With Napoleon and Killers Of The Flower Moon struggling to earn back their budgets at the cinema, how do we judge a film’s success in the age of streaming?
The weekend after Thanksgiving is usually a quiet one for the US box office. That might go some way to explaining the 66 percent revenue drop Ridley Scott’s Napoleon has seen over there in the last week, but even so, with a budget of somewhere between $130m-$200m, the biopic was always going to struggle to break even in the cinema alone.
It’s a similar fate to Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon. Topping out at a pretty handsome $152m worldwide, any R-rated, three-and-a-half-hour historical crime drama would be over the moon with those numbers. Unless, of course, it cost $200m to make.
But then, for both of these films, making money on the big screen was never really part of the plan. Apple is footing the bill for both, and by shelling out the big bucks for two of Hollywood’s biggest and most critically acclaimed directors, the company is hoping to drive subscribers to its oh-so-new-and-exciting streaming platform, Apple TV+.
The problem with that, of course, is that getting viewing figures for individual projects out of a streaming service is like getting Ridley Scott to acknowledge that historical inaccuracies are a problem. The recent writers’ strike proved that even the creators of the world’s biggest streaming films and TV shows had no way of knowing how well their work was received by the public unless streamers felt like telling them. Even now, access to figures for the purpose of residuals is limited to a select group from the WGA, all sworn to secrecy.
Nowadays, it’s a rare film that relies on box office alone to keep its accountants happy. Last year, Focus Features’ distribution of The Northman was widely denounced as a major flop by industry analysts. A year on, the company’s head of acquisitions revealed video-on-demand sales – to the tune of somewhere between $70m and $90m – had helped the film turn a profit.
With Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny, Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels underperforming in cinemas this year, there’s a palpable sense that the studios are reconsidering their adherence to superheroes and franchise fare. Even still, there’s no way any of these films are making a loss when their respective Excel spreadsheets are completed. All three are likely to sell enough lunchboxes to feed a small country, not to mention streaming, broadcast and on-demand rights over the next few years.
A film’s soft power, too, has always been worth something. A film which lands belly up at the box office but picks up a dozen shiny gongs come awards season is usually worth the investment for a studio keen to keep its reputation as a peddler of quality cinema. Now, a similar logic hopes to attract subscribers to the plethora of streaming services battling for online supremacy.
This certainly seems to be the route Apple is going down.
Where Netflix and Amazon have spent millions of dollars on streaming rights to pack out their interfaces with an endless parade of stuff, Apple TV+ has a far leaner, glossier content library. Now, with two big awards hopefuls from octogenarian directors in its back catalogue, an Oscar or BAFTA win would go some way towards cementing its reputation as a streamer with some kind of quality control behind it.
At the same time, it looks like most entertainment outlets – Film Stories included – are struggling to work out how to present this smorgasbord of information.
This article’s first paragraph, even, is pretty ineffective at communicating the economic reality of a film’s release in 2023. Where for most of cinema’s history, a combination of box office and DVD/video sales charts meant we had a pretty reasonable idea of a given film’s profitability, the streaming revolution has seen film journalism slowly sink into the dark.
Does this matter?
From the perspective of someone paid to report on this kind of thing, I’d like to think so. If nothing else, the lack of transparency in streaming data at best feels like an attempt by streamers at concealing a product’s market value from investors – at worst, it prevents artists and filmmakers from receiving their fair share of the profits.
This does throw up a lot of questions around the direction of film reporting – questions the industry, for the most part, hasn’t really been able to address. In the end, the move away from judging a film’s success by the amount of money it makes could be a good thing. But being kept in the dark doesn’t feel too good either.
