Movie Theaters Reduce Hours

[Bobby Henderson]

The last attempt to franchise theatres (Jerry Lewis Cinemas) back in the 1970's didn't last too long or end well. While the industry has changed a lot since then, and many of the issues that killed JL Cinemas would not exist if the distributors were the one doing the franchising, I still see lots of potential problems. The devil would be in the details.

I don't see the movie studios "franchising" theaters out to other partners to share costs and operational tasks. In the whole scorched earth model, any emerging theaters would be 100% company owned. Given how they could use leverage to strong arm terms with property owners or local city governments the movie studios could force thru some pretty advantageous deals.

Not every big national company does franchise setups. Take In-N-Out Burger. The company is 100% privately held and 100% of their locations are all company owned. There are ZERO outside partners. If I was running a major movie studio it would be tempting to set up company-owned theaters where you get to call the shots 100% of the time. Adding in a wild card, given the current legal setup, there is nothing stopping outfits like Amazon, Apple, Google/YouTube, etc from opening their own theaters just to showcase their own in-house developed content. That wrinkle in the fabric could make it more critical for studios like Disney and Warner Bros to maintain direct operational control and ownership of their own theaters.

[Mike Blakesley]

If things were normal, it'd be fun to give some studio ownership of my theater for say, two months. Then they could see the first hand the insanity of making me play a new movie for 3 weeks.

[Bobby Henderson]

If the big movie studios end up taking over theaters they'll likely do some things different. Prior to the home video revolution in the 1980's it was common for single screen theaters in big cities to play in the same movie for months or even over a year. I don't think we'll ever go back to that. But we could see some wildly different lengths of theatrical windows for different movies. If a company like Disney is fully vertically integrated from production all the way down to its own company-owned cinemas they could hold over a specific movie in a specific theater for however long they liked. They get to call the shots on when the movie appears on PVOD, Blu-ray, etc. With retail disc sales continuing to crater everything is pointing to download-based movie purchases or rentals for the home market. They can milk a theatrical release for all its worth and then immediately pivot to download version releases once the foot traffic begins to dry up. Disney owns the ABC TV network and has its own streaming service; they can use those two platforms to spam the hell out of a given movie release for pretty much nothing (although they'll cook the books to show many millions supposedly spent in ad dollars). Universal can use NBC to do the same thing. Likewise between Paramount and CBS.

Given the parent companies of these movie studios own broadcast networks it's also possible they'll book other non-movie types of programming into studio-owned cinemas. It could be the premiere of some TV series, a major sporting event, some type of live event. Since they have their own easy outlets of network TV advertising it will be easier (and cheaper) to promote. Amazon, Netflix and Google/YouTube could do some unusual things if they started opening their own cinemas.