Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Will We Ever Go To The Movies Again… And Does That Matter?

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

That phrase - going to the movies - that shared experience in a movie theater full of strangers already makes me nostalgic, like listening to vinyl records. Before the pandemic, the movie theater business was an 11-billion dollar industry in the US alone. In 2020, there were approximately 40,000 screens in 5,798 theaters that employed over 115,000 people. Then, of course, in March of 2020, like all communal entertainment experiences, they were all shut down. Netflix, Amazon and Disney, which were already increasing their market share of the movie experience, replaced movie theaters overnight. But as we crawl out of the pandemic to a post-corona world, will the tension build to return to the movies? Right now, we are seeing early signs of a market for the sanctity of the movie theater experience. To help us understand the history of the film business and where it goes from here, post-corona, John Podhoretz returns to our conversation. He’s been a prolific film critic for over four decades. John is editor in chief of Commentary Magazine and host of Commentary’s award-winning daily podcast, he’s a columnist for the New York Post, a book author, and was film critic for the Weekly Standard and television critic for the New York Post. Are movies as we’ve watched them for the past century — over? Were movie theaters already in decline and the pandemic simply accelerated the race to the inevitable? Or are we itching to get back out… to go to movies?

You are looking at something larger than life. That is the part of the experience of the movies that is unduplicable, and that you're sitting there and you're looking at a screen that is 40 feet wide by 20 feet high, and you are seeing things, you are experiencing something that is larger than life. The experience of television or looking at something on a computer screen is that you are watching things that are smaller than life, not larger than life. And what's going on now, and has been hastened by COVID in a way that may be totally revolutionary and change everything,

is that movies are being shrunk down to television size. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. Will we ever go to the movies again? That phrase, go to the movies, like it's an outing, a shared experience, shared with a theater full of strangers. It already makes me nostalgic,

like listening to vinyl records. But before the pandemic, the movie theater business was an $11 billion plus industry in the U.S. alone. In 2020, there were approximately 40,000 screens in 5,798 theaters that employed over 115,000 people. And U.S. films found an even bigger market in theaters globally. Then, of course, in March of last year, like all communal entertainment experiences, they were all shut down. Netflix, Amazon, and Disney, which were already increasing their market share of the movie experience, replaced the movie theater overnight. But as we crawl out of the pandemic to a post-corona world, will the tension build to return to the movies?

Right now we're seeing early signs of a market for the sanctity of the movie theater experience. So to help us understand the history of the film business and where it goes from here post-corona, John Podhoretz returns to our conversation. John's been a prolific film critic for over four decades. He's also editor-in-chief of Commentary Magazine and host of Commentary's award-winning daily podcast. He's a columnist for the New York Post, a book author, and was film critic for the Weekly Standard and television critic for the New York Post.

Are movies as we've watched them for the past half century over? Were movie theaters already in decline and the pandemic simply accelerated the race to the inevitable? Or are we itching to get back out, to go to the movies? This is Post-Corona. are we itching to get back out to go to the movies this is post corona and i'm pleased to welcome my friend and longtime film critic john podhortz to post corona hey john hey dan how you doing i'm good good i'm good i'm just uh i'm basking in the afterglow of your son's Zoom bar mitzvah. You and me both. It wasn't only Zoom.

No, it was real. You had what you said. You had 45 people. 45 people, all vaccinated, all tested. Yeah, and I'm still jealous of the superb Hebrew that he displayed and the sangfa, the poise, and everything like that. So it was pretty great. And I don't know how you feel, but I'm still on a high from it. You, I think, sat through most of the three and a half hour service.

I mean, I can go to the tape. We have the Zoom recording, so I can see when you dropped off. But I'm pretty sure you were on there for most of it. I did indeed. I was there certainly through your son's Dvar Torah, which is the analysis of the Torah portion that he read. And then on into the, I think, I think the rabbi's sermon came before. I can't remember because I'm just still so bedazzled by the whole experience. You're so overwhelmed with this.

Yes, overwhelmed. I will say one interesting factoid that occurred to me the other night when my mother and I were deconstructing the whole couple of days. So my mother made aliyah from Canada. She was living in Canada. She made aliyah in the summer of 2014. Interestingly, during the Gaza War, she made aliyah. And had she still been in Canada, she would not have been able to make it in person to our son's bar mitzvah, because I have friends in Canada who wanted to come and couldn't come because they are not vaccinated. And even people her age are just now, not all of them, but just now people her age are just getting their first shot in Canada. And she's been vaccinated since late last year, early this year, uh, in Israel.

And so I, you know, this has been a very difficult year, but when you look at the sort of miraculous developments that we focused on quite a bit on this podcast, from the development of the mRNA vaccines, when you think about the fact that this pandemic has barely touched children, and when you think about how some countries like Israel got it together so early on the vaccination front, it enabled my mother, who, you know, for a period there, wasn't sure if she was going to be able to attend her grandson's bar mitzvah, be able to attend. So, okay. So we're going to talk about the movie theater industry. One would think that COVID decimated just about any industry, at least in the near to medium term, any industry that's in the kind of, any business that has us cheek to jowl with other people, right? Sitting on airplanes, sitting at sporting events, sitting at live

theaters, you and I have talked about on this podcast, sitting in movie theaters, sitting in restaurants, sitting on subways. Any of those kinds of industries would be in big trouble, and actually they have been. The question is, will any of them be salvageable post-corona, A? And B, could some of them thrive? And the question I always get from listeners when we get into these topics is will i ever go to the movies again go to the movies that's the question by the way even that term go to the movies is an interesting term as though it's like an outing um that you you and i grew up with grew up with so so that's what i want to that's what i want to talk about will

people go to the movies but before we do that i just want to talk about, will people go to the movies? But before we do that, I just want to talk a little bit about your small but not unimportant role in the whole go-to-the-movies industry, because for, I would say, I'm going to show my age here, for decades I've been reading your reviews. Well, you're showing my age more than yours. Well, I'm showing mine too. Look, your first review was in 1978? 1979. I was 18 years old.

