War on the Way? Star Wars Premieres This Friday
With the upcoming premiere of Star Wars: The Last Jedi this coming Friday many theaters have opted to not show the new Star Wars film in their theaters. Increasing demands by Disney may leave smaller theaters unable to justify the cost of showing The Last Jedi. Larger theaters such as AMC and Regals won’t necessarily have a problem complying with Disney’s demands, although they are burdensome. The Wall Street Journal lists some of the demands given to theaters by Disney in this article.
The specific demands that give smaller, independent theaters headaches are that they must show The Last Jedi for four weeks instead of the usual two weeks in their largest theaters. The theaters also must give 65% of the ticket revenue to Disney, when the average ticket revenue given to other studios is usually 60%.
With critics predicting that The Last Jedi will be the second best opening after The Force Awakens many believe that Disney can afford to make these demands of theaters.
War on the Way?
With movie theater business declining in the age of online streaming and pirating what will these demands mean for the future of theaters? Is Disney the Empire and the theaters the Rebellion or the Resistance?
In my opinion, Disney may be struggling itself with the increasing subscriptions for services like Netflix and Hulu, but their demands might hurt them in the long run. If theaters are unable to justify accepting Disney’s demands they may just refuse to show any Disney movie until the demands are more acceptable. If all AMC or all Regal movie theaters made it franchise policy to not show Disney movies, yes they would hurt, but they might just hurt Disney enough to reduce the demands back to the standards. Overall, I think it takes these small theaters great strength to resist giving into Disney’s demands and I sort of hope other theaters follow suit. I like going to movies and if The Last Jedi is always on I would definitely be disappointed.
On the other hand though are Disney’s demands that outrageous that theaters shouldn’t show The Last Jedi? Comparatively the portion of ticket sales revenue that Disney receives from the theaters is only 5% more than the “standard”. Furthermore, Disney is only enacting these demands for The Last Jedi, not any of it’s other movies, YET.
Scott Mendelson from Forbes stated this…
“But I will argue that the motivations behind the new rules aren’t just a power play, but rather an expectation of where The Last Jedi will make most of its money”
Disney’s motivation behind these new demands are to make the most amount of profit from the area that they know will perform well based on the previous Star Wars movies. But, will The Last Jedi serve as a test run for enacting new standards for ticket sale cuts and auditorium requirements?
