Dont Tell NetflixDont Tell Netflix

By George Robbins

This has been an incredible year though that does not mean that it has been a good year by any stretch of the imagination, it just means that it was just a different year all around in general. This has led to countless things going into affect this year as we have obviously seen countless businesses going in various directions in order to make up for the fact that they could not compete normally this past year. Hence we now have many different businesses working very differently from how they would otherwise just to try and survive this pandemic. They aren’t so much trying to keep up at the moment as they are trying even harder just to survive what is happening during this pandemic. As of now, many businesses across the world have taken to trying to adjust to the rules and regulations in place just to try and make up for the loss in overall transactions they have been facing since the start.

When this pandemic first began back in March earlier this year, we saw the immediate closure of just about every single business out there with the exception of those deemed to be essential. What this meant was that all businesses out there which were deemed to be useful to the continued everyday lives of civilians were able to stay open with restrictions. Those restrictions would essentially be the same ones that we would continue to follow as time went on and this is how we ended up where we are now over 9 months later. Those restrictions were ones such as having to wear masks, keep to distances of around 6 feet from one another, and limit the overall capacities of stores and services. The first rule is one that has caused a lot of issues over the months with some people not wanting to listen to the rules and thus causing the virus to spread even more.

The biggest catch-22’s are what is being seen in the economy today as many businesses are trying to cope with the various issues being presented at the moment. Obviously, with the massive rise in cases over the past months, they have been trying to figure out how to move forward and follow the rules while bringing in new business. Most stores are not truly suffering from this same sense of stagnation or loss of customers because people will never stop going out to stores to buy things when they need them. Online stores and distribution sites have essentially been booming because people are far too afraid to take the risk and travel out to stores to get what they need. Stores that have their own online distribution have pretty much been booming and it has led to them being able to outlast this whole pandemic.

Distribution centers which have their homes online have always been set up to do well in these types of situations so of course they would be doing even better now that people have started ordering even more frequently off of the internet. That aside, there are some industries which are now suffering tremendously from all of this and among those industries is the film industry. From the very moment where the pandemic first began to now, the film industry has easily become one of the more interesting cases to follow because they really have no idea how to handle this pandemic. When everything first kicked off back in March, the pandemic immediately caused the shut down of every single business out there including both movie theaters and studios. From that moment on, studios have been trying to come up with some way of getting back to work why simultaneously coming up with ways to release their films.

Movie theaters, on the other hand, have essentially been shut down for the most part until some time in August when they decided they no longer wanted to wait in order to open their doors back up again. The result of which was something that should have been expected but simultaneously surprised most people in the theater industry because they immediately started losing out on business. Movie theaters started losing business the moment that they were forced to close their doors because that is their entire lay-out for how they get paid. Without being open to show people new movie releases, theaters immediately began the slow and painful process of exsanguinating money that they would never get back. Whether it be from the cost of maintenance even while their buildings were not in use, or the simple fact that while they were not open for business they were losing out on potential revenue, they were losing money in some way.

In August, when they reopened once again to the public, theaters found their opportunity to once again try and make money and that was where things once again took a turn for the worse and the industry took a tumble. Warner Bros. had a movie for them to show not long after the reopenings that theaters had taking place all over the world and that was their newest Christopher Nolan blockbuster ‘Tenet.’ Unlike other movies, ‘Tenet’ was not a sequel nor was it a movie with any big background to it which made it much more difficult for people to get excited for it. All the movie truly had going for it was the fact that the movie was a new Christopher Nolan original blockbuster, which, under normal circumstances, would have been enough to get people out and about to see the film. Unfortunately, this movie simply wasn’t bound for anything great in the middle of a pandemic and it failed to even come close to its marks that the studio wanted.

