The coronavirus have been reported in over 160 countries worldwide. More than 8,000 deaths have been confirmed while over 82,000 patients have officially made recoveries. In an attempt to stave off the speed with which the condition has spread, many world governments have taken drastic measures that include blanket travel bans, closed borders, curfews, and mass shutdowns of businesses and schools. The United States declared a state of emergency while countries such as Italy and Spain are in states of near-total quarantine.
The cancellation of some of the world’s most prestigious film festivals.
It is unknown how costly these measures will be, but it’s safe to say that the more prominent studios will be losing tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars over the coming weeks and beyond. The short-term impacts are glaring enough, but nobody seems to understand how much this will change Hollywood over the next few months and years. To put it bluntly, it seems unlikely that the film industry as we know it will ever be the same again thanks to the coronavirus.
How Was Hollywood Before the Coronavirus?
For the past decade or so, Hollywood has been a strange grab-bag of contradictions. Studios like The Walt Disney Company have reported new record-breaking grosses on movies like NBCUniversal under Comcast, but that hasn’t stopped many of Hollywood’s most historic studios from struggling to stay afloat.
All that and the speedy domination of streaming in film and television hasn’t helped to stave off dwindling theatrical ticket sales. Those billion-dollar box office numbers are deceiving: The grosses may be high for some, but it’s not across the board and they barely conceal the growing troubles at the heart of the industry. Hollywood has seldom played on secure ground, but the past ten years have seen them struggling in an atmosphere of smothering precarity. Unless you’re Disney, it seems that nobody is safe. It’s no wonder that the reactions to the coronavirus have been swift and dramatic. Few can afford to dawdle on this.
How Did the Coronavirus First Impact Hollywood?
The evolution of Hollywood over the past decade, as documented above, meant that their seemingly extreme responses to Mulan from its schedule altogether. It still does not have a new release date, although the company are reportedly hoping to still get it out in 2020. All of these films are dependent on big international money, especially from China, and it simply makes no sense to continue releasing them when that market is now all but gone. All of these choices happened before major cinema chains like AMC announced that it would close all of its theaters for between six and 12 weeks, forcing other studios and distributors to follow suit, regardless of how big or small their film was.
The shutdown of films currently in production quickly followed. With various authorities, both political and scientific, advising against gatherings of more than a hundred people, studios made the call to shut down shooting or pre-production of various titles. Disney brought a halt to their entire live-action slate, which included in-production titles like Marvel's Stranger Things to essentially the entire slate of American network TV (with some notable British titles, including long-running soap opera Eastenders also shutting down).
With the traditional realms of film and television grinding to a halt, many wondered if this would be the perfect time for the worlds of streaming to shine. Streaming services have already provided formidable competition to the old-school methods of Hollywood, but few could have envisaged that even the mighty big five studios would embrace them in this manner. NBCUniversal decided to break their theatrical window and put films like the Black Widow dropping on Disney+ and bying cinemas altogether. Still, this moment felt like Hollywood unleashing a genie that it could never put back in the bottle.
What Happens in Hollywood After the Coronavirus?
Right now, the public at large has no idea how long the coronavirus will continue to impact daily life. With many people in voluntary self-isolation and worldwide cities left as veritable ghost-towns, this period of uncertainty is proving to be especially difficult. Hollywood and the entertainment industry at large have never faced a problem of this magnitude, and that’s what makes its long-term effects so unnerving.
Currently, most live-action productions have shut down for two weeks, with the potential for that hiatus to go on indefinitely; however, even if things go back to formal after 14 days, the immediate costs will be vast. The Hollywood Reporter noted that shutting down a major production like Shang-Chi for even one day could lead to a bill of around $300,000, and those numbers will only get bigger as the days . Studios have insurance for emergencies, but questions remain over whether or not a literal pandemic is covered under many of these plans. That doesn’t even take into consideration the employment issues, from the need to pay actors and directors their full fees to the below-the-line workers who face sudden unemployment.
Finished films will eventually get a release, but only time will tell if studios choose to hold out for an eventual theatrical release or if they decide that streaming is more beneficial. It’s worth ing that we still have very little knowledge of how profitable streaming is as revenue for many of these releases. Would it really be worthwhile for Disney to just stick Mulan on Disney+ over giving it the vast worldwide rollout they had planned? The chances are the answer is no, at least not for a film of that scale. The traditional means of release may see profits dwindling, but it’s still a far safer bet than streaming right now.
2020 as a whole may be vastly different in of film compared to what audiences were expecting because of the Oscars could see a drastically slimmer field compared to the previous year, for example.
Why Hollywood Will Never Be the Same After the Coronavirus
The coronavirus has fully exposed how much of Hollywood’s default way of doing business is built on the shakiest of foundations, even when they aren’t facing down a worldwide crisis. When blockbuster tentpoles require near-unprecedented levels of grosses just to break even, the industry becomes overly reliant on an already unreliable market that has no long-term certainty. Right now, time is dictating how Hollywood moves forward. Studios will need to renegotiate their leases on soundstages and crews, contracts will need to be sorted out once more, and months, possibly years, of film and television schedules will need to be drastically overhauled. Hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue mean that Hollywood will have to drastically change track for the long term. There simply won’t be enough money to go round to stick to business as usual, even for the big players in the game.
The most seismic shift may come in the form of a serious shortening of the theatrical window. That’s something that’s already been changing over the past few years in the age of Netflix, but it feels inevitable now. Audiences were choosing to stay at home long before the coronavirus, and studios were having a tough time getting people into the cinemas. Aside from those major event movies that by design require a high-paying worldwide audience, direct-to-streaming may become the default mode.
Hollywood has proven that it’s not ready, or at the very least willing, to make major changes to its increasingly archaic way of business. The traditional studios aren’t ready to fully embrace at-home viewing, especially since it’s yet to fully prove its status as a guaranteed money-maker; yet, even when the worst of the coronavirus has ed, people may still be hesitant to return to the cinemas to rub shoulders with coughing strangers. That is why Hollywood can never be the same after this, because the world will not be the same after this — not after dealing with a life-altering pandemic. Right now, all one can do is speculate about the future, but whatever happens, Hollywood must be fully aware that trying to revert to the status quo after this major social and economic shift would be a fool’s folly.
