The Big Picture - Movie Theaters Are Closed. When They Reopen, Will the Movies Follow? | The Big Picture

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

With virtually every major new release pushed back and the box office recording a record low over the weekend, movie theaters have shuttered around the country to battle the coronavirus. And some studios are starting to make their movies widely available on streaming services and VOD platforms. Sean and Amanda talk about the brave new world of movies, what these radical changes could portend for releases both big and small, and whether the industry will ever be able to turn back to the old way of doing things. They also make some streaming recommendations for the self-quarantined and pick the one 2020 release they'd like to have in their homes right now. Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, guys? This is Kelly, and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. Make sure to check out the latest addition to the Ringer lineup, Music Exists. Each week, Chris Ryan and Chuck Klosterman ask and answer questions about their love of music while exploring the role of concerts, locations, fandom, criticism, genre, lyrics, and much, much more. You can listen to new episodes of Music Exists and follow along every week for free on Spotify. I'm Sean Fennessy. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about the movie business, which is in a state of confusion bordering on outright disaster.

Amanda, how are you feeling after weekend one of quarantine after the coronavirus has struck? I am feeling lucky in the sense that I'm able to work from home and I am here with my loved ones. And there are a lot of people who are in a lot less certainty. It is also very stressful. It's very stressful and it feels like things are changing every day. And that is true, obviously, of the news at large, but also the movie business. Like I, you know, I'm just closed Twitter, but I should probably have it open in case things change in the movie industry while you and I are recording this podcast. It's true.

Things are moving very fast. We're going to try to walk you through everything that has happened in the movie business over the last, oh, about 72 hours, which has frankly been radical. Maybe the most radical thing that's ever happened to the theatrical movie distribution business ever. And that includes the Great Depression and World War II and 9-11 and every crazy world event that the United States of America has encountered. And because of COVID-19 and the extreme social distancing that is now being encouraged in virtually every town in this country, movie theaters are in a state of crisis because they are now closing. What we saw initially over the weekend was some half capacity social distancing

policies from places like AMC and Alamo Drafthouse and the Arclight Cinemas, which is dominant here in Los Angeles. Some independent repertory houses closed, like the Metrograph and Film Forum. Then the Egyptian and the Arrow in Los Angeles closed. And over time, we had these rolling closings. And movie theaters around the country started to,

I don't know, if not empty out, seem more like ghost towns than they usually do. And it created a panic. I think like a genuine panic in the state of the industry. We were already in this kind of soft time, Amanda, for the box office and the box office was already off to a little bit of a slow start this year in the US. And obviously it has been shuttered for months now in China, which means the global box office was in trouble. But it was odd to imagine a world in which people were afraid of going to the movie theater. That's my sanctuary in many ways. And I think we'll talk about everything that has happened in the last 48 hours in particular. But what was it like just to see

the kind of fraught relationship that people were building between going to the movies you know it's funny i had a lot of um group text messages of people being like should i go shouldn't i go what is the best way to support a movie theater and what is the best way to support the people who are working at the movie theater because this obviously has like a lot of ramifications not just for the theater business itself and whether we there will be movie theaters to go to in three months or six months or nine months or a year. But it affects studios and production companies and all of the work that is where there's no place to show it currently or at least no theaters to show it. And then obviously also some productions have been shut down as well. And so that has future ramifications to what will be in the movie theaters or what will we watch. And it obviously has a huge number of ramifications for all of the staff at movie theaters, which is just a continuing source of

concern. So, you know, that all in addition to the idea of a place where I go for fun and for relief and to learn something else about the world or other people is suddenly not available to me. It was alarming. And I think it just, I think the industry itself and also myself and people I know just took a lot of time to wrap your head around it. It's so surprising. Yeah. And it's unusual for something like the movie theater to raise questions of morality, but that's something that you and I and our producer, Bobby, were talking about even on Friday about if you go to the movie theater, is that somehow an immoral act? Is it dangerous to expose yourself and expose others to whether you may or

may not be infected? I mean, this is just highly, highly unusual. And I think a lot of those moral concerns were sort of handled for people who theoretically would be wanting to go to the movie theater. It's interesting though. I mean, it obviously has had this kind of cataclysmic effect. I noticed that in the New York Times where there've been a handful of stories about this, there was a quote from the professional media pundit, Rich Greenfield. He said something that I thought was interesting. He said, quote, the behavior was already shifting, but this hits the accelerator pedal. I think most of the global exhibition business will be in bankruptcy by the end of the year. Now studios are going to think more and more about why they are relying