I published my first professional review in the American Spectator during my second year in college. About the Warriors. About the Warriors, yeah. Warriors. Yeah, the movie about gangs, the gang trapped in the northern Bronx that has to get back home to southeastern Brooklyn with all the gangs in the city chasing after them. So you've been writing almost weekly or every other week for about over four decades now, and who have you written reviews for the range of publications okay so so i wrote for the american spectator uh from like 79 to 80 485 something like that i then wrote for the walk i wrote intermittently for the washington times and for insight magazine which i uh which was published by the was Times and for Insight Magazine, which was published by the Washington Times

from like 84 to 87. Then I kind of wrote stuff about the movies, but not on a weekly basis. In the early 90s, I ended up as the TV critic of the New York Post, which is, of course, not a movie reviewing job. But when the Weekly Standard started in 1995, pretty much from the time the Standard started from 95 until it was shuttered in 2018, I think I, in the history of the magazine, I have had the most bylines because I was in there most weeks.

Yeah, back of the magazine. The culture section, which was my favorite part of the magazine. It's what I started with whenever I got the hard copy. I'd go to the back to read your movie reviews. And until the pandemic sort of called sort of a halt to it to some degree, I then moved on to the Washington Free Beacon. So intermittently, a bit more than 40 years with a couple of years gap in between. So I've written, I can't even imagine how many.

I mean, I've probably written 2,000 reviews or something like that. If you add in TV, it's probably close to 2,000. Okay, so here's my question. How does a young John Podhortz become a movie critic? How did you decide, I want to write about and publish about movies? Okay, so basically from the age of nine or 10, so this would have been around 1970, I became, I fell in love with the movies

and I grew up in Manhattan and Manhattan was not only a place where movies opened and played, but you could get an education in the history of cinema because there were all these revival houses, 10 or 12 houses that played different movies every day. And, of course, the other thing that I have to remember is that, let's say, so over the course of the 70s,

after school sometimes, on the weekends i would go to the movies often by myself uh and sort of get this education in the history of cinema both for and while seeing new movies now there were two reasons that it was possible to become extraordinarily well at this point when you're just i mean i'm a teenager i'm a teenager yeah like like a young teenager. But here's the thing. So the movie industry itself had only been around after the silence, had basically only been around for 40-odd years.

And so now it's been 80 or 90. So if you were my age now, the amount of material you would have to know to consider yourself literate enough to talk knowledgeably about the cinema was much much smaller because there was much less time and a lot fewer movies were being made and in the 1970s when american and foreign movies were being made a lot fewer of them were released like there would be one maybe two a week uh that came out uh the studios uh sort of folded up it was only in the 1980s that enormous amounts of ancillary money came into the business in the form

of uh VCRs and cable television and stuff like that so that there was suddenly a lot more investment capital to go into movies because there was a lot more way, there were a lot more ways to make money from movies aside from releasing them in a theater and then selling them to television. And so there just weren't that many made. So by the time i started writing about it i had probably seen most of the movies released in america from 1972 to 1978 1979 i stayed up a night watching movies on tv and i went to revival houses so i was oddly and ironically i was sort of like as literate as would be necessary to write

knowledgeably and with some command of movies, even though I was not yet out of my teens. And that's a thing, by the way, like the movie director, Peter Bogdanovich, who started out writing about movies largely for a program that was handed out at the New Yorker movie theater on the Upper West Side in the early 1960s, he also was like 20, 21 years old, something like that. Truffaut and Godard, the French directors, they were writing for French film magazines in their late teens and early 20s. It was kind of like a very young person's game at that point because you could because you could master it you know whereas if you want to write about literature you got you got 10 centuries you want to write about anything serious like you just need to know more

right so it wasn't that hard that's all i'm saying and when you and when you would write film reviews did you even even when they became very available on television and then ultimately on tablets and computer screens, for purposes of writing reviews, do you prefer to be in a theater? weekly for the Washington Free Beacon this year, because movies were being released on demand or on premium services or that sort of thing all the time, I don't really find that like watching a movie. And it doesn't generate any excitement. I find it very hard to hold my attention, particularly if I'm in my house and my kids are running around or whatever, and they don't want to sit around watching the kinds of things that you can watch. So I wrote three or four reviews this year. I reviewed the Tom Hanks movie Greyhound, which is about the war in the Pacific, the submarine war in the Pacific,

and a couple of other things. But I mean, just before everything fell to pieces, there were two very interesting experiments in this question of what was going to happen to movies and movie theaters, which is that Netflix paid for, Netflix or Amazon, I can't remember who did what here, but the Coen brothers, who of course are like probably the premier American filmmakers, made a movie called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and they made it for, I think, Netflix,

and then they wanted it to be in theaters, and Netflix is like, we don't care if it's in theaters or not. And Netflix also paid, I don't know, $150 million to make The Irishman, Martin Scorsese's movie with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. And he wanted it to be in movie theaters. And they were like, okay, we'll release it in some movie theaters, whatever. But it's of no interest to us whether it could make a billion dollars at the box office. Not that either of these movies could make anything close to that.

It has no effect on what we are and what we do. So we're going to be nice to you. And in fact, Netflix even then kind of bought a theater in New York City, the Paris Theater next to the Plaza Hotel, to show movies to be nice to the people who wanted their movies to be released. But their model, their financial model, their purpose, to be nice to the people who wanted their movies to be released. But their model, their financial model, their purpose, has nothing to do with grossing at the box office. But for you, so take The Irishman.

