Back in the early days of television, when the only options most people had for watching anything were limited to three big national networks and just a handful of local broadcasts, you could always count on a large audience number for any given program.  Those were the days when you could count on things like the final episode of MASH being watched by over 100 million people on it’s premiere, counting for nearly 80% of total viewership in that one night.  In the years since, with cable television beginning to divide up the audience’s attention, the only programs that could garner those same kinds of numbers were big events.  Think the Super Bowl, or the NBA Finals, or even breaking news events like the O.J. Simpson verdict.  Probably the most unusual program to emerge as a force in the early days of television was the broadcasts of the yearly Academy Awards.  The Oscars as we know them certainly never hit Super Bowl numbers, but they were for many years a reliable juggernaut in the programing block every year they were broadcast.  Since the first telecast on NBC in 1953, more than half of the American TV watching audience would tune in to see the glitz and glamour of the ceremony every year.  While the numbers would fluctuate over the decades, the numbers always remained strong for the Academy Awards, and it helped to cement them as the premier honor of the whole film industry.  Even as TV habits changed in the era of cable, the Oscars broadcast still remained an event not to be missed.  But, that long resilience seems to have worn off in recent years.  Ever since the year 2000, the Oscars have been in a steady decline in audience ratings, and in the last couple years in particular, it has been in a freefall, reaching it’s lowest numbers ever in 2021.  And this has led a lot of people wondering if the Oscars have lost it’s luster completely as a must see television event.

It was honestly not that long ago that the Academy Awards were at their peak.  The 1998 ceremony, with James Cameron’s mega blockbuster Titanic sweeping it’s way to a record tying 11 Oscar wins, including Best Picture, saw the highest audience rating in the ceremony’s history.  Of course, subsequent years after that couldn’t match those numbers; you don’t get a Titanic in every year.  But, the show could still be relied upon to lead it’s block of airtime every single year.  That, however, is no longer a guarantee.  The viewership for last year’s academy awards didn’t even look good by old metrics of the Academy Awards, and is dwarfed by the amount of viewership seen for things today that appear on streaming or even cable.  Polls even suggest that people no longer care about who wins the Oscars, and that is reflected in declining influence that the ceremony has on a film’s overall performance at the box office.  For an organization that has long held itself up as the gold standard for recognizing excellence in the film industry, this is a troubling trend that they have been struggling to understand for several years now.  As we’ve seen in recent years, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) which governs the Academy Awards has taken dramatic measures to help shore up their declining influence in Hollywood.  Some of the moves have been good, like increasing the diversity within their voting membership, but a lot of their other decisions have been puzzling and cry desperation.  Only a couple years ago they received backlash for suggesting the idea of creating a Popular Film Oscar, which was rightfully seen as an empty gesture to hide the fact that the Academy has grown out of touch with the movie going public.  Now, the Academy has been derided for another short-sided decision to streamline the ceremony by removing several awards from the actual telecast itself; relegating them to a pre-ceremony handout that won’t be shown in full on TV.  With the Academy increasingly desperate, the question arises; are the Oscars finished?

One thing that should be made clear; the Oscars will never go away.  The Academy will still hand out yearly honors and a select audience of movie fans will always tune in to watch (myself included among them).  But the idea of the Oscars being a ratings powerhouse on national television has probably come to an end.  The truth that the Academy must face is that they will never again reach the kinds of numbers that they once had when the Oscars were a dominant force in television.  They must resign themselves to the fact that the Academy Awards is now just a niche program that only plays to a smaller but devoted audience.  And that devoted audience is also not pleased at all with the desperate measures that are being taken by the Academy to climb themselves out of the pit.  There’s nothing that movie fans hate more than obvious moves to pander to an audience that doesn’t care in the first place.  This recent move in particular (streamlining the ceremony) seems in particular to be an address to the common complaint that the Academy Awards are too long.  This has been an issue with the Awards in the past, with some ceremonies dragging on for quite a long time.  The 2002 ceremony, where Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001) walked away as the night’s big winner, was the record holder with a staggering 4 hour and 10 minute runtime.  But, the complaints have remained there, even as the Academy has reigned in their ceremony with shorter speeches and fewer show-stopping performances.  The ceremony last year, which was highly affected by the ongoing pandemic, was the most stripped down in history, and it came in at just under 3 hours in length with commercials, and it did nothing to boost the audience rating for the Oscars.  So, what this has shown is that addressing outside complaints from an already disinterested population doesn’t actually help to rehabilitate the Oscars performance; it just drives them further down.

What really upsets people the most about the Oscars recent moves is that it blatantly shows the disparity of power within the industry.  The categories that are being cut from this year’s Oscars are all from the technical side; meaning the hardworking crew members that are not big name celebrities.  The decision sadly exposes where Hollywood’s priorities are, which is to place their talent in front of the camera on the pedestal and have the ones behind the camera stay hidden.  Of course, it’s been true of Hollywood since the very beginning, but the Academy Awards has always allowed a chance for the unsung heroes to have their day alongside the marquee stars.  Now that’s being taken away.  It’s with these often unseen talent behind the camera where we see the Oscars achieve their most genuine and heartfelt moments.  The honorees in the technical awards are the ones that connect the most with the average audience member, as they can see themselves reflected in their presence there and recognize that the dream of a win at the Academy Awards can happen to anyone.  By taking this out of the ceremony, it just reinforces the idea that image that the Oscars are a playtime for the elites; disconnected from the rest of us.  Aspiring filmmakers and long time Oscar enthusiasts don’t want to see the Oscars lose that connection to everyman aspect of the Awards.  If anything, it’s the technical side of the Oscars that reflects the truest make-up of the industry, and by pushing that out of the ceremony it only reveals an elitist sensibility that the Academy has come to.  Of all the desperate moves made by the Academy, this seems like the most brazen, out-of-touch move yet, and it’s one that I think represents a mis-reading of the Oscars audience that the Academy has sadly fallen into.  The Oscars audience doesn’t care about the amount of awards given out each year, nor the people who end up winning.  The Oscars seems to have forgotten what the awards are really meant to represent; a celebration of the creation and experience of cinema.

What I have always liked about the Academy Awards is that they offer a yearly snapshot into the overall history of cinema.  Just looking back at the winners and losers of each year gives you an interesting insight into the status and mood of Hollywood at any given period.  You can see the interesting effect of the Civil Rights Movement on Hollywood, through the way it began honoring different movies that addressed race relations head on (from Sidney Poitier’s history making win in 1964, to the Best Picture victory of In the Heat of the Night from 1967).  Hollywood’s response to war conflicts also has seen interesting fluctuations in Oscars history, from the propaganda era films of World War II, to the harsh critiques of war from films in the post-Vietnam era like The Deer Hunter (1978) and Platoon (1986).  That’s always been what has kept the most die-hard fans of the Academy Awards interested; observing history being made.  But, the Academy has lost sight of what constitutes significance in the long run and instead it’s been chasing fads and responding to pressures that otherwise have little to do with the with the people being honored.  More than anything, the Oscars problems have stemmed from them making the mistake of playing things too safe.  The Oscars’ decidedly undemocratic voting system based on ranked preference has unfortunately led to some chaotic results, which itself is a response to a slow moving change in the Academy membership that up until recently mostly leaned older and white.  The Oscars are also mistakenly falling into the idea that they have to be the vanguard of the industry, meaning that the definition of an ideal Oscar movie is becoming increasingly narrow and safe.  Gone are the days when big studios flicks and genre hits could have their chance at the ceremony; now if you want to be nominated for an Academy Award, you better be an uplifting drama with a pedigree of star power behind it.  There have been exceptions to be sure, but the increasing homogeny of the films at the Academy Awards has been one of the reasons people have lost interest.