This whole event would go on to cause the current predicament that the movie industry as a whole is now facing as many studios then realized that that was not a good time for them to release their films. Thus, they immediately pushed back nearly all of their remaining 2020 films into some time in 2021 with some other plans of attack being drawn up in the meantime. While many small studios don’t really have much of a choice available to them other than waiting to see what will happen, the bigger studios have been taking steps to create new options for themselves over the years. Of course, no studio really thought that there was going to be a pandemic which would change the world and the way it functions, but they were merely adapting for the new age we are currently in. This is why so many companies are no focusing so much on the advent of the streaming age where people could view any content they wanted whenever they wanted.

Streaming services aren’t really anything new or revolutionary at this point, but they are the future for media across the world at this moment and the moments to come. People have always been bound to watching movies and shows they have liked on TV for years but with no real way of controlling what they get to see and when. These types of things have led to scheduling issues over the years that no one has been able to truly rectify but there have certainly been attempts to help fix these things including features like DVR. Other than DVR, there is nothing for TV networks to do that would allow them to help their customers because they can’t just make their content available whenever they want. They all have set schedules that they need to follow if they are going to make it out alive because that is how they fit in all of their content on their line-ups to fit every demographic.

With streaming services becoming more and more popular this has become less of an issue, but there are still a few problems which have arisen as a direct result of all of this. Those problems would be the fact that not every streaming service has the shows and content that people want to watch available on them and thus, various services are necessary for the full spread of content. This is how we ended up with so many services having different content which has driven people to have to get those services like television station packages. Unlike those packages however, those who get those services can watch all of that content whenever they actually feel like watching it meaning that thousands of hours of content is always readily available at peoples’ fingertips. Among those services which have made themselves available to the public at large are the Disney+ and HBO Max services which have been pushing hard to sell subs over these past months.

Primarily, the subscriptions they are trying to sell are almost entirely based on the exclusive content that they try to make available on their streaming sites. This is how we ended up with so much effort going into the creation and maintenance of these two sites over this past year since they vary so wildly. What really ends up selling subscription based services after all is the fact that they have exclusive content that really can’t be seen anywhere else in the world which draws in the traffic to their services. This is how the biggest services these days make the money on subscriptions that they do. Hence now, the ones that are trying their best to draw people in are the ones like Disney+ and HBO Max which have literally thousands of hours of content to give to the public.

HBO Max seems like they are losing the war for new subscriptions as of late however, because they have not been getting as many as they hoped they would since they launched back in May earlier this year. In fact, despite the countless hours of content they have made available to people who subscribe to their service, people don’t feel incentivized to really give their money to Warner. This has resulted in Warner Bros. now going through the trouble to do things that are making them hated among the industry including taking money away from the already failing theaters. These theaters have been trying their best to get business back after the pandemic began, but nothing they are doing is really considered enough at this point because people just don’t want to take the risk and go back out to theaters. Despite this fact, Warner now feels the need to make things difficult for theaters by putting their new content out on both HBO Max and in theaters simultaneously upon release.

Their most recent and first actual venture into this was to the release of their ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ which actually managed to have the best pandemic box office opening this year. With the movie actually doing well, some were wondering just how much of an effect the movie had on the HBO Max side of things since it was such a big deal to release through both mediums on the same day. In truth, it worked out like they intended, but there is no way that it worked out exactly as they intended it to because their numbers do not lie. As it turns out, they may have won the box office, but the points that really matter, the HBO Max subscriptions, did not end up being as high as they were hoping for them to be upon the film’s release. In fact, they ended up losing out on that win this past weekend to Disney+ which is just continuing a winning streak at this point.

Disney+ had their premiere release of the new Pixar movie ‘Soul’ this past weekend which managed to outclass the much looked forward to ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ which released the same day. Unfortunately for HBO Max and Warner as a whole, this also meant that Disney+ ended up getting more overall subscriptions to their service as opposed to HBO Max. So in conclusion, HBO Max did get something but it was nothing like what they truly wanted and some of their thunder was stolen by Disney and Pixar. Hopefully for Warner this will not be a foreshadowing of things to come, but who really knows at this point. They are going to have a long year ahead of them which hasn’t even really started yet so it will be interesting to see how things turn out in the not too distant future.