Wait, you reviewed The Irishman? I went to see The Irishman at a movie theater. But what is it for you about writing a review in a theater? Is it the screen? Is it the size of the screen? Is it the sense of going out the event? Is it the shared experience, the communal event? What is it? It's all of it together. I mean, if you take it apart from what does it mean to write about something, it's much easier to write about movies if you see them in movie theaters because you are distractions are eliminated the way that they're not eliminated if you watch something on a computer screen or even on a big tv screen that's you know attached to netflix or something

you're in your house you can stop you can go to the bathroom you know you can take a phone call you can have your you can have your phone on your lap looking at email that sort of thing and you can't lose yourself in the experience, or it's a lot harder to lose yourself in the experience. Take that, and then also take just the sense that you are looking at something larger than life. That is the part of the experience of the movies that is unduplicable, and this is where we're going to get into the real meat of this conversation, that you're sitting there, and you're looking at a screen that is 40 feet wide by 20 feet high or larger, and you are seeing things, you are experiencing something

that is larger than life. The experience of television or looking at something on a computer screen is that you are watching things that are smaller than life, not larger than life. People in a movie are often taller than they would be in real life. If you have a close-up of Robert De Niro, his face is 10 feet high as opposed to what his face would ordinarily be, which is like a foot and a half, right? So our experience of television for the range of television is that it's a much more intimate medium and much more familiar. Like there are people there in our living room. We're inviting them into our living room. You know, your wife, Campbell, worked on TV for a long time,

and the whole experience of being a person, a personality on television is, is this somebody I want to, like, be sitting in my living room? That's not what we think of or what we should think of or what we have thought of about movies. These are larger-than-life, epic, mythical people, practically. They don't exist in our frame of consciousness. They're kind of mysterious. They're weird. We don't have that feeling about them that we can have about TV people. And what's going on now, and has been hastened by COVID in a way that may be totally revolutionary and change everything, is that movies are being

shrunk down to television size, even though TVs are getting bigger, right? So you now have a TV that's 100 inches long in your living room, if you, I don't, but I mean, if you have a wall big enough for that, you have a huge television, which has good sound, you have a sound bar, it has good sound and all of that, and you hear things better you can put on captions so you can make sure you hear or you understand all the dialogue all of that stuff but it is a fundamentally different experience it's not the same experience and it's not the experience that generates an audience a repeat audience in the same way so yeah yeah the director of do you see 1917 yes so the directors yeah sam endes so do you remember his speech actually was i think it was the last award ceremony i think it was the golden globes before covid yeah uh where he gave that speech

where he kind of did this finger wagging thing at the hectoring almost, the larger television audience of the awards, saying, go to the theaters, go watch movies in theaters. It's not the same. And I watched that. I thought the film was terrific, and I took his point. I mean, I sort of agreed with it, but I thought it's a bad sign if a movie director has to yell at the audience that the audience question is the movies have been a dominating cultural medium now for a century pretty much for a century the first global star was charlie

chaplin came became a star in the 19 teens it was in the you know the the the most popular movie ever made by some lights was Birth of a Nation. More people saw Birth of a Nation, so it is said, than saw any other movie in the history of mankind, in part because there was so little else to see. They built these movie palaces. This was a new form of mass entertainment. People flocked to them, and they were off to the races,

and that was 100 years ago. 100 years is a long time it's a long time now but the now the theater of course with probably gaps of a thousand you know the middle ages there wasn't a lot of theater but you had greek theater you had roman theater you had elizabethan theater you had french moliere comedy francaise theater you had theater throughout you know throughout the recorded history of the west um so it's kind of an offshoot of that but it's it's it's a hundred years so if the time has come because of technological changes and computer whatever uh that this this has become a calcified thing where people don't have to come together in one room to see one showing of one

thing maybe it's organic that it's gonna end and that it's gonna be it's being replaced by something else but uh there's other stuff going on that's not so organic and it's more financial than it is organic. Bring it. Okay. So in a good year, last year before COVID, the entire American movie business grossed about $12 billion at the box office. That's everything. Right.

That's not video. That's not video on demand. That's not DVD. That's everything. Right. That's not video. That's not video on demand. That's not DVD. It's nothing. It's just box office receipts. Yep. $11 billion. And just to be clear, this whole term box office receipts,

which now people in the industry, industry players follow religiously, that is also a more recent phenomenon, right? It was only like in the 70s or 80s. Nobody ever knew. People knew that things recent phenomenon, right? It was only like in the 70s or 80s. Nobody ever knew. People knew that things were hits, right? I mean, it was known that the graduate took off, or Jaws, or The Godfather, stuff like that. But it was literally the mid-1970s before box office receipts became a thing.

Box office receipts became a news story. Right. And I remember once being quizzed by somebody. It was interesting, like when I was a very young man, and somebody said, okay, so The Graduate was the number one grossing movie of 1967. Guess what number two was? And I was like, I thought, tried to, I remembered what was it. So I was like, was it Funny Girl?

No. Was it this? No. Was it that? No. What was it? The Green Berets. John Wayne's The Green Berets, which is a movie.

And this is sort of interesting because there you had the cultural divide in the United States. You had The Graduate, which is a movie for sort of like young hipster draft dodgers. And The Green Berets, which is a movie for people whose sons and whatever went off to Vietnam. And one made a zillion dollars and was the cultural conversation of the moment, and the other made a zillion dollars and was condemned by the New York Times and was hated by everybody and all of that. But I didn't know the answer to that question because people didn't write about the box office. But when the blockbuster age began with Godfather, Godfather, Exorcist. Yeah, 1975 was Jaws.

Yeah. But 72 was The Godfather. 73 or 74 was The Exorcist. And then came Jaws. And everything broke wide open. Right. Movies made four or five times more than they had ever made before and superman what was superman 78 yeah but star wars

and then star wars just you know star wars the entire industry altered itself because suddenly you know you could make something that made a respectable amount of money and doubled your money or you could make something that made 20 times your money and so of course if you were in this business you were going to aim for the 20 times your money as opposed to the the double your money and so the whole way everything went and then that also transformed things because they were doing interesting things with sound. So theaters had to upgrade their sound systems. That's where Dolby came in. And cinematography, special effects stuff became more sophisticated. And so you had to make sure that projectors had good lights and good lighting and good light bulbs and stuff like that. And theaters were

getting a lot more attendance and people were getting annoyed by how grungy they were and so theaters started upgrading themselves sort of like the way in the 1980s everything in america got nicer people got richer the country got richer there was twice as much money and so like you know the streets got cleaner restaurants got nicer houses got nicer movie theaters got nicer the economy grew by a third yeah yeah so um and so movie theaters you're saying box office receipts about 11 to 12 billion dollars a year for the yeah so so let's say 11 or 12 billion dollars that's good like right i mean the thing is it's actually pretty static so pretty much it seems to have hit a seal it hit a ceiling somewhere around 2010 2011 it makes around this and not much sometimes it makes 400 million dollars more sometimes it makes 400

