Author: Zhao Yi
Black Widow was the first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to be released after Avengers: Endgame. The film was originally scheduled to be released in May 2020, but was eventually postponed to July 2021 due to the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the global film market, and chose to have a simultaneous paid premiere on Disney's streaming platform Disney+. Compared to the film's tepid reviews (Douban 6.3, IMDb 6.9), starring Scarlett Johansson's lawsuit with Disney seems to be more dramatic: On July 29, "Widow Sister" formally sued Marvel Studios' parent company Disney, claiming that the decision to simultaneously play the film on Disney+ (rather than theatrical premiere) violated its contract and could cost her tens of millions of dollars. Immediately, Disney responded, saying that "this lawsuit is meaningless, and this lawsuit is particularly sad and sad because it is a cold disregard for the terrible, long-term global impact of the new crown epidemic." ”
Stills from Black Widow.
Accelerated arrival of "Streaming +"
Since 2020, this type of controversy involving streaming platforms and traditional theaters/production companies has hardly stopped. In China, because of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, all the Spring Festival films in 2020 were withdrawn, but the Internet company ByteDance bought out the copyright of Xu Zheng's new film "囧Mom" for 630 million yuan, and premiered it for free on its platform, becoming the only film that was successfully "released" in the Spring Festival file in 2020. The "hospital transfer network" of "囧Mom" has attracted the joint condemnation of the theater line, and a joint statement has been made to boycott the film produced by Xu Zheng. Coincidentally, after Universal Pictures sold the 48-hour online viewing rights of the theatrical film "Trolls 2: Journey to the World" for $19.99 due to the epidemic, AMC, the largest cinema line in North America, issued a statement to boycott all of Universal's films since then.
The confrontation between the traditional film and television industry and the film and television streaming industry has existed for some time, the most interesting of which is the attitude of the French film industry to streaming platforms, and the conflict between the most representative Cannes Film Festival and the veteran streaming platform Netflix. In 2018, the Festival de Cannes introduced a new rule: in the official section of the main competition and other awards, any film must be released in French theaters next. According to French industry regulations, the "window period" for a film from theatrical release to the launch of the streaming platform is 3 years, which directly led to the withdrawal of Netflix from Cannes with Alfonso Cuarón's new film "Roma".
It can be said that until the second half of 2020, "boycott" is the main theme of the traditional film and television industry represented by the theater line facing the streaming media platform. However, the "terrible, long-term global impact" of the covid-19 pandemic has reversed the position and position of traditional cinema and streaming media platforms, a change that is particularly reflected in Hollywood's attitude: in July 2020, Universal Pictures and AMC re-reached an agreement to shorten the window period for the company's new films from theater to online from 70 to 95 days to 17 days; in September of the same year, Disney Pictures' film "Mulan" abandoned most offline theaters. Instead, it was released on streaming platform Disney+ at a price far exceeding the average U.S. theater fare; in December, Warner Pictures announced that 17 new films released in 2021 would be released simultaneously in theaters and the group's streaming platform HBO Max; in 2021, Amazon acquired traditional film and television giant MGM, which brought in the inclusion of "Rocky," "Robocop" and "The Handmaid's Tale" to its film and television streaming unit, Amazon Studio. Including more than 4,000 movies and more than 17,000 TV series copyright.
Apparently, streaming platforms and the traditional film and television industry have completed a round of "offensive and defensive conversion", so that in Scarlett Johansson's lawsuit, Disney did not hesitate to defend the legitimacy of streaming media synchronous distribution - today, the interests of most Hollywood companies have been tied to the streaming business. Hollywood has accelerated into the era of "streaming +".
Miramax in the digital age
In fact, this wave of Hollywood's transition to "streaming +" is poised to take place by 2020. Although it encountered the "blocking" of Cannes, in January 2019, Netflix officially joined the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), replacing 20th Century Fox, which was acquired by Disney, and became a member of Hollywood's new "Big Six"; in January 2020, Netflix attended the Oscars with Martin Scorsese's new work "The Irishman" and received 24 nominations, becoming the most nominated production company of the year. Netflix, which has focused on original content since 2010, has finally completed the transformation from a playback platform to a production/distribution system. It was also from this period that the system's streaming business began to receive more and more attention from film companies: Disney launched its own streaming platform Disney+ in 2019, Warner launched HBO Max in 2020, and NBCUniversal launched the streaming brand Peacock in the same year. For a time, Hollywood film giants began to set up exclusive streaming departments.
