Following calls to bring back a 45 day exclusivity window in cinemas, Hollywood studios are back at the negotiating table.
This week’s CinemaCon has been dominated by discussions about the theatrical exclusivity window and the benefits that could come from restoring it to a meaningful period of time. Anora helmer Sean Baker has made several high-profile calls for the return of a longer (90 days) exclusivity window, while others, such as the head of AMC Cinemas in the US, Adam Aron, have joined him in the last month or so.
Given that – in the wake of the pandemic – some studios are still putting films onto premium video on demand services just 17 days after films leave cinemas, there’s a real fear in the industry that audiences are being trained to simply wait and watch new releases at home. This week’s episode of Matt Belloni’s podcast, The Town, saw him moderate a panel of top industry players who gave their takes on the subject. It’s a fascinating listen if you want to get a deeper perspective on what theatrical exclusivity should look like.
Still, some good news on this front though. AMC boss Adam Aron has publicly confirmed that active negotiations about bringing back a 45 day theatrical window are ongoing, with three of the six major legacy studios in agreement that this window should be inviolable.
According to Deadline, Aron stated, ‘we have started conversations with almost every major studio so far – we haven’t gotten to everybody yet – that as an industry, collectively, we need to fix this, and we need to bring back at least a 45-day window, and then we can talk about, should it be more than 45 days? But it can’t be 25 days. It can’t be 28 days, right? It can’t be 32 days, because it’s robbing movie theatres of moviegoers.’
We aren’t disagreeing with him there. Aron wouldn’t share which studios are on board, but you can bet Disney is one of them, given that the studio is pretty rigorous with exclusivity windows, while its past experiments to lower such periods haven’t been huge successes.
Aron also confirmed that he hasn’t yet spoken to all of the studios, adding: ‘This is still fresh … I’m having dialogue with studios, one after another, after another. And so far, I’m not saying we have any ‘no’s yet, but I am saying we have three yeses. I got three of them – not ‘I’, but, well, you know, our conversations with three of them – they agree with what I just said.’
Universal is going to be the toughest studio to convince, given that its balance sheet continues to be sizeably fattened by quick PVOD releases. Wicked's release onto PVOD some 39 days after leaving cinemas made the studio around $100m and its argument is that it supports cinemas by investing all of those profits back into new films for cinemas to exhibit – films that otherwise wouldn’t get made, it argues.
Debate on will continue, but we might be headed towards some kind of consensus. We’ll keep you posted.