million dollars less but it was it's around 12 billion dollars and then you know uh a couple of the main thing that happened the main disruptive thing that happened, I think, that is going to change everything is that AT&T bought Warner Brothers, among other things that it bought in the network of buying entertainment companies. So Warner Brothers is the second most profitable studio in Hollywood next to Disney, and made a lot of money in this realm, like made $2 or $3, $4 billion a year in profit or something like that. But then it's purchased by a conglomerate that makes or grosses $182 billion a year. So from being a gigantic player in this big mart in this market this very showy market suddenly warner brothers is a teeny tadpole swimming in a gigantic you know aquarium that is dominated by at&t and um it doesn't really matter that much to AT&T,

although it paid a lot of money for these properties. And suddenly, what it means for Warner Brothers to be a success inside its new ecosystem, inside its new corporate ecosystem, changes completely. You know, like, if you went in old days, you went from grossing $4 billion a year to $7 or $8, right? If you, Disney made this huge surge

and became the most profitable and powerful studio by dominating the market with, you know, by making a billion dollars more than Warner Brothers or something like that. So let's say you're Warner Brothers and you go from $4 billion to $5 billion. So what? So you threw another couple of quarters into the kitty,

the AT&T $200 billion a year kitty. So if you're the guy who runs Warner Brothers, what are you going to do? You want to make some noise. You want your corporate bosses to light. You want to do something big. And so what's the hot Wall Street subject? What's the hot subject of the moment?

Streaming. The future is streaming. Streaming, streaming. Netflix. Look at Netflix. Look at the Netflix place. So Netflix, of course, is a company that has never made money. Netflix loses.

Netflix's model is that it loses money and then the stock price grows. And, you know, you can, that's why you are who you are and I am who I am because you understand why that is and I don't. And, you know, and, you know, if I understood why that was, I could have bought Netflix stock in 2007 and I would be a happy man today. But I didn't because I'm like, this company doesn't make money. So why would I buy the stock? And it has a massive stock price, which it uses to buy content that the traditional media companies could never compete with. Okay.

So Wall Street is like, we want streaming, future of streaming, all of this. So Jason Kailar, the guy who runs WarnerMedia, says, screw theaters, screw, you know, this is nothing to me. This is like, I want, you know, I want my corporate chieftains to think well of me. So I, in the bake-off later on, when I want, maybe can become CEO, I want to show that I know how to play with the big boys. So what does he do? He reorients his entire business towards streaming.

And COVID then provides him, is not a tragedy for him, but an enormous opportunity. Because it disrupts the entire way in which movies are distributed. And he didn't have to. It's not clear why AT&T bought Warner. I don't know what it is. I don't understand they need content for their for their the things that they want to sell right i mean they they they want to amazon is the example because amazon is is is buying up content right everywhere right everywhere

uh it seems though that they're not in the they don't need to be in the content revenue generating business they are in the get eyeballs to amazon business for a variety of reasons right so that's it or at&t also like they want something to sweeten the pot so you'll you'll sign up with at&t so they want to give you hbo max for a year so it turns out if that's their play, and where they're going to make $100 billion is on your AT&T phone contract, right? If you're the head of Warner Brothers or Warner Media, what you want to do is serve that interest, which is, let's make HBO Max the best thing ever, and who cares about the movie theaters and so when covid came along the movie

theaters closed and jason kylar made this decision that he was going to release the entire warner slate of 2021 on hbo max for free you know as long as you were a subscriber, you would get it for free. So beginning, you know, and Disney has followed suit to some extent. And so it basically, he said, all right, this is over with. Because he already didn't really care about theaters. And theaters had these restrictive deals with the studios where they said, you have to give you you can't put your movie out on streaming or on dvd or anything there needs to be a three-month window so that people will come to theaters and uh and that'll be good and you know we won't show your movie unless you have a three month window and then there was a big fight and then they reduced the window to 45 days and then to 17 days and then kylar said nope everything goes on hbo max h uh the minute that it's coming

out it's going to be there and we'll also put it in theater so if you want to go to theaters you can go to theaters and right there that is the end of the that is likely if it's not right now maybe later it is likely the end of the motion picture distribute theater business okay so let's let's we have we have a real test case of whether or not you're right about that because i'm not sure you're right because godzilla versus kong just came out all right and in the middle of a pandemic god Godzilla vs. Kong opens in 3,000 theaters, which is a lot. I mean, that's almost half the theaters in the country. And in the first five days, box office is $48.5 million in the U.S. Globally, it's over $285 million.

They probably hit $300 million by now. It cost $180 million to make. So for a trans-corona theatrical film release, those economics aren't terrible. They're not, but they're not much. Actually, if you want to really look at it, it cost $180 million. Is that what you said?

Yeah, $180 million to make. So what you said 150 million to make so it costs 180 million to make generally speaking promotional costs and stuff like that that's another 180 million so they're they're in for 360 million they need to they need to make 360 million and it's not just 360 million because let's talk about theaters now theaters get a percentage of the box office take. Now, they get much less the first two weeks. They get, I don't know, 70, they get 20% or something like that. But in general, it's said that over the course of the run theatrical release of a movie, the studio gets 50% and the theaters get 50%. So to make back, if you want the theaters to make back the money that you spent on it, the movie has to gross $700 million worldwide to break even, not $180 million.

