because they didn’t have
access to the theaters anymore.
And I think the structure is being different now in that streaming and
cable provide so many different platforms for content.
And while that makes me concerned about the
future of the theatrical part of the industry, I think the consumer is the
one who’s going to win here because the numbers of choices
they have are so much greater.