It’s not a good sign when the only times the Oscars have seen an uptick in their audience is when they have courted controversy and scandal.  There are some who would like to see the Oscars humiliated and taken down a notch, and that’s what slightly increases the audience rating; that desire to watch a train wreck happen; and even there, the Oscars broadcast disappoints.  The #OscarsSoWhite controversy of a couple years ago was a good example, and it did feature one of the few bright spots that the Oscars had in recent years, which was host Chris Rock’s unvarnished take down of the Academy and Hollywood elite in his opening monologue.  You would think that Hollywood would’ve taken note of the popularity of Rock’s comedy following the ceremony, but no.  They’ve even eliminated the idea of a master of ceremonies altogether, with three straight ceremonies now without a host.  Even their decision to reintroduce hosts this year seems half-assed as the duties are being split among three comedians.  It shows the fundamental reason why the Oscars have fallen on hard times recently; because they forgot that this is as much a show as it is a ceremony.  The ceremony may hit well with the people in the Dolby Theater itself as they dress in their finest and rub shoulders with the Hollywood elite, but it doesn’t translate across the television screen.  You need to find the thing that will draw in the viewer to not want to miss what will happen in the Oscars ceremony.  Whoever takes on hosting duties plays a big part in this, and sadly, the Academy has largely gone with the safe and reliable choices.  It might help if they looked to someone younger and more connected with the audiences of today to host, not so much as a chasing of a fad, but more as a way of giving credence for this older institution to a newer audience.  The same goes for entertainment throughout the ceremony, or allowing the presenters and winners to speak their mind.  Authenticity is the thing that people value most and the Oscars would be better served by not trying so hard to avoid the unexpected.

The Academy may also need to consider how they approach their audience as well.  The biggest complaint leveled at them is that they are old-fashioned.  That’s a subjective reading, but what is certainly old-fashioned about them is that they are clinging on to past glory.  The ratings highs of the late 90’s reflect a time when you could still dominate the airwaves on a Sunday night with something like an Awards ceremony.  The Academy must recognize that they are not alone in their ratings downfall.  All awards ceremonies have lost audiences over time; the Grammys, the Emmys, and the Tonys.  They should also be grateful that they aren’t the Golden Globes right now; a ceremony that has disgraced itself far more than their declining ratings.  The viewership has changed in the era of streaming, and it’s reflected across all areas of television.  Network television no longer dominates the market, and even cable doesn’t have the pull it once did.  The only benefit that the Oscars have gotten from their time on network television has been from the money generated by the networks from ad revenue.  But, with the Oscars declining like they have been, their current home ABC hasn’t been able to get the same kind of returns on advertisements, and what once was a prime spot for advertisement space during commercial breaks now just falls into the average of basic programming.  When the network lets their ad time go for much cheaper during something like the Oscars, that’s a significant sign of danger.  So, what can the Oscars do.  They may need to consider alternatives to how they broadcast, as a way of expanding access to their the audience.  For one thing, they could broadcast live online on places like their website or on YouTube as an alternative, especially if they include those off-the-air categories in full as an exclusive feature.  If they are having trouble with ratings, going to a place where those numbers don’t matter while still generating ad revenue through the algorithm of video streaming might be the best bet for their future.  That way, they can better cater to what best works for them instead of still adhering to the archaic standards of broadcast television.  It doesn’t have to leave the networks entirely, but it can better allow them to have the best of both worlds without having to compromise the things that have made them special in the past.  If the Academy is looking for better audience engagement, this is where they will find it, and it may be the key to them to finally find some relevancy again.

As a stalwart feature on network television, I think the Oscars may be near it’s end.  It can’t survive on just network television alone.  It needs to reconsider what it should be in the era of on demand entertainment.  A diversified presence on both regular network television and online might be the key, as it can reach a broader audience.  We live in a time where many people now solely get their programming through streaming, so the Oscars would be wise to have an entryway into an audience like that, especially considering that most people who are solely online skew younger.  It would also help if they engage with younger audiences more by giving fresh faced talent a chance to perform as a part of the Oscars.  The Oscars are an old-fashioned institution, but they don’t always have to present themselves that way.  Like the movies and the people that they honor have changed, so must the ceremony itself.  But they can still do so while maintaining their vanguard appeal.  There have been things that have always ringed true about the Oscars over the years and that’s that the movies have always matter the most.  It’s not the fashion, nor the personalities of the Hollywood elite, nor the star power on the stage.  Making movies and watching movies are what drives Hollywood, and the Oscars should be a reflection of that nearly century old sentiment.  When someone picks up that golden statuette, it shouldn’t be a reflection of their popularity stature, it should be a reminder of their contribution to the history of the industry, and where they fall in the pathway set by those who came before them.  The appeal of the Oscars is that it has spread it’s honors across the industry as a whole, and to sacrifice some of that in the pursuit of TV ratings is a betrayal of the legacy it has built for itself.   The Oscars may be in an identity crisis, but it’s not irredeemable either.  A lot of good has come out of the Academy, especially with recent pushes for diversity and it’s extensive charitable work, but they must consider what is different about their audience today and adjust to a different kind of industry that they find themselves today.  They don’t have to sacrifice the things that have made them a little over-stuffed in the past, especially with those technical categories.  They don’t have to pander to trends either.  The audience has moved somewhere else, so go to where that audience is and stay true to what you have to offer.  There is an audience out there willing to join in the celebration of the movies, and if the Oscars recognizes that, they can find their purpose once again and regain their relevance as the biggest night in Hollywood.

Coming out of the pandemic era of near annihilation for the theatrical market, a new sense of normal has emerged with the types of movies that are arriving on the silver screen.  As of right now, the selection of movies available to watch in theaters right now fall into two distinctive groups: mega-budget tentpole features based on well established IP, and micro-budget, low risk independent films.  It’s a night and day difference between these two types of movies, and yet, these are the types of movies needed to drive back audience attendance at the local theater.  You either start off big, hoping for a huge opening weekend that can hopefully compensate for the massive expense of making the movie; or start small and hope your movie can be discovered through word of mouth.  These are essentially the different paths that are being taken by movies heading to movie theaters today.  You’re either a Marvel or an A24.  There is little in between.  But, once upon a time in Hollywood, there actually were many films that fit somewhere in the middle.  They weren’t bank breaking studio tentploes, nor were they risk-taking indies that had to make their way through the festival circuit first.  These were studio made films that were modest in budget, usually had one or two A-list stars but not an all-star cast, and were often low key productions meant to fill out a calendar slot that the studios had to occupy.  The mid-sized studio movie often came in a variety of different genres: the screwball comedy, the rom com, the period piece, or the family adventure.  For a long time, these were the engines that were driving the machine of Hollywood, because if one tentploe feature fell hard at the box office, the studios could compensate for that loss with a solid performance from one of their mid-sized movies.  But, that kind of strategy at the box office has seemingly disappeared, and this was a trend beginning even before the pandemic took hold.  So, what happened to the middle ground that once dominated the movie landscape.

In the early days of cinema, blockbusters were very much a rarity in the market.  Hollywood was built much more around the quantity versus quality ratio during the studio system,  which created an assembly line approach to movie-making.  That’s why the vast majority of the most popular films of that era were John Wayne westerns, Shirley Temple musicals, or a James Cagney gangster flick.  And there of course were the many dozens of copycat movies made surrounding those industry leaders.  It was an era where genre flicks dominated the market, because they were cheap and easy to turn around in time to meet the demands of the theaters.  You would see this being the case at every studio in Hollywood, and only occasionally would they get around to something as big and grand as Gone With the Wind (1939).  Even something as universally beloved today as Casablanca (1942) began as one of these assembly line flicks, and it only seemed to achieve masterpiece status purely by accident.  The breakdown of the studio system in the 50’s, along with the advent of television, forced Hollywood to change it’s approach and this led to an increase in the market of the big event films.  Even movies that normally would’ve fallen in the mid-range budget area became spotlighted as big event movies in this era, as the studios were touting the new, prestigious Widescreen process.  However, this era came crashing down in the 1960’s, as budgets ballooned to unsustainable levels on studio films, like Fox’s Cleopatra (1963).  In the 1970’s, the opposite began to happen.  Theaters began to favor gritty, independent films that challenged the old Hollywood system.  In this era, we saw the emergence of voices like Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Alan Pakula, Peter Bogdonavich, and many others who worked outside the system.  But, studios made a comeback later in the decade on the backs of hits like Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), and this led to the blockbuster 80’s, which also saw a surprising return of the mid-sized film as well as a force.