Because there's $180 million plus promotional costs of $180 million, and then whatever carrying costs they had or whatever interest stuff that they and then so it's got to make 700 million dollars so uh this did as well as you could possibly hope a thing would do in 3 000 theaters where people they can only have 25 to 50 percent and people are there's this that you could argue that there's people there's people are yearning there's a sort of tension building about around getting back to the theater so that getting back to the theater was an event in itself which may not be as easy to replicate right and of course this is also uh so this is the fourth or fifth movie in a series of movies that were an

effort to create what what Brothers called the Monsterverse, because they wanted a universe like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So they were doing the Monsterverse. The Monsterverse is Godzilla and Mothra and King Kong, and they also had The Mummy, which was one of the worst movies ever made with Tom Cruise that went nowhere. And Russell Crowe was going was gonna play whatever it doesn't matter so so so it's the monster verse and they made godzilla and they made a second godzilla and then they made a kong movie and this is the fourth okay so it's the fourth and your point is

how much longer they keep doing this well no but's like, okay, so there's a lot. They spent a lot of money to get to this point, sunk costs, movies that didn't make a huge amount of money, by the way, like the last Kong Skull Island, which was the movie before this, basically broke even. It made $500 million. It cost $250 million. And by that formula that I told you, it basically broke even or made you know made a couple of cents so they're now making this they

made 58 million dollars or 48 million dollars and that's about as much as they're going to make because next week it'll you'll see the box office numbers and like all movies like this the people wanted to go went and now it's going to drop 70 60 or something like that then it'll make 24 then it'll make 12 then it'll disappear so it'll maybe make 100 million dollars which is will be a triumph but again in an 182 billion dollar corporation what difference does that make it doesn't make any difference the real question for him for jason kylar and for warner is what did it do for hbo max did people watch it on hbo max did they did they like it enough on hbo max that they're going to stick around and subscribe to hbo max

again next month to watch the next thing that's on hbo max that's been released instead of to theaters but in terms of these these titles you know what they call the pre-aware titles do you also worry to the extent that you worry on behalf of the industry, that it's just not as replicatable going forward? I mean, if you look at like the Iron, you know, the superhero movies, the film series, you know, when Iron Man burst onto the scene in 2008. Yeah. And then there was Captain America and there was Thor and there was the Guardians and and there was galaxy and even captain marvel and so they kept going back to this well yeah and do you also questioned how much can you go back to this well if this is how you're rolling out these movies and there's so much content now so you can't create these national cultural events and build these lexicons

around these these movie releases um that that whole model in and of itself seems pretty important to this tentpole uh movie release approach right well i think this is the ultimate thing right so marvel represents the the um the triumph of 21st century movie making which is that this this this thing that had been around for 60 or 70 years which was the superhero genre that had had successes here and there and a couple of spectacular successes suddenly they took it off into the stratosphere largely for creative reasons they they made really really good movies and they made them over and they started but they were so reliably good and so reliably entertaining for the audience that they grew in force and power and and and uh and and audience interest and all that but yeah as said, that was 13 years ago that,

that Iron Man came out of nowhere as a great surprise. And, uh, and it built on itself and it, and these are event pictures. They became event pictures and there were this thing where they built up interest, they built up enthusiasm and there came like with Avengers, this opening weekend and every theater in america

practically was showing this one movie like you couldn't see anything else because of the way they build these multiplexes you could basically show it in 25 theaters with the same digital print or whatever and it made 350 million dollars in a weekend which had never happened nothing like that had ever happened before um but it was the u.s right but that was um and it made close to three billion dollars in the u.s but that was the end that was the end game that was the literal end game of 19 movies or something like that 17 movies that had been made that built to that movie to that crescendo so in this universe in which you're sitting at your your home with your television and there's tv shows and there's ted lasso and there's the queen's gambit and there's series and there's this and there's that how on earth are you going to build one of these things that will now it's i don't really care like i who cares whether studios

get a marvel universe or not that's not really what's of interest but what what where this where this matters is that this experience of uh what the sociologist emil durkheim called collective effervescence which is the experience of a mass something that people experience together in in one place and that therefore makes it more enjoyable or more intense or more whatever uh this is a very big thing and and and it is it is i think on the verge of becoming obsolete the the movies are on the verge of becoming obsolete because the people who make them no longer have or have broken their uh their interest is no longer in putting these things in these buildings and having millions of people go to the buildings they

want millions of people to turn on their streaming service and they don't care that much about the millions of people in the buildings and in disney's case just to give you an example disney releases movies on disney plus at premium pricing as they call it. So you pay, Disney puts up, you know, I don't know, this Raya and the Last Dragon or something, and you pay $30 for it. So here's what's interesting about that. That $30, that's $60. That's not $30. They're not sharing that with anybody. That goes directly into Bob Iger's pocket it doesn't they don't have to do anything and so twice like they can they don't have to sell tickets anymore in the same way but five years from now how is anybody gonna know that a pixar movie is coming now you could

do it the same way you always did. You advertise it, you push it, you do it, whatever. But the event quality of the release of a movie that people are excited about, that can build, you can build to it and make them go want to see it, and then that itself builds audiences over time, which is the other thing that you're going to lose, which is somebody who's 10 years old

and loves a Marvel movie might, when he's 12 years old, love some other kind of movie, might like a romantic comedy and then might like a gangster movie. And therefore, as is true of all people who love the movies, you build their interest in the whole ecosystem of the cinema.

And without this common experience, it's going to go away. And it just looks to me like most of the people who make them no longer have any real interest in contributing to that experience. So even if you do have a situation like you have with Godzilla vs. Kong, where 3,000 theaters are open and people turn out, not as in big numbers as they did before the pandemic, but still in meaningful numbers, there's still demand for it. I mean, you could argue that there's still a market for these big event movies, even if the movie companies, the studios, the streamers decide it's not in their interest. But there is a market.