This is easily reminiscent of a "Hollywood thing of the past" at the end of the 20th century. In 1993, Disney acquired Miramax Pictures, which focused on independent distribution, and this acquisition eventually brought the entire American independent film movement of the 1990s to a climax. In 1994, due to the successful production of Quentin's "Pulp Fiction" and other excellent independent films, Miramax became a star in the American independent production company, and many of the young filmmakers who broke through various film festivals were involved in Miramax's door, which made Hollywood realize that they also had the opportunity to enter the increasingly hot independent film market, began to set up a special department and systematically produce and distribute low-cost films: in addition to Miramax, there are Sony Classics under Sony Pictures. Fox's Searchlight Company, Warner's Warner Independent Film Company, etc. Since 2000, Hollywood's small-budget film production department has formed a large-scale scale and has gradually become a part of the mainstream film market.
Faced with the challenge of European cinema, independent studios have mobilized Local North American film festivals and independent filmmakers such as Sundance with more flexible independent production, distribution strategies and business models, enabling Hollywood to participate in the ideological agenda of art cinema and making its globalization process more pervasive. After the new century, european emerging directors such as Guy Ritchie, Nolan, Tom Tikwe and later international filmmakers with strong local styles, such as "Three Masters of Mexico", were also incorporated into the global/local system of the film industry under the independent production/distribution mechanism of Hollywood. Today, structural dilemmas similar to those of cultural globalization in the 1990s are the digitization of production and broadcasting that the film industry is facing. Today, Hollywood reacts almost as much as it did in the 1990s: quickly setting up a streaming department under the umbrella of a large company to meet challenges from outside the industry. This is enough to make us realize that this is the general absorption mechanism of Hollywood in the face of crisis.
"Whistleblower" or "Outsider"?
But the historical positions of Netflix and Miramax also showed a distinction at this time. The same "whistleblowers" have taken the lead in warning of the problems that Hollywood is facing, but Netflix's position is much more embarrassing. Netflix has produced a series of Marvel superhero-themed self-produced dramas, among which "Night Devil", "Jessica Jones", "Luke Cage" and "The Punisher" were recognized for their unique styles, but Disney subsequently took back the development rights to these characters. The main tide of Hollywood's commercial battlefield over the past decade has been the franchise battle, and the biggest winner is obviously Disney Pictures. Immediately, the newly launched Disney+ quickly broadcast its own superhero dramas "Wanda and Vision", "Falcon and winter soldier" and "Rocky", and simultaneously launched the movie "Black Widow", without exception, these content produced and broadcast on the streaming platform are associated with the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" and become an integral part of the huge empire of Disney Pictures. Among hollywood competitors for streaming platforms, HBO Max and Peacock also own a large number of movies, TV series content and IP under Warner and Universal Pictures, respectively.
The exclusivity of franchises has made "traditional" streaming platforms such as Netflix suddenly become "outsiders", and this "streaming +" trend launched by Hollywood in the face of digital broadcasting challenges has become more like "Hollywood +" private parties from the beginning. It is foreseeable that the main tide of Hollywood film and television streaming media will be a continuation of the franchise war of the past decade in the future, and a large number of outgoing, prequel or reboot works developed based on core IP will also become the main output of streaming media platforms.
Therefore, we must be more cautious about the accelerated "streaming media +" pattern of the film industry. In the first quarter of 2021, Netflix's new users were only 4 million, lower than the expected 6 million, and the stock price fell by 11%, which of course has a direct relationship with Hollywood's entry. It is true that the impact of the global epidemic on physical cinema has brought a rare "window period" for online entertainment, but it has also erased the relative first-mover advantage of the streaming media industry based on media differences, making platforms that focus on original content face greater pressure.
China's streaming media industry has formed a content ecology with online self-made dramas as the core around 2018, and has continued to produce a number of high-quality works, which is very similar to the relative advantage formed by Netflix in the field of television before 2019. Therefore, the problem we face today is how to reconcile the excessive intervention of the traditional content industry in the post-epidemic era in the streaming media business and continue to focus on content innovation in the digital era, which will earn more full development space for the film and television streaming media industry that is still growing.
(The author is an associate professor at the School of Film and Television Media, Shanghai Normal University)
Source: Wen Wei Po