Through the 80’s and 90’s, you were likely to see many surprise hit movies that didn’t support an outlandish budget, and didn’t have an all-star cast, but still managed to gross as much at the box office as their tentpole cousins.  There were movies like Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Dirty Dancing (1987), Pretty Woman (1990) that immediately caught fire upon their release completely under the radar of the studios that produced them.  And Hollywood had these movies to thank the most for the success they endured during those years of growth.  Unlike the blockbuster tentpoles, these movies were capable of making back their costs ten fold, due to the fact that they were so inexpensive to begin with.  These movies also had the added benefit of producing the stars of tomorrow, as their success proved that these actors had box office pull.  So, with proven success from a bunch of mid-range movies, Hollywood began to include them as an essential part of their release calendar.  It was a successful enough compartment of the industry that each of the studios even set up their own separate in-house production companies to focus primarily on these types of movies; such as Touchstone Pictures at Disney and Fox 2000 at 20th Century Fox.  These movies also had the added benefit of there being overwhelmed by the competition at the box office.  Blockbusters as they were seen then were not as bloated in their budgets as they are now.  And in some cases, what became the most popular franchises at that time had their starts as modest budgeted movies that were limited in scope initially.  When you look at the first Back to the Future (1985), you can see how despite it’s larger than life concept, it’s actually a very small scale production.  The latter films expanded greatly on what was built with the first movie, but the original Back to the Future is really just a simple time travel comedy filmed in and around the Universal backlot.  The 90’s especially featured many movies in this range, where the main draw was the name star on the marquee and not so much the brand that the movie was centered around.  The movie didn’t need to cost $100 million to make, as long as you had Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, or Tom hanks to reliably bring in the audiences.

So, what led to the eventual decline of these movies.  There are certainly a lot of various reasons.  First of all, the budgets of movies steadily increased across the board for movie productions; even the mid-range ones.  It became harder make back the substantial cost of making the movies at the box office, especially at the point when either the actors no longer had clout at the box office, or the franchise had lost most of it’s steam and relevance.  In the 2000’s, movie stars like Julia Roberts, Bruce Willis and Jim Carrey were beginning to have paychecks that exceeded $20 million or more, which would balloon budgets even higher, and make even the mid-sized movies feel as expensive as a blockbuster, depending on how many big name stars were included.  Because movies across the board were growing too expensive, the studios started to change their priorities and invest in far fewer movies that were unique and challenging.  Instead, the market began to favor brands over star power, choosing to invest in IP that could sustain long lasting franchises.  This was the era when the name Harry Potter had more clout than Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts.  Big franchises like The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, and of course super hero flicks would soon dominate the marketplace, and none of those franchises needed to rely on having a big name actor attached to it.  The rise of independent films also allowed for the film industry to find a way to produce movies with challenging themes and messages without having to drop nine figures to make it.  It was this combination of a boom in one type of movie and a bust of the other kinds that squeezed out the movies that fell in the middle range.  Movies either had to be parts of a bigger franchise, or small awards contenders.  This sadly erased the kinds of movies that used to have A-list talent tackling grounded, relatable human stories or the odd studio picture that threw a lot of weight and effort behind a serious epic film that was geared for awards season.

The interesting thing is that movies that would have fit within that mid-sized studio movie mold didn’t entirely go away completely.  They just migrated over to streaming.  Looking at Netflix in particular, the streaming giant produces anywhere between 60-80 original films a year, and they’re output includes movies of all sizes, including the mid-sized movies that we no longer find on the big screen.  The rom com has especially found a place to thrive on Netflix, with movies like The Kissing Booth (2018) and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018) not only finding an audience on there, but becoming big hits in the process.  Netflix has also become the home to actors who have in the past been responsible for the crop of mid-sized movies in years past but have since then found streaming to be a better place for them.  Adam Sandler for instance has set an exclusive deal for his Happy Madison Productions on Netflix, and as a result, the only big screen appearance Mr. Sandler has made in the last several years was in his critically acclaimed indie film Uncut Gems (2019) for A24.  The truth is that on streaming, there is far less pressure to deliver on the investment to make each movie.  There is no box office threshold that it must meet in order to turn a profit, because as long as it’s being watched on Netflix or any other streamer and helps drive up those subscriber numbers, the investors will be happy.  So that’s why we are seeing these middle ground movies that once were an essential part of the movie release calendar finding a new home in the streaming world.  And they are indeed becoming the norm on every service; from Netflix, to Disney+, to HBO Max, to Amazon Prime.  And what that is leaving us with on the big screen is just the movies on the opposite sides of the spectrum; mega-budget franchises and tiny little independent films.

Does that mean that there is no place for a mid-sized movie to make it in the theatrical market anymore.  There still is, it’s just that there’s more competition now for where the movie can end up finding it’s audience.  The conditions for a mid-sized movie to find it’s audience are more favorable on streaming, but it’s not impossible for these kinds of movies to find an audience in the franchise heavy market that we find in theaters today.  Often these are the movies that suddenly catch Hollywood by surprise, and makes them rethink what audiences are actually looking for.  One of the clearest recent examples of this was the movie Knives Out (2019).  The film is basically a re-imagined take on the Agatha Christie style whodunit, given a contemporary setting with an eccentric twist.  The Rian Johnson directed film certainly boasted an impressive all-star cast, but nothing about the movie other than that suggested that it would draw in a huge audience.  But that it did, grossing an impressive $165 million off of a $40 million budget.  And it did so in competition with big movies like Frozen II (2019) and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), remaining in the top 5 movies weekly for several months.  It’s when the uncharacteristic movies manage to exceed expectations and become huge hits despite what the market dictates, that’s when Hollywood takes notice of movies that fit within this often ignored middle ground.  One interesting area where these kinds of movies emerge is when they give voice to an often marginalized group and tap into an audience that had been clamoring to see themselves represented more respectfully on the big screen.  This was definitely the case with a movie like Crazy Rich Asians (2018), which broke out of it’s rom com expectations to become a touchstone moment for Asian representation in cinema.  Perhaps it’s not that audiences don’t care about mid range genre movies; they just want to see movies in general that aren’t just like everything else they’ve seen.

Is it possible for there to be a return of the mid-sized movie to having a regular presence on the big screen again?  The theater industry has just experienced an earth-shattering shake-up to their business model, so it may end up leading them to reconsider what they want to allow on their screens moving forward.  In the high stakes pre-pandemic market, it was all about bringing in the big movies that could gross billions of dollars in a single run, and for the most part, these were the safe bets that Hollywood could rely upon.  But, with the market diminished after the pandemic, Hollywood’s safe bets no longer feel as safe anymore.  Not only that, but streaming now has a stronger foothold in the marketplace, and has become the favored place for those movies that had over the past decade been considered too risky to produce.  Seeing how well some movies have performed on streaming, it might lead many of these movie theater chains who had once scoffed at the likes of Netflix to reconsider their priorities.  That seems to be what’s going on right now, as more and more streaming movies are getting a modest release in theaters before making their debuts on their respective platforms.  This also coincides with the shortened theatrical window that resulted from the pandemic.  Now, the pressure to make a lot of money over a long theatrical run is reinforced with availability on digital PVOD services, so that people who don’t want to go to the theater can still have their chance to see the movie soon after it’s release.  This change in the market may help relieve the studios of the burden of worrying about whether or not a mid-sized movie will be able to connect with audiences or not, and that may help them to reconsider looking at the theatrical market as being a preferred starting point for their movies.  Truth be told, we are only starting to see a change in the theatrical market, and thus far only the biggest movies like those from Marvel Studios are generating anything close to the kind of money that theaters made before the pandemic.  With a more balanced playing field between theaters and streaming in the competition for where studios invest their properties, it’s hard to say where the movies that fall in the middle might end up.

For one thing, audiences really need to rediscover the value of movies that fit outside of the two extremes of cinema.  Movies don’t have to be a choice between CGI heavy blockbuster extravaganzas or Avant Garde art house indies.  There can be that movie that falls in the middle that features A-List talent in front and behind the camera, but is more down to Earth and challenging in it’s themes, and doesn’t have to rely upon spectacle in order to entertain.  The thing that really is appealing about these mid-sized movies is that they are more than often unique compared to what we normally see on the big screen.  Though it’s a bit more expensive on the budget side than most movies that fall into the mid-sized category, the action comedy Free Guy (2021) that came out last Summer was a perfect example of a non-franchise conceptual film that surprisingly found an audience and became a hit even in the pandemic affect theatrical market.  It all comes down to having a movie play on the big screen that appeals to everyone, no matter if it’s something familiar or something new and unproven.  We may see more of what we saw happen during the pandemic, which was movies being given hybrid releases on both platforms, and this may be the preferred way to help bring mid-sized movies back to the big screen.  With the studios having the ability to hedge their bets across both theatrical and streaming, the movies that are mid-ranged could see a renewed presence theatrically as the pressure is off them to come out of the gate strong at the box office.  It’s still a market in flux, but the option to do so is much more possible today, and has been proven effective for some movies both big and small.  Not surprisingly, one of the last mid-sized movies to make a splash at the box office before the pandemic, Knives Out, is getting a pair of sequels, on Netflix.  There’s a crossroads that still lies ahead for these types of movies, but it should be recognized that at some point these movies were an essential part of the identity of the industry, and hopefully they can still continue to have a future in Hollywood.