Like, there'll be anticipation for Top Gun 2. I mean, there'll be these event movies. So you're just saying that these movie theaters are basically going to close, and they'll all be kind of niche art houses art house theaters and there will be actually no there'll be no place to go for for for this kind of experience that you're describing well i mean i think for example you're forget 2021 are the things that have already been made right top gun 2 is coming steven spielberg's west side story is coming uh uh in the heights is coming there's a whole bunch of things that are coming dune of you know 200 million dollar version of the science fiction novel dune is coming

and there are a bunch of marvel movies coming what's 2025 like that that's what i'm talking about not not whether at the end of the pandemic and in 2022 people are going to go to the movie theaters but whether a year's pause in this whole experience largely uh breaks people of the habit and you know we know this happens by the way i i know from my own experience but i know it's duplicated in a lot of people the baseball strikes of the of the 80s and 90s or the 90s really i was a huge baseball fan that was it for me like suddenly you know there was no more basically some season was canceled and i i never really came back like it left my life uh i didn't miss it as much as i thought i would and when when i came, I didn't really care, or I cared a lot less, or I'd watch in September

when things got hot. I didn't really know who was on the teams anymore and all of that, because my frenzied interest broke. And I just don't know if people are going to feel the same way about this and uh and as i say if the industry doesn't have if the industry that makes these movies uh and supports the rest of the industry that makes movies like these big movies support the lesser movies they not only support them because they give the studios capital to make money with, but the movie-going experience is shared.

You know, basically, if you like a Marvel, like I say, if you like a Marvel movie, maybe 10% of the audience will take a chance on Minari, which is this little movie about Koreans in Kentucky that is really, really nice. Or 5% might or something like that or conversely you know the only reliable money makers aside from the marvel movies are horror movies and then every now and then there's like a game changer horror movie like jordan peele's get out right which came out of nowhere made 200 but that was more than just a horror movie i mean that was right that's my point independent yeah yeah it was an amazing piece of work, cost $5 million, made $200 million, and became a center of a part of a cultural conversation. That'll never come out in a theater.

I mean, that'll be on Netflix, and maybe it'll do fine. We won't even know, because Netflix doesn't tell us. Well, okay, so two points there. One, Alon, who's the producer of this podcast and is a is a independent film junkie uh basically says this is a good thing because we're going to revert back to everyone focused on smaller budget taste making artiste independent films and you know and it doesn't even have to be that extreme actually he points

out et back to the future i mean there were these high quality films from a storytelling a serious storytelling and creative perspective that weren't you know the avengers that weren't godzilla versus kong and that's going to become the business. And there will actually be theaters to release those films in, and people will want that experience of going out. It's a smaller industry, but it's an exciting industry that's been overwhelmed

by the tentpole strategy. Look, that's probably right to some degree, but again, the question is 2030 not 2023 like are p are people going to find this exciting are are people going to want to invest let me put it this way right now you've got the children of billionaires, right? Who they want to make movies. So they want to make movies. They're children of billionaires, Megan Ellison, her brother, David, uh, you know,

I don't know, Bill Polad. They're also the people and they direct movies, they produce movies and they want to be in it and they have enough money and they, they, they use the family money and they do lots of interesting things with it and all of that. Ten years from now, those people are going to have absolutely no interest in making movies. Because movies aren't going to be – because they're not going to be at the center of the cultural conversation anymore. They're just not. They're going to be off to – they're going to be part of a general panoply of cultural products that it's like if you've been home for a year, right, and what you really want to do is get out, right? You want to get out. The pandemic is

over. There are things that you really couldn't do, right? You couldn't see live music. You couldn't go to a ball game. You couldn't go to a theater. You couldn't go to, you know, I don't know, for a lot of people, you couldn't go to Disney theater you couldn't go to you know i don't know for a lot of people know disney world you couldn't do stuff like that you couldn't go to an amusement park but you could watch things and people watch things throughout this whole thing and it just isn't gonna it's like now okay so this is the big question about something like godzilla versus kong or whatever follows it is it really worth it to me to go out like spend 40 minutes to get to the theater to watch that in the theater now get a babysitter take an uber get refreshments you're talking about a couple hundred dollars by the time the night is done yeah so so and it's

like or i can watch it for free. I just don't know. That's why the theaters are so freaked out about this whole question of the window that they used to have the exclusive rights to show movies in. It was the only place you could see them. And so when they were hot,

that's how they existed. Now, I do want to say one thing. I know I'm blathering on a lot, but I do want to say that um theaters stink and they deserve what they're getting because they're run badly they they price their concessions at ridiculous levels in order to gouge people they don't keep the places clean they're gross they don't replace the seats enough and all they do is whine about how hard it is to make a living in this business. And nobody told them to do it. Nobody made them do it. And they do it badly.

And if they suffer because people aren't just that excited to go back to the movie theaters because they stink, then they deserve what they get, AMC doesn't keep its theaters nice. Century Theaters doesn't keep, there are theaters that are really well run. Alamo is well run. Landmark is well run. There are chains that do this well because they care about the customer experience.

And then there are garbage chains that do things crappily and people, and now they're gonna claim even more that they can't afford to do anything because their business is being harmed and you're going to get this spiral downward where you know it's like it's hard to get some people to go this is what you're describing is the near you know near monopoly like industry that they were able to i mean up until technology so so you could argue that even before coronavirus yeah because of advances in technology now people as you said have 70 inch screens they

have hd they have projectors they have surround sound they had in their homes yeah right so one could argue it was inevitable we were going to head in this direction yeah exactly and as i say it's a hundred years it's a hundred years that's a long time for this model where you go to a big theater where people go and they sit in a big theater and they used to be selling points that don't exist anymore along the way like they were air conditioned in the summer when no one had air conditioning or you know they had popcorn and there was no such thing as getting popcorn anywhere except at a movie theater or whatever. There were often newsreels,

and that's where you could see things happen on newsreels before there was television. And so it was like a thing, and it lasted, and maybe it's over with, and I'm going to miss it, but I think it's over with. And what does it mean? Go ahead. No, one way or another, it's over with. It may way or another go ahead no one way or another it's over

with it may not be over with now it may may take five but it's like one of those things where it dribbles out it's like vaudeville didn't it wasn't like there was a moment when when vaudeville shut down it was like that's it vaudeville has gone bankrupt this is the last day of vaudeville, you know, or something like that. Okay, but let me, your, our friend Rob Long wrote in commentary about, during the pandemic, he wrote, I thought, a very good piece about how he put it, you know, Hollywood's having a nervous breakdown and they're blaming TV again. And he compared it to the early 60s when box office numbers were crashing. People weren't going to the movies anymore. And the movie moguls then, according to Rob, were doing what they do now,

which is blaming television, although then they blamed NBC and ABC and CBS versus today they're blaming Netflix and Apple and Disney. And he points out what they soon learned is it wasn't actually that people were just turning to TV because they wanted the convenience of TV. It was that all the movie theaters were in cities. And in the 60s and 70s, everyone was moving to the suburbs. And suddenly, enterprising American business leaders figured, wait a minute. If we build these multiplexes in the suburbs, in or near shopping malls, near the freeway, will suddenly tap into this audience that wants to go out. And they didn't want to schlep back to the cities to go to a movie,

but if they could go to a multiplex out in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, or Westchester, or Bergen County, or wherever, they would do it. So Rob's basically arguing that if there are good movies and theaters are open, they will find an audience. But let me just give you an example. So in 1987, I did a piece on the new American movie theater for U.S. News & World Report. And here was the new movie theater.