on third parties to distribute their content. This is kind of a precursor to what started happening on Monday morning with the major studios. But if we look at the box office here, it's pretty grim. According to Deadline, the weekend's tally came in at $55 million, which is even lower than the $58 million that was projected on Friday. It's a 22-year low, not since 1998, the weekend of October 30th to November 1st, when John Carpenter's Vampires led all titles with $55 million. Have you seen John Carpenter's Vampires, Amanda? You know what? I skipped that one, believe it or not. Okay. It's not his best. So overall, this weekend was down 45% from last weekend

when market conditions were normal and off 60% from the same weekend a year ago. In fact, after September 11th, 2001, the box office fared better than it did this weekend, which is, you know, that's a sign of an industry that has been completely strangled by this issue. I mean, there's a ton of great reporting at Deadline and on IndieWire about this issue and New York Times and Variety have been covering it. We're just sort of just regurgitating a little bit, but I think it's worthwhile to look at some of the movies that opened this weekend and kind of what they did and what it means for them. Um, you know, we talked a little bit about lost girls on Netflix last week, and that is one of the biggest movies that opened. And it was the number two movie on Netflix is top 10 carousel that we talked about.

Even though, again, I don't know anybody who's watched Lost Girls. Have you watched Lost Girls? I have not. Okay. So that tells you everything you need to know. I think both of our hearts were broken a little bit for Never Rarely, Sometimes Always, Eliza Hittman's movie, which we caught at Sundance and opened to $18,000 in just a handful of theaters, which is just kind of a devastating thing. This is the best reviewed movie of the year. This is a movie that has won film prizes around the globe. Eliza Hittman is a young and rising filmmaking star in a lot of people's eyes. It's a little bit crushing. I mean, what do you make of a movie like this opening into an environment like this? I mean, I agree. It's just, it is, it's, it's so disappointing. And I think that when we talk about

long-term effects in terms of the types of movies that might not get made or might get squeezed out by theaters having to be big theatrical event movies and streaming movies needing to be streaming movies and, you know, fast streaming movies and you know fast pace and designed to hold your eye for every five seconds i i think it's movies like never rarely sometimes always which is just like tremendously accomplished and um and thoughtful and upsetting film are like will be the one the consequences and that's that's a bummer That's more than a bummer. That's just a real tragedy for this movie and for the industry in general. Yeah, I think the plan for Focus Features, which picked up and produced this movie, was to sort of announce Eliza Hittman as

an independent filmmaking star. And it's just impossible to do that when people won't go into the movie theaters. It's impossible to do that when a small movie like this can't expand into more movie theaters. Usually what happens is a movie like this opens, it has an incredible per theater average, and then it convinces exhibitors to open it on 200 screens or 500 screens, and then it gets to make more money and it makes stars out of the filmmakers and out of the young actors who appear in the movie. There's two incredible performances from the two young actresses. So it's just a, it's a, it's an upsetting thing. I mean, it's, it's on a different scale than what this means for say onward or, um, the hunt maybe, but you know, it has such a, such a profound effect on the future of someone's

career. And I think you're right too, that potentially, um, I don't know, it, it really, um, potentially puts a roadblock in front of someone's career that that shouldn't have been there otherwise you know and obviously there there are things about this situation that can't be controlled but it's just really unfortunate that this movie isn't going to get in front of more people i wonder if it's the kind of thing that could potentially show up on itunes soon, like some other movies we're going to talk about. I absolutely hope so. And I do hope that if that does happen,

I hope everyone listening will seek it out because it is worth your time. It is definitely worth your time. I interviewed Eliza in January at Sundance. So if you're interested in listening to that interview and you've by some chance had the opportunity to see this movie, please check that out. Let's just talk about the mainstream movies

that came out this weekend. Onward was the number one movie at the box office with 10 million dollars it had the biggest second week drop in pixar history which is pretty profound obviously this isn't a huge hit in the pixar world but still obviously significant and shows that a lot of parents were afraid to take their children in these movie theaters um you know i don't know what else there is to say really about onward at this point. It feels like it's going to be on Disney Plus within the next couple of months, the way that things are going. Everything that you just said, it being like a historical drop has nothing to do with the movie itself and is just all about circumstance. And I mean, that probably doesn't make it any easier for Pixar, the people who put a lot of,