Like Marvel in our current day, and Pixar Studios through the 2000’s, Walt Disney Animation went through an unprecedented win streak that helped to revitalize them as a vanguard brand in Hollywood during the 1990’s.  This period in time is known as the Disney Renaissance, and it still is one of the most celebrated periods of creativity in the annals of Animation history.  After hitting a low point in the 80’s with the colossal failure of The Black Cauldron (1985) at the box office, there were many who were wondering if Disney would even be able to make animated features any more, and that they would always just be a legacy studio shepherding past glory.  That all changed once The Little Mermaid (1989), one last big Hail Mary by the struggling animation department, became an immediate hit.  As a result, the legendary animation studio that had given the world Snow White, Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty came roaring back to life, better than ever.  Building off of the success of Mermaid, Disney kept the momentum going with each film building off of the success before.  They released Beauty and the Beast (1991; their first Best Picture nominee), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994).  Lion King in particular broke every record imaginable at the box office, and proved that Disney wasn’t just a success again, but a force within the industry.  But, The Lion King’s success may have been too big, as it began to put too much pressure on what was to follow after it.  The next film up was Pocahontas (1995) which performed decently at the box office, but nowhere near the numbers that The Lion King managed.  This began a small decline in the years after, which saw both The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Hercules (1997) making far less than their predecessors.  But, the Renaissance was not quite over, as Disney saw a bit of a bounce back with two hits in a row in the last half of the decade, with both Mulan (1998) and Tarzan (1999) delivery strong box office returns.  Though Disney still remained a strong brand going into the new millennium, it was clear that some of that sheen was wearing off.

Part of the decline of the Disney Renaissance also had to do with internal shake-ups that were affecting the flow of production at the studio.  The very public feud between Disney CEO Michael Eisner and Head of Production Jeffrey Katzenberg saw the latter’s departure after the premiere of The Lion King.  Katzenberg would then team up with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen to form Dreamworks, which would directly challenge Disney as it formed it’s own Animation studio.  At the same time, Disney was also reaping the rewards of it’s partnership with a rising force within animation called Pixar.  Pixar of course created the first ever fully computer animated feature called Toy Story (1995), which out-grossed Disney Animation’s own film (Pocahontas) at the box office, and it began to spark the conversation of whether this was the future of the animation industry.  For Disney Animation, they were still sticking by their commitment to the tried-and-true traditional hand drawn form, but in all those years since The Lion King reached it’s peak and the emergence of computer animation as an exciting new venture, there was added pressure to justify it’s worth in the market.  Though traditional animation has it’s base support of fans, it was not enough to outshine the allure of computer animation.  So, Disney Animation began to look outside it’s comfort zone of adapting well known tales and fables into Animated epics and instead the focus became finding unique stories that would appeal to a broader audience, much like what Pixar was excelling at during that time.  This unfortunately led to a bit more disruption in the stability of the Disney Renaissance.  The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) went through a turbulent re-working as it’s previous incarnation (a dramatic epic titled Kingdom of the Sun) went through a disastrous production overhaul.  And the more grown up oriented Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) became perhaps too much of a departure for Disney.  But, as luck would turn out, a surprising little gift landed in their lap as a quirky, original story made it’s way through Disney Animation that had long been the pet project of a passionate but untried new voice at their studio.

Chris Sanders came to Disney Animation just before the beginning of the Disney Renaissance in 1987.  A graduate of the legendary CalArts animation program (the incubator of pretty much all of the most noteworthy names in animation over the last 50 years), he had previously done work for Marvel Comics and the television show Muppet Babies.  An accomplished draftsman, his primary expertise was storyboarding and character development, which helped to earn him a place in the rapidly expanding and revitalized Disney Animation.  He worked on various projects, including storyboards for both Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, where he was very instrumental in helping to shape the characters of the enchanted objects in Beauty as well as the hyenas and Timon and Pumbaa in King.  Though he was widely celebrated for his stellar story artwork, Disney was also realizing that he was adept as a writer as well, and this then led them to giving him the chance to take a shot at drafting a screenplay for their next film, Mulan.  Mulan was a special project for Disney as it marked the first feature film produced entirely at their satellite studio at the Disney World in Orlando, Florida; a testament to the level of growth that Disney had enjoyed during the Renaissance years.  The California based Sanders made the move out to Florida to participate in the creation of Mulan.  In addition to co-writing the screenplay with Rita Hsaio, Phillip LaZednik, Phillip Singer and Eugenia Bostwick-Singer, he also was made co-head of story for the film.  His co-head of story was another rising star in the story department at Disney named Dean DeBlois, who would prove to be a valuable partner in story-telling for Christ Sanders.  DeBlois had been a layout artist for Don Bluth animation before moving over to Disney, and like Chris Sanders, he was also showing a lot of promise as a storyteller.  Mulan premiered to great acclaim and was celebrated for it’s deft balancing of sincere drama and charming humor.  Afterwards, the Orlando studio was looking for their next project after proving it’s worth, and both Sanders and DeBlois jumped at the opportunity.

Chris Sanders had been sitting on an original story from even before he started at Disney Animation.  It was about an alien creature named Stitch who comes to Earth and befriends a human child, who helps the creature abandon his destructive instincts.  First developed by Sanders right out of art school in 1985, it was pitched to no avail as a children’s book with original art that Sanders had drawn himself.  After Disney picked up Sanders as a talent, he stopped sending his manuscript to potential publishers and had it sitting in his portfolio for years while he rose up the ranks at Disney.  But even while he found success on other projects, Sanders still would return to this story from time to time, hoping to make it a reality someday.  When he began partnering with Dean DeBlois on story development, he looked to his new collaborator for help in fine tuning this long in development idea.  Together, they made changes to help flesh out the story and make it feel even more unique. One of the big changes they made in this time was the setting.  Originally, Stitch was to have crash landed in Kansas and befriended a farm girl who helped to smooth away his destructive path.  They later realized that the islands of Hawaii would provide a more interesting backdrop for the story; as it still allowed for Stitch to be stuck in an area without major population centers with the added element of being surrounded by water.  Stitch also went through a transformation during this time, going from a reptilian like appearance to more of a cuddly, puppy dog like look.  But even more importantly, they fleshed out the character of the child who befriends Stitch, eventually molding her into the young native Hawaiian girl named Lilo.  Lilo would end up having her own interesting narrative going on at the same time, struggling to cope with a shattered family where her sole means of support is her older sister Nani, who herself is on the verge of losing Lilo to child protective services.  Lilo is also a bit of a oddball herself, attracted to strange sights and sounds with a particular obsession towards the music of Elvis Presley.  Eventually, all these story elements came together to where Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois felt confident in pitching it as a film idea to Disney Animation.  And, even in the midst of a changing dynamic in the world of Animation, Sanders and DeBlois managed to received the go ahead from the head of Disney.

Lilo and Stitch managed to enjoy a relatively smooth production compared to it’s other contemporaries at Disney Animation.  With Sanders and DeBlois taking on directing duties for the first time, there was still pressure to prove that they could deliver a hit film for the studio, especially at a time when they needed one.  Sanders and DeBlois benefited surprisingly from some of the turmoil of the productions of other Disney films.  When Kingdom of the Sun went into it’s production hiatus to be reworked into The Emperor’s New Groove, Lilo and Stitch managed to pick up many of the animators and artists that were displaced suddenly by that troubled production.  This included legendary animator Andreas Deja, who had been one of Disney’s most celebrated talents during the Renaissance, animating characters as varied as King Triton, Gaston, Jafar, Scar, and Hercules.  On Lilo and Stitch, he was granted the coveted assignment of animating Lilo, which when you look at his other work was quite the departure for him, but one that he relished the opportunity to undertake.  The animation of Stitch was given to another longtime animator named Alex Kupershmidt, who exceled at frantic comedic action, which he showed in the animation of all three hyenas in The Lion King.  One of the most important aspects of putting the movie into production was in accurately conveying the look and culture of the Hawaiian islands.  The production team took many trips to Hawaii to get a sense of it’s natural beauty, but to also acquaint itself with the native population and it’s centuries old culture.  Numerous cultural and historical consultants were included in the development of the film, as the animation team wanted to be respectful to the traditions and characteristics of the native Hawaiians in their film.  Sure, Lilo and her sister Nani are contemporary characters dealing with modern day problems, but their cultural identity is also a strong part of who they are too.  It’s probably through the research into Hawaiian traditions that the concept of Ohana worked it’s way into the story.  Ohana is of course the Hawaiian word for family, and as this film is about finding one’s own family even out of unusual circumstances, it’s only natural that this would be the thing that drives the heart of the story.