There was this guy in Boston. His name was Sumner Redstone you know what ever heard of him you know this this this this guy and he bought drive-ins he bought up drive-ins which were sitting there on these big plots of land like you said like near highways and then he took away the drive-in he built these buildings and he called them showcases or eventually called them multiplexes. And they were sitting there with lots of parking. And the seat that he put in that theater, this is what I remember from this, you know, 35 years ago. The seat cost $130, which was twice the price of an ordinary conventional movie theater seat.

And what did it do? It rocked a little bit. It rocked a little bit. And people, and this was true when they started opening them in Washington, where I was living at the time, people drove an extra 15 miles to go to the multiplex in Centerville because the seats were comfortable and they rocked a little bit. You went to the theater and people, and they had this experience, which is people would show up,

they wouldn't even know what they were going to see. They had 12 movies and they would go because they were going to go there and they liked, there were also some video games in the lobby and all of this. And that turned the experience into a more pleasant experience. My only problem now thinking about

this is i don't know what they do they as i say amc and some of these chains are are lousy exhibitors and they don't do a good job and they don't make the experience very pleasant but i just don't know what they can do to duplicate that thing which is ugh, it was so awful to go to the movies. Now it's really great. But what are you going to do exactly? Like, it's just not clear. I mean, maybe you could, now they have seats that recline all the way back. Or they bring food to your seat or something like that.

But again, that's all like putting lipstick on a pig. Like, it's not going to make that much difference. And the difference between what Rob was going to make that much difference and the difference between what rob was talking about about the studios then and the studios now is that the studios are part of the destruction system they are not part of the salvation system warner is a studio it is no longer interested in in in theatrical releases i mean it pays lip service but it isn't i thought at some point look disney for a long time studios couldn't own theaters because of a consent decree signed in the late

1940s um the consent decree was lifted in i don't know 2017 2018 disney in theory should buy up all the movie or build movie theaters the paramount the paramount the paramount consent right so um disney made 60 or something like that of the money at the box office in 2019 disney could build theaters where it showed all the marvel movies and it had princess and it was a disney store right it had princess dresses and you could buy the videos and you could princess, and it was a Disney store, right? It had princess dresses and you could buy the videos and you could do this and you could eat, they could have a character breakfast, like at Disney World, they could walk around in costumes and you could take a picture with Mickey Mouse,

I don't know, and they could do this all over the country. And I thought, oh, see, look, I'm an entrepreneur. I understand, I really understand business because they're gonna do this because they need theaters. Well, Disney has now followed Warner because they also are now this $100 billion company. How do I know this? Because Disney turned around and spent $70 billion buying Fox. I don't even know why.

It doesn't make sense. What did it buy Fox for? I mean, people, no it doesn't make sense what did it buy fox for i mean people no one can really make sense though now it owns fox congratulations so but now it's like this hundred billion dollar and they also need to go to wall street and say we're doing great in streaming streaming streaming streaming streaming and so they're not going to go around and invest $10 billion or $5 billion in 200 movie theaters across the country because it's too little. It's not going to make them enough money. Two final questions. One, what does it mean for these – I see – I understand what you say what it means for these big blockbusters.

And I see what it means potentially for the small independent artsy films what does it mean for the the middle like the you know there's this movie that just came out this Bob Odenkirk movie uh called nobody yeah so it's did fine solid earner actually you know came out around the same time as you know in the same period as Godzilla vs. Kong. It obviously appeals to a different audience, but the industry used to make a lot of movies like that. It's like the whole Liam Neeson genre of films. Right.

What happens to those movies? Well, those movies, what's interesting is those movies have a i think a reasonably bright future on the streaming services because uh they're cheap to make they're they're cheap to make and they have this ready model right they're violent they're for men uh there's there's not a lot of talking and there's a lot of action that that translates well internationally obviously you know business like netflix is in i don't know 90 or 100 countries or something like that half the things if you go on netflix and you're relatively adventurous you look and they they have like 150 indian tv series that you can watch if you want to and so they're they're

thinking about this very much i'm thinking more about things like the romantic comedy or like the sort of the already basically the drama, the drama, the real life drama about a family and a crisis or this or, you know, something happens. Kramer versus Kramer. I don't know. Like those movies that were once the heart and soul of award season and stuff like that. Those are already gone. But then there was always a more reliable conflict. And not gone and not coming back. Probably not coming back because they're not saleable.