The movie is an interesting mix overall of different, oddball concepts working together to create a very original film.  One of the most interesting out of left field ideas that the Disney animation studio brought to this movie was using watercolor to paint the backgrounds of the movie.  This was quite the departure for Renaissance era Disney which had invested in very hyper-detailed background art in many of their movies.  But, it’s not unprecedented, as watercolors had been used before by Disney on films like Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942), which helped give those films a very storybook like feel.  This naturally helps to bring to life the story that Chris Sanders had originally envisioned as a storybook for children in his original concept.  It’s especially effective in conveying the sun-kissed natural beauty of Hawaii, with the colors being especially eye-popping.  The movie also does a great job in conveying the voice of the Hawaiian people.  Though Lilo was voiced by a young Caucasian actress Daveigh Chase (who perfectly captures the spunkiness of her character), other actors in the cast included native Hawaiian performers like Tia Carrere as Nani and Jason Scott Lee as her surfer boy crush David Kawena.  And foregoing a traditional musical score like previous Disney films, the film does feature two original songs performed by Hawaiian artist Mark Keali’i Ho’omalu, as well as some interspersed Elvis songs.  In another departure for Disney, there is a wildly imaginative science fiction element centered around Stitch in the movie.  All the while Stitch is learning to cope with life on Earth, he’s being hunted down by his maniacal creator, a mad scientist named Jumba (voiced by Disney stalwart David Ogden Stiers) and his assistant Pleakly (voiced by Kevin McDonald) who may be the first implied trans character ever in an animated film.  Another interesting choice is that the voice for Stitch was provided by Chris Sanders himself.  It’s possible that Sanders had been fine tuning how Stitch would sound like over many years he had been working on the story, so when the opportunity came to give voice finally to the character, only Sanders was qualified enough to do the character justice.  It’s interesting that even 20 years later, and even after Sanders has long left Disney behind, he still returns to perform Stitch’s voice for various projects, showing just how much he is intertwined with the character.

Though Lilo and Stitch moved forward without any issue to it’s planned Summer 2002 release, there was one real world event that did cause them to make an eleventh hour change.  In the film’s original climax, Stitch chases after Lilo’s captor, a giant alien named Captain Gantu (voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson) in a 747 airplane he hijacks from a local airport (safely without passengers I might add).  During the aerial pursuit, Stitch has to pilot the massive plane through the high rise buildings of Downtown Honolulu.  Of course, as you might guess, this scene had unfortunate echoes of the real life attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11, which happened during the last months of Lilo and Stitch’s production.  Despite having the scene fully animated and picture locked, the decision was made to rework the climax at the last minute, which the animation team managed to accomplish with impressive speed.  The 747 was changed into a giant alien spacecraft and the high rises were changed into a mountain range.  It worked so well that no one who saw the movie noticed anything off in the reworked climax.  As the film prepared for it’s summer release, Disney decided that this unusual film needed an unusual marketing strategy.  Deciding to focus on the character of Stitch, the marketing team came up with the idea of having Stitch invade other classic films and sabotage them.  This included him showing up in moments from Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and The Lion King and naturally wrecking havoc, showing that he was a very different kind of Disney character that challenged the formula.  It was probably a strategy made in response to the challenge of Dreamwork’s Shrek (2001) which directly made fun of Disney.  Lilo and Stitch was therefore set up by Disney as a cynical repudiation of their own formula, which was not really reflective of the movie itself, which was honestly just a heartwarming story told with a lot of soul and passion, as many of the great Disney movies are.  Even still, the plan worked, as Lilo and Stitch became a box office hit for Disney, easily becoming the highest grossing animated film of the year.  However, the belief that this movie would help propel a second act in the Disney Renaissance was short lived.  The financial gains made by Lilo and Stitch were offset by the financial losses of it’s follow-up Treasure Planet (2002), which ended up losing Disney a lot of money and accelerated the decline of traditional animation afterwards.  What it ended up showing in the end was that Lilo and Stitch was the final hurrah of the once mighty Disney Renaissance, which had it’s days numbered.

Looking back 20 years, it’s interesting to see how Lilo and Stitch stands in the Disney canon.  It’s place at the tail end of the Disney Renaissance helps to mark it as a pivotal point in Disney’s transition going into the new millennium.  It became clear that Disney had to change and embrace a new way of making animated films as computer animation began to dominate the market.  With Lilo and Stitch, it showed that they didn’t always have to rely on familiar stories to reach an audience, but instead work with stories that were grounded and true to the human experience, even if it had fantastical elements within them.  The sincerity of the storytelling was also crucial.  But, with the failures that followed Lilo and Stitch, it was clear that there was not going to be much of a future for hand drawn animation.  Even Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois knew that, as they begun their follow-up film for Disney called American Dog, which was going to be their first computer animated movie.  Unfortunately for them, another shake-up at the studio in the post-Eisner era of Disney saw the team clash with the new head of animation, John Lasseter for Pixar, and they eventually left Disney Animation altogether.  American Dog was reworked into the film Bolt (2008) with different directors, while Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois landed new positions at Disney rival Dreamworks, where they later developed the soon to be classic film How to Train Your Dragon (2010).  You can definitely see the same creative force in the making of Dragon as seen in the making of Lilo and Stitch, showing that Sanders and DeBlois lost none of their talent in the transition.  There’s also a notable similarity in the design of the dragon Toothless, who bears a very Stitch like look, particularly in the football shaped head.  Despite all the behind the scenes turmoil that surrounds it, Lilo and Stitch has not lost any of it’s luster 20 years later.  It’s still a favorite for many, and Stitch in particular is still a widely used mascot for the Disney company.  You’ll still see many theme park appearances of the character as well as tie-in merchandise that sells pretty well to this day.  It’s a real testament to the longevity of the character and the movie, which stands alone outside of it’s era.  Sadly, the Disney Renaissance did not live much longer after Stitch’s success, but it certainly is not the fault of the film.  It was the kind of fun romp that audiences wanted, but was sadly too few and far between for an animation studio that collapsed under the weight of it’s own lofty goals.  Of course, Disney animation would find new life again in the Digital Age, but Lilo and Stitch stands as one final benchmark in one of the most storied periods in the medium of animation.  Consider it Disney’s one last great Aloha for it’s beloved era of Renaissance animation.

So, the year of 2021 gave us a few answers about the direction that a post pandemic world would take in the world of cinema, but it also ignited a few new questions as well.  We do know for a fact that the movie theater industry, though heavily bruised, will endure for at least the foreseeable future.  They may not be near where they were at pre-pandemic levels, but they have at least rebounded a bit enough from the lockdowns to keep their doors open.  And I’m sure that many experts didn’t expect that the year of 2021 would close out with a billion dollar grosser with Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), a movie that is defying all expectations in the face of a pandemic surge.  But, even though the darkest days for the theater industry may be over with the regards to the pandemic, they still have an existential threat that has persisted from even before the pandemic to now.  That is the growing streaming market, which had a major period of growth over the months of the pandemic.  Not only do movie theaters have to contend with one streaming giant like Netflix; now they have to deal with about 5 more, many of whom have recently launched amidst a lot of advance hype.  Disney+ and Apple TV+ both launched mere months before the pandemic turned into a global catastrophe, while Universal’s Peacock and Warner Brothers’ HBO Max took off right in the middle of the lockdown period.  And then last year, CBS All Access rebranded into Paramount+, making it the fourth of the 5 major to launch it’s own streaming service. In all their own ways, each streamer wanted to leave an impression that would define them in the marketplace, which became even more interesting after the theater industry went into lockdown.  While each of them pushed for a variety of different exclusive perks to boost their subscriber base, it was HBO Max that perhaps made the boldest move in response to the pandemic effected market.  And it’s their gamble that in many ways clues us into the state of where the movie industry might be headed.

Like all the other studios, Warner Brothers had their film calendar shaken up by the COVID-19 pandemic.  The closure of theaters worldwide forced many movies to delay their releases, most of them into the next year.  But, by doing so, it created a backlog of movies that if not released soon would cause productions to be delayed for other films down the pipeline, and that would endanger the careers of those who work within the industry who depend on a steady work flow to earn a living off of.  So, in order to not disrupt the movie production pipeline any more, many of the studios had to consider whether it served them well to release their film on streaming instead.  It’s certainly not an easy decision to make, especially when some of the movies in the pipeline cost anywhere from 50, to 100, to even 200 million dollars to produce.  A lot of those more expensive movies are especially dependent of a robust theatrical market to help them earn back their production and marketing costs, and that becomes a major problem when there is no box office revenue.  So, many within the accounting firms at the major studios had to take a look at if it was possible for studios to offset box office dollars with the money that would be generated through new monthly subscriptions.  It seems from the outside that this is not a 1:1 equivalent benefit, but to many of the studios had the success of Netflix to look at as an example of the gamble paying off.  Netflix has put billions of dollars into exclusive content for their platform, including some films that do cost in the same range as other Hollywood blockbusters. And as a result, the industry has seen Netflix grow to almost half a billion subscribers worldwide, which generates for them many more billions in revenue off of their monthly subscriptions.  In the end, that’s what mattered to the movie studios; that there was a model that guaranteed billions in revenue each month, something that especially appeals to stockholders.  For the movie theater industry, box office sales are an uneven generator of profit, because every film performs differently.  Thus it became a more logical prospect to release movies on streaming during the pandemic, as long as it boosted subscriber growth.  And that became the big threat to the theatrical industry in the face of the pandemic.  How would they bounce back when there was a proven alternative.

As much as many of the streaming platforms made a big deal about their arrivals in the marketplace; the outcome was not as evenly spread out amongst the other studios. Disney+ certainly made the biggest splash right off the bat thanks to their catalog of popular IP like Star Wars and Marvel.  Apple TV+ and Peacock struggled a bit at first, but managed to find their way with critically acclaimed titles that were available exclusive to their platforms.  And then there was HBO Max, which had probably the roughest of starts.  The big anchor around their waist was their questionable starting subscription price of $14.99 per month, which is nearly double what their competitors charge.  Not only that, but their exclusive content seemed a little thin at the start and their user interface was heavily criticized for being hard to navigate.  The only appeal it had was being a place to watch back catalog material from the Warner Brothers library as well as having content curated by HBO and TCM, both of which are part of the Warner Media entertainment portfolio.  There was interesting stuff to watch on there to be sure, but nothing that demanded the eyes of a broad audience, and certainly not worth the exorbitant high price tag.  So, with a pandemic affected backlog of movies affecting their release schedule and a struggling streaming platform affecting their bottom line, the WarnerMedia executives made a bold but also controversial decision at the end of 2020.  Starting with the release of Wonder Woman 1984 (2020), all of their movies in the next year would be available both theatrically wherever possible as well as on HBO Max at no extra cost on the same day.  This was a move that enabled them to relieve the pressure on their movie backlog as well as generate a renewed interest in their streaming platform, which certainly grabbed the attention of the industry as a whole.  Now, with 2021 behind us, and the entire Warner Brothers release calendar more or less back to normal, we have some answers as to if this gamble paid off.

Initially the move was met with mixed to negative reception from the film community.  One longtime Warner Brothers staple, Christopher Nolan, saw it as a betrayal of the theatrical experience and he left the studio that had been his home for the last 20 years, choosing to take his next film, Oppenheimer, to rival Universal instead.  He also famously labeled HBO Max as the “worst streaming platform” as well.  The movie theater industry was also not very happy with the news, but they were also in a sticky situation at the time.  None of them wanted to refuse to play a Warner Bros. movie, so they had to begrudgingly agree to the plan.  No one would argue that it was the necessary venue to take for Wonder Woman 1984, because it was coming out on Christmas Day 2020, when most of the theaters across the country were still closed due to the pandemic.  But, as situations changed going into 2021, this one size fits all approach to releasing all these movies would be tested to varying degrees.  In total, Warner Brothers had 17 films slated to be released under this 2021 plan, including a few that were pushed back from the year before in addition to those already planned originally for that year.  It’s a lot for one studio to put out in one year, and the backlog created is probably why Warner Bros. made the choice that they did.  Overall, the collection of movies spanned a wide range, from small dramas to big tentpoles, and some of the movies made far better sense as a small screen release than a big screen premiere.  But, it was the outcome of all the films in total that mattered to the WarnerMedia bottom line.  Would the subscription boost make the difference, or were they better off relying on the box office numbers, inconsistent as they may be.

A few things became pretty clear over the course of 2021 for the HBO Max gamble.  The big one overall is that despite having everything available theatrically, the measure of success could not determined by box office alone.  For a year filled with 17 individual releases, Warner Brothers only managed to crack the $100 million threshold twice, and even then just barely.  The highly anticipated Dune (2021) grossed a little over $106 million while Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) just barely managed to eek out past the 100 million mark.  Any other year beforehand, both of these movies might have managed to gross maybe twice as much.  In the case of Godzilla vs. Kong, it could be argued that the box office was still being hampered by the pandemic, as vaccines were only just being rolled out wide at that point, and getting to the $100 million mark in that environment is in itself a sign of huge success.  Dune is a different story, as it came out later in the year with the theatrical industry more or less in rebound mode.  At this point, it could be said that it had it’s box office depressed not by the pandemic, but by the availability on HBO Max.  With that being the case, we’d have to look at the numbers of viewers on streaming to determine if it was more of a hit on HBO Max, which unfortunately remains a closely guarded secret at the WarnerMedia corporate office.  We can only assume how it performed there based on subscriber growth, which is a publicly discussed metric, and while HBO Max did see some growth, it was not at the pace of it’s competitors.  Even old timer Netflix saw bigger growth in the last year.  It doesn’t initially appear that movies like Dune mattered that much at all, and may have had it’s box office potentially cannibalized for not much gain.  Even still,  Warner Brothers determined by what they saw from Dune’s performance based on their internal numbers, did greenlight a sequel, so maybe the private data proved more encouraging than what we’ve seen publicly.

But the overall question remains inconclusive with regards to how all the other films from Warner Brothers performed over the last year under this release plan.  For a lot of the smaller films, not much of a difference would’ve mattered.  Something minor like The Little Things (2021) or Cry Macho (2021) would have underperformed at the box office anyway, and it’s impact on streaming may have been very inconsequential to the overall subscriber growth.  But there was some noticeable issue with the box office performance with some of Warner Bros. more high profile films.  Case in point, the performances of In the Heights, The Suicide Squad, and The Matrix Resurrections.  Each of these movies were highly anticipated and in any other year could have been big hits for the studios.  But, they all fell flat upon their releases, not even gaining much more than a fraction of box office that movies of their ilk usually do.  In the Heights, a big screen adaptation of a popular Lin-Manuel Miranda Broadway hit had a prime summer release date, but disappeared within a matter of weeks, barely making a splash.  The Suicide Squad couldn’t muster any box office excitement despite critical acclaim, the prestige of director James Gunn’s name, and the popular DC brand.  And The Matrix Resurrections  put an extra nail in the coffin of a long dormant franchise.  While Dune and Godzilla vs. Kong defied the odds with their box office performance, these films indicated a sign that the best hopes for the HBO Max plan to be the best for all camps turned out to not be the case.  In all, out of the 17 films, getting only 2 to be a box office hit is not an ideal track record, especially when your streaming numbers don’t indicate a phenomenal amount of growth.  The only conclusion we can draw looking from the outside is that Warner Brothers left a lot of money on the table by splitting their release schedule across two markets, and not ensuring that they would get the maximum out of both alternatives.