Like they don't have a thing. It's like, you know, you got to see this because it's a thing. Or, you know, so Queen's Gambit, which was this Netflix series about this, you know, brilliant female chess prodigy, you know, teenage chess prodigy. Fantastic series that my only gripe with, completely sugar-coated, how the Soviets behaved during international chess tournaments. Absolutely. But I won't digress. Yes. Well, no, no but i i only bring

this up to say that so there's the queen's gambit which is like so it's a series not not a movie um but of course it has to be it's it's a girl chess player right that's if not that the novel is about a female chess player and i i don't begrudge it i'm just saying could you make a show about a male about a teenage you know but about a budding bobby fisher i don't begrudge it. I'm just saying, could you make a show about a male, about a teenage, you know, about a budding Bobby Fisher? I don't think so because it's not, it doesn't twist it. It doesn't take it in some different thing. But like movies about ordinary life and what people went through,

those are all basically going away unless they're stories about gay awakenings or pansexuality or you know or or what or have woke themes or something like that now you have all these middle brow movies that are like re-litigating the 1960s from the from the radical perspective you know praising the chicago seven and praising fred ham, this thug, Black Panther kid killer. This is similar to your criticism of Broadway. I mean, you raised the question when we did a conversation,

how could you make Hamilton today? Yeah, right. I mean, that was only six years ago that Hamilton debuted. So that shows you how fast things are going. And it's not that you couldn't. You could. But people on social media will yell at you and as we know from major league baseball apparently the fear of just being yelled at on social media is enough to make you make these

calamitous gigantic decisions that turn into large-scale social catastrophes that we're going to have to litigate for a year over where the all-star game might be so finally the the just bring this full circle so so the industry lived and died and people like you who follow the industry lived and died by the box office numbers coming out every week as we said that's you know that that was a big that was a big um way to kind of maintain a pecking order if you will um and it was talent used it and the industry used it and critics used it how are we going to way to kind of maintain a pecking order, if you will. And it was talent used it, and the industry used it, and critics used it. How are we going to know what's working now and what's not?

We're depending on the streamers to tell us when their press releases, and they don't really want to tell us much. So how do we know what's working? I honestly don't know. Here's what I know, because I have friends and family in the industry, and this is how it goes. They say, you know I have friends and family in the industry and this is how it goes they say you know Universal is really happy Universal's happy with the performance of X they called us they said they're happy maybe if they weren't happy they wouldn't call us they're happy so we're happy because they're happy so they're gonna say they're happy

so we have to go to them to make the next movie they're gonna be like we're happy with how that did let's make the other one but there's no there's no data there are no data and so i don't i mean it mostly is like a game so you can sort of understand what the american people are interested in or what the audiences are interested in. That's why box office numbers were interesting. It's obviously not as a critic. It doesn't matter what a movie makes. It only matters how good it is and whether I can recommend it to you or not, right? It's interesting, though, sociologically, if something really explodes outward, like get out or something like that and what that what that might mean or portend or what kind of social lessons you can glean from

the fact that it seems to find this audience that didn't really exist before that like the hand carving uh the hand stitching the bespoke nature of the movie each audience that is assembled for a movie that is successful is itself a bespoke thing it comes together it's not the same audience that was at the last thing and it won't be the same audience that was at the next thing and so it's interesting but um but you know it's like i will say this which is the oscars are coming up and no one has seen anything or cares about any single thing that has been nominated or made. And I noticed, like, the Golden Globes got six million people.

The Oscars is usually the second or third most watched program of the year in the United States on television. Nobody is going to watch it this year because no one has seen anything and nobody cares. And that's the future. There's no national conversation going on about any of these movies. No. And by the way, they don't really deserve it what's more because they're they're and you know uh a lot of the things that might have that might have impelled that national conversation were held back you know right like the most interesting movie that would have come out in

december in my view would have been the steven spielberg version of west side story because west side story you know 1957 meet spielberg best you know greatest director ever never made a musical before uh tony kushner fancy radical playwright writes a new screenplay um uh the movie is largely viewed as being horribly miscast spielberg really does know how to direct a production number. We know from a couple of things that he did, like the number at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or something in 1941.

So this will be like a dancing movie and all this, and on provocative themes of racial conflict, urban racial conflict that are obviously very hot. But it didn't come out and so there's like nothing to talk about like what am i going to talk i'm going to talk about a movie that's about a black panther or a movie that's about about malcolm x uh and and and muhammad ali or a movie that's about jerry rubin and the yippies and it's like really this is what i'm supposed to talk about is like leftist fantasies

of revolution about yes one night in miami versus the trial of shirano seven versus jesus and the black messiah and uh judas and the black messiah these are three of the eight nominees for best picture and you know what like whatever i i don't like them but you know it's also like this is what we're talking about like right your grandparents fights over vietnam and you know really what are you kidding me like abby hoffman will be 250 years old today like why are we even talking about him well anyway i am on saturday night taking my kids to a drive-in movie theater, upstate New York, to see Godzilla vs. Kong. You go.

You know what I saw this year at drive-ins? What? I went to a drive-in outside Soldier Field in the parking lot of Soldier Field in Chicago. Wow. I went to one Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Another classic movie like that. That goes on Alon's list with Back to the Future and E.T. Right, but that's a movie about a high school kid

who takes a day off. Try to sell that in the Netflix universe. So Ferris Bueller's Day Off, I saw Mama Mia on the uh williamsburg at a drive-in on the waterline williamsburg queens and then saw this is this is what it was like i saw jurassic park at a drive-in on cape cod because they didn't have anything else to show. Right. So, anyway. All right.

So, we won't be going to theaters, really. I mean, some of us will. Some of us will be going to theaters. But most of us won't. Right, exactly. My point is, like, when I went to see Buster Scruggs, the Coen Brothers movie, and The Irishman, I saw them. They were vastly better in the theater than they were on television. And I saw them at a theater. One of the theaters had 12 seats.

And one of the theaters had 100 seats. Because it was one of these glamorous, new, sort of ritzy. And so you can see why Netflix doesn't care what its box office numbers are. It spent $150 million on The Irishman. It threw it in a couple of theaters because whatever. So in two or three years from now, they're not even going to do that is my view. John, thanks for this upbeat conversation as always. Well, it's fine.

So enjoy watching things at home. If you enjoy it, it's going to happen to these people before. If you don't get enough crushing morosity from the Commentary Magazine podcast, you can come to the Post-Corona podcast. We can talk about Midtown Manhattan. We'll come back. We're going to bring you back to talk

about the future of post-corona politics. But until then, John Podhoretz, thanks for joining the conversation. Thanks. That's our show for today. If you want to follow John Podhoretz's work, subscribe to Commentary Magazine. Go to commentarymagazine.com and also subscribe to the Commentary Magazine podcast. You can also follow Commentary on Twitter at Commentary. If you have questions or ideas for future episodes of Post-Corona, tweet at me, at Dan Senor. Post-Corona is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.