Here’s where the problem lies with the HBO plan as opposed to all the other ones offered by their competitors; the danger of piracy.  People who stream content have the ability to also download that content for viewing later, whether offline or on the go.  HBO Max has that as a feature too.  Unfortunately for them, it makes it easier for their content to be downloaded and dubbed much easier to be exchanged person to person, or even worse, sold on the black market without Warner Brothers benefiting from that circulation.  When everyone can share their log in password to multiple people, it depresses subscriber growth, and yet the same number of people who would’ve bought individual tickets to a movie in a theater can just rely on that one generous subscriber to give them access to the same film at home.  The big problem is that HBO Max only relied on that upfront subscriber cost, and didn’t charge any extra on top of that.  It may seem like a generous trade off, having first run films at no extra cost, but it financially puts Warner Brothers at a disadvantage.  Their only hope was put into the overall subscriber growth, and nothing else.  Compare this with Disney, which also put their movies out on streaming during the summer in addition to theaters, but with an additional paywall for access.  The Premiere Access option had a steep price tag of an extra $30, but that equals about what a family usually pays to go to the movies.  Yes, the piracy problem becomes an issue, but for Disney at least, they still receive that $30 revenue no matter what.  And in the end, even Disney saw that this was an unreliable generator of money for their films, and they went for theatrical exclusive premieres for the rest of the year.  Warner Brothers unfortunately were stuck with their highly publicized plans, and couldn’t course correct midway, because it would reveal their plan to be an overall failure.  Their consequence is probably the most clear example of there being no conclusive answer to the state of film releases in the future.  Warner Brothers did manage to keep it’s word and put every movie they planned for 2021 into theaters and onto streaming concurrently, but in doing so, it probably hurt their bottom line for the full year, with all their movies making less then they should’ve, even in the face of problems caused by the pandemic.

Essentially, the state of film releases going into this year is determined mainly on the desire of what audiences are willing to risk seeing on a big screen.  That’s why movies from studios like Marvel still potent in a pandemic market.  You feel like you’re missing out if you don’t see a big movie shown the way it was meant to be shown.  That’s largely why of all the Warner Brothers movies released in 2021, the only strong performers on the silver screen were the ones made for the big screen; Dune and Godzilla vs. Kong.  From my own experience, I will tell you that I saw the majority of the Warner Brothers releases in theaters, just because that’s the person I am.  The only ones I chose to see on HBO instead were The Little Things (because theaters were still closed in my area at the time) and Reminiscence  (because I wasn’t going to waste my time going out to the theater for a movie that I knew would just be disappointing.  There were quite a few movies in that bunch that I wish had been theatrically exclusive like In the Heights and The Suicide Squad, because those films should have been given the chance to prove themselves in exclusive theatrical windows.  For now, it looks like Warner Brothers saw that the plan did not work for them, and their 2022 outlook appears to favor theatrical over streaming.  We’ll see if that works better for them, with the highly anticipated The Batman coming out in March.  In the end, was it worth the risk for Warner Brothers.  It certainly drew some attention to HBO Max, and the streamer did see a bit of growth.  But, with the year over, it looks like it was a gamble that didn’t pay off the way the studio wanted it to.  Warner Brothers is still a big enough studio to where it won’t hurt them too much in the long run, and the executives that greenlit the decision have already left the studio completely, as AT&T have given up their stewardship in the last year and WarnerMedia is imminently about to merge with Discovery Studios, which is going to create a whole different outlook for the future of Warner Brothers.  For some, having the availability at home for first run pictures at no extra cost was very generous, but it’s better in the long run for movies to have a robust theatrical option to generate the most return on their investment.  That’s not to say that there’s no value in going straight to streaming either.  It really depends on the individual title.  Overall, HBO Max’s 2021 plan was an ultimately unsuccessful from a revenue standpoint, but still noteworthy in it’s way, as it did put the struggling streamer into the headlines and garnered the attention of the audience.  It’s own topsy-turvy results more than anything reveals to us that the state of Hollywood is still one with a undetermined outcome even post-pandemic; one in which the years hereafter will tell us more conclusively how the industry will look in the future.

It’s Christmas Day.  We’ve all had a pretty hectic year, but if you are making it to this festive time with your mind set in the right place, then you’ll no doubt be feeling the warmth that the season brings.  We all celebrate the holidays in our own way, depending on our background, cultural upbringing, and station in life, but there is no doubt a lot that many of us still have in common when we reach the Holiday season.  No matter what holiday it is that we celebrate, this end of the year season is about coming together and expressing how much we are grateful for having the loved ones in our life to share these moments.  That and giving each other lots of presents.  That in itself can be both something wonderful this time of year, as well as a headache.  We also have that in common, scrambling through all the days and weeks trying to prepare for the big day.  Whether we are decorating, shopping, or preparing the big Holiday meal, many of us are putting in a lot of work to make the season bright.  And all for a brief moment on Christmas morning where we open our gifts together.  It’s a time of joy, but also frustration.  But even these hectic moments have come to define the season itself, and in many ways, the perseverance to make the the holidays perfect become memorable moments themselves.  In some ways, they turn into war stories that we tell each other, sort of a way of bragging to show just how much Christmas spirit we have.  I have some of those two, with my years spent working in retail during the holiday season.  This goes for the shopping experiences as well as all the headaches at home with making everyone happy during the holidays.  Oftentimes, there are just as many tears to be had over the holiday season as smiles.  We all recognize the trials of a holiday season because many of us have gone through it ourselves.  No Christmas is 100% perfect, and the ones that we remember as being perfect may be just rose colored glasses over a foggy memory.  But, that strive for perfection is a universal feeling, and the best we can do is to laugh it off in the end and just enjoy the holiday mood.  Though many movies show the ideal types of Christmases we’d like to have, there is one movie that perfectly encapsulates all the things that could go wrong during the holidays: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989).

Christmas Vacation is an all time classic holiday film, but one that I think goes against the grain of what a typical Christmas movie should be.  It’s a movie about everything going wrong during Christmas time, despite the best efforts of it’s central family, The Griswolds, to make everything perfect.  And by the Griswold’s, I mean the father, Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) who takes holiday festivities to a cult like obsession.  And every mishap that befalls Clark and his family is played up for laughs.  The movie overall is a farce in the very classic sense of the word.  There really is no driving plot to speak of, other than a couple of loose threads like Clark’s ambition for a perfect holiday and his anticipation for a Christmas bonus check from his greedy boss.  It’s merely just a collection of moments with hilarious punchlines at the end of each scene.  We see the family going pick out their Christmas tree, Clark decorating the house, the extended family members making their arrivals, and the family sitting down for a Christmas Eve dinner.  Things we all have our own experiences with during the holidays.  But, as the movie unfolds, every possible thing that could go wrong does.  The tree is too big, and Clark forgot to bring an axe; Clark nearly falls of the roof many times while putting up the lights; the grandparents all hate each other; and the Christmas Turkey is cooked too dry to be edible.  All these mishaps are filmed with the same kind of manic zaniness of a Marx Brothers or Charlie Chaplin comedy, which is typical of the National Lampoon brand.  And yet, there is still an underlying truth beneath all the farce.  None of the scenarios that Clark Griswold finds himself in are too far fetched; we all can identify with all the mishaps that befalls him, because many of them have often happened to us too, though maybe not to the same extreme extant.  It’s that combination of relatable mayhem and the unrelenting farcical tone of the movie that really helps to keep the film a perennial favorite.

It might surprise many that National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is the third in a series of comedies, because it stands pretty well on it’s own as a stand alone movie.  The series began with the celebrated National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983).  Written by John Hughes and directed by Harold Ramis, Vacation followed the Griswold family through a similar series of unfortunate events, only it’s during a Summer vacation trip that takes them to a fictional theme park named Walley World.  That film likewise is renowned for it’s manic farcical tone and often mean-spirited humor.  It also marked Chevy Chase’s first post Saturday Night Live hit as a headlining star.  And it was a role that he played to a “T”; a highly strung out dad trying his best to make everything perfect even though nothing goes right, and it only makes him sink deeper into his own mania.  Where I think a lot of people forget that Christmas Vacation is the third film in the series is because of the often forgotten sequel, National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985).  Made right on the heels of the original, and retaining John Hughes as screenwriter, the sequel obviously did not have the same magic of the original film.  Something just felt off taking the Griswolds abroad and placing them in Europe rather than the American Midwest.  And I think that’s where the problem lies with European Vacation; it’s just trying to be the first movie all over again, and it can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice.  The change of scenery doesn’t hide the fact that it’s all the same farcical situations all over again, and all it does is spotlight the flaws all that much more.  So, when the opportunity came to make a third film, Hughes and company decided to do something different, which ultimately helped to bring fresh new life into the series; they brought the Griswolds home for the holidays.

The at home Christmas seemed like a natural progression for the series to take, but it also opened up the series to a fresh set of mishaps that could befall Clark and the family.  In essence the dynamics are still the same.  Clark is the driven to perfection man that we are all familiar with from the last two films, and his mania is perfectly countered off of his long suffering wife Ellen (played again perfectly by Beverly D’Angelo).  What is especially funny is that the movie keeps the tradition going of recasting the Griswold children in every new film.  This time around Rusty and Audrey Griswold are played by a very young Johnny Galecki and Juliette Lewis respectively, and of course the recasting is never brought up at all.  The same progression of cascading problems also happens to the Griswolds, but here it’s all set at home.  The gimmick of them driving across the country is out of the story, and that allowed John Hughes to craft his comedy around the characters’ home life.  And that offers a whole different set of comical situations to mine from.  This is especially hilarious to see with Clark’s manic personality coming through.  He not only decorates the house, he decorates to a point where he uses so many lights that it literally drains all the power from the community.  The tree he picks out is so big that it destroys half the living room once it’s branches are unbound.   Everything is not a minor thing with him; he has to take it to the nth degree.  It’s all over the top, but John Hughes grounds it in a very real place.  Every situation feels like something that naturally would happen, and probably comes from real place.  John Hughes was a midwestern kid from Michigan who probably experienced his fair share of crazy Christmases.  Whether he wrote himself into the character of Clark, or based him on members of his own family, you really get a sense of Hughes finding a universal story within the mishaps of the Griswolds and their striving for not just a perfect Christmas, but also a sane one.

What is interesting about the movie is how Clark Griswold comes across to us the audience.  We are meant to sympathize with his ordeals, but it’s often hard when Clark is not the best person in the world.  Carrying over some of the character traits from the previous films, we see Clark as a very flawed man.  He insults his co-workers, constantly puts his family in harms way in order to achieve his often impossible goals, and at one point even flirts with a girl at a department store while his wife is somewhere else.  Clark, in many ways is a self-obsessed jerk underneath that suburban dad exterior.  But, that’s one of the most fascinating aspects of Clark as a character.  As flawed as he is, he is very much an everyman whose problems are all too recognizable.  It’s through his striving for a perfect Christmas that we see his attempt to be a better man, and it makes all the funnier when he fails horribly at it.  I think if he was a purer soul, the farcical situations he would find himself in wouldn’t feel as funny as they do.  Because he is sometimes a jerk to others, it makes it funnier when we see misfortune fall his way.  But, it’s not to the point where he is too unlikable or the misfortune too stacked against him.  The movie is all about that balance between hilarious hubris and triumphant comical resolution.  It helps that the Griswolds live next door to an uptight Yuppie couple, played by Nicholas Guest and a pre-Seinfeld Julia Louis-Dreyfus.  Clark’s mean-spirited self-obsession feels much more earned and celebrated when the misfortune falls the neighbors’ way.  He may not be the antithesis of a George Bailey, but Clark Griswold is a Christmas character worth celebrating this time of year, because he honestly is the one who represents how we all feel during the holidays.

There is one moment in particular in the movie where I think the movie reveals exactly what drives Clark Griswold, and in many ways shows us what we see of ourselves in him.  At one point, Clark goes up into the attic to hide Christmas presents from the rest of the family.  However, his mother-in-law ends up closing the roof access door, not knowing that he is still up there.  Now, Clark is stuck in the cold attic in his pajamas, with no way out.  While going through some old boxes to find extra layers of clothing he can put on in order to not freeze, he finds some old 8mm film reels.  Not knowing how long he’ll stay up in the attic, he finds the family projector and begins to run these old films strips through it, using a white shirt as the screen.  On the film, we see Clark as a young boy celebrating Christmas with his family.  It’s in this scene where it finally dawns on the audience what is driving Clark Griswold to making this a perfect Christmas for his family; Nostalgia.  While watching the movie projected in front of him, we see Clark at his most content, even shedding a tear while he has a beaming smile on his face.  Though the film is grainy, worn out, and not ideally projected, it brings Clark back home to the days when Christmas was ideal for him.  Naturally, we all look back on the Christmases of our youth with fond remembrance, but that’s because the burden of the holidays were not on our shoulders yet.  As kids, we were the main recipients of holiday cheer.  We didn’t have to spend hours at the mall looking for the right presents, or work for days to put up the decorations in the cold of winter.  The holidays change for us as we get older, and many of us can easily adapt to the new dynamic.  But, Clark is still trying to hold onto when Christmas was just as self-fulfilling as it was when he was a child.  It’s really interesting that the movie takes a pause from the farcical situations from before and gives us this moment of reflection that tells us more about Clark than we’ve ever known before.  Of course, the movie punctuates it with Clark falling through the ceiling access door once Ellen reopens it, bringing us right back to the comedy.  Still, it’s a moment in the movie that probably captures the holiday spirit the most, as it personalizes what Christmas means for Clark Griswold, and that it’s a whole lot more than just the superficial traditions; it’s a quest to feel inspired by the holidays again.

It’s really interesting to see where Christmas Vacation falls within the John Hughes filmography.  He was only the screenwriter on this one, with Jeremiah Chechik capably handling the direction, but it really shows a certain mode that he was finding himself in as a story-teller.  This movie came in between two other Christmas themed comedies that Hughes also wrote, 1989’s Uncle Buck and 1990’s Home Alone.  They are all very different films that use the Christmas aesthetic, and yet all three perfectly illustrate the way that John Hughes mined American holiday traditions for comedic effect; including Thanksgiving as well with Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987).  Christmas Vacation clearly is the movie that mines the foibles of the holidays the most, but there is a characteristic sense of comedic precision found throughout all of them.  Hughes liked to turn the holidays on it’s head and slyly insert the kind of slapsticky, mean-spiritedness of the comedies he grew up with into this thing that is supposed to be so pure.  At the same time, there is a genuine love he displays for the spirit of Christmas in his movies, and I’m struck by how much of Hughes own creative trademarks have themselves becomes part of our own holiday nostalgia.  I think that his series of holiday themed movies were instrumental in helping to create the Christmas playlist of holiday standards that we hear every year on soft rock radio stations.  That’s true for Christmas Vacation as well, which has something as enriching as Ray Charles “The Spirit of Christmas” to something as bouncy as Bing Crosby’s “Mele Kalikimaka.”  In many ways, John Hughes contributed more to the nostalgia for the holidays that we continue to have thanks to his choices of needle drops.  There’s a cynical edge in the movie, but one that never belittles the idea of the holidays itself.  Like all great comedies, it asks us to find the humor in the things we hold sacred and in that sense, John Hughes achieved what he wanted; to create a farce in the same comedic spirit of those that came before him, like Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and even the likes of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner.  And it’s definitely a flavor of comedy that the holiday season definitely needs.

There are countless moments in Christmas Vacation that stand among the funniest ever put on film.  The climatic Christmas Eve series of events are especially hilarious, in just how much it cascades into pure chaos.  From a cat that’s fried to death by faulty Christmas light wiring, to Clark’s elderly aunt (played by original Betty Boop actress Mae Questel)  mistaking the Pledge of Allegiance for a prayer, to Clark’s Cousin Eddie (a perfectly demented Randy Quaid) kidnapping his boss after Clark did not receive his Christmas bonus in the mail.  It’s just the right balance of mayhem and genuine Christmas spirt that I want to see in a movie like this.  It’s both naughty and nice, cynical but uplifting.  Naturally myself and many like me return to this movie every year and enjoy it over and over again.  For some, the holidays don’t feel complete without it playing at least once.  It’s not an unexpected holiday classic; how could it be when the holidays are ingrained into every frame of the movie.   But, it’s one that’s not afraid to buck a few traditions and reveal some of the misfortunes of the holidays in a hilarious manner.  Perhaps the highlight of the movie is it’s most profane moment, when Clark reaches his breaking point and delivers his manic, single breath, vitriolic rant against his cheapskate boss who cut his holiday bonus out of his yearly salary.  That’s something you won’t find in a wholesome Christmas movie.  At the same time, the movie celebrates the idea of trying to make the holidays better for others.  Clark Griswold may be a maniacal sociopath, but his heart is in the right place when it comes to making the holidays work out for his family.  It’s just that the problems fall out of his control and build towards a chaotic end.  Even still, he pushes ahead and declares, “We are going to have the hap, hap, happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap danced with Danny f***ing Kaye.”  The Griswold family Christmas is course, crude, and chaotic, but it’s not unlike the kinds of Christmases we have had ourselves.  The only thing is that we shouldn’t let the drive for perfection cloud our own enjoyment of the holidays.  Even as everything has cascaded into insanity by the end, Clark Griswold finds that special sense ultimately too, and that helps to make Christmas Vacation in the end feel like a hopeful tribute to the holidays.  So, to all of you, Merry Christmas and thank you for reading.  Now where’s the Tylenol.