it's a very personal movie. So that must be upsetting to the people who put a lot of, it's a very personal movie. So that must be upsetting to the people who put so much of their lives into it. But yeah, there's nothing else to say except people were not going to the movie theaters. The one movie that even if it didn't overperform actually did surprisingly well is a movie called I Still Believe, which I would assume that neither of us have seen and that many of the listeners of this show have not seen. This is one of those entries in the Christian ideology melodrama category. This movie made nine and a half million dollars. And the only thing stronger than coronavirus is fans of movies about Christian ideology glazed in some sort of love story. These movies are the most consistent performers at the box office that are not Marvel movies around. We very rarely talk about them. I've

always wanted to do an episode about a movie like this to sort of do not just like what is all the fuss about, but to try to have a little empathy for this experience and figure out why these movies are so persistent at the box office. This is not really the time to do an I Still Believe episode, unless you'd like to no i don't think that i would want to spend my time talking about the 9.5 million worth people who decided that they could go to the movie theater this weekend to see this movie yeah there's that's the thing is there's something almost indicting about the way that this this uh box office performance stacks up you know sometimes we make judgments when silly movies

do really well, but there's something even more coded and deeper about what is and isn't doing well. Notably, Bloodshot, the Vin Diesel comic book movie, also did not do very well this weekend, $9.3 million. That's one of the worst comic book movie openings of the century. The Invisible Man did fairly well in its third week.

We'll talk more about that movie in a minute. We'll also talk more about The Hunt, which I wrote about on TheRinger.com for today. And I think up until this moment, you might have considered the most cursed movie of the century, given all of the trials and tribulations and controversies it has endured to get to the box office. And when it finally arrived, there was no one there to see it.

But there may be second life for The Hunt, which means there'll be opportunity for us to talk about it possibly next week. How do you feel about that? Yeah, it really became the social document for our times in every single way. Though whether it can live up to that is something that we'll discuss on Monday. Meanwhile, Disney added Frozen 2 to Disney Plus three months early. And I'm on the record about Frozen 2. It's quite bad. Really one of the least good movies I've seen in a long time. But I think that this probably made the coronavirus crisis a lot easier for our pal Jason Gallagher and a lot of other parents around the country. Yeah, I will say I was able to... I received this email, this press release. I was able to screenshot it and send it to a friend who has two small children.

And she is now working from home and also being their primary caregiver. And her response was, angels do walk among us. So, you know. Is that a reference to Bob Iger? I think so. To whoever made the decision on Disney at Disney to put it on Disney Plus, you made a lot of working parents lives a little bit easier. And that's something. Yeah. I mean, a senior Disney executive told the New York Times on the condition of anonymity that rerouting Mulan to the company's Disney Plus streaming

service was not currently under discussion in part because of piracy concerns. We'll see on that. I think that that was a comment that was given on Sunday and things changed pretty radically on Monday. Also, Star Wars, The Rise of Skywalker, another movie that is not very good that you and I have talked about on this show, was added to iTunes a few weeks ahead of schedule. And I'm sure that there are a lot of people rewatching what either destroyed or validated their childhood. I won't be rewatching it. And then the big news dropped this morning, which was that Universal announced that The Invisible Man and The Hunt and Emma will be made available on streaming VOD platforms for $19.99 on Friday, March 20th.

Now, we talked about this last week as a possibility. And then I got a lot of text messages from Bill Simmons about this issue. And he really wanted this to happen. He's been scouring for recommendations like all of us. And I think you and I were pretty confident that something like this was going to happen, but just didn't know at what scale. What was your immediate reaction to seeing these movies announced, this studio, this price point, everything about it? Well, my first reaction was like, finally, because I also was on similar text chains, and we had been talking internally at The Ringer. Everyone was just like,

this has to happen at some point. We have the technology and the studios have the movies. And at some point, someone has to be able to figure it out. And the questions would be, which movies and when and for how much? I think The Hunt is extremely smart. Not the movie. We'll talk more about the movie,

but releasing The Hunt online or on demand is very smart because it is such a it's seeped in online discourse and putting it the place where everyone can watch it and then you know yell about it as we probably will next week makes a lot of sense and visible man just seems like it is already kind of trailing off its theater run so they just kind of get to skip the exclusivity window. And Emma is a movie that I have seen, but I think that's a nice treat that they considered that. And I think it might be

a slightly different audience than the first two movies. So for sure. Nice that they threw that in. Yeah, there's something smart about that one too. If you read kind of deep into the, like the box office analysis that anthony

delisandro does on deadline every sunday he noted i think in the specialty box office roundup that this was the weekend that emma was supposed to go bigger not big necessarily but into like a thousand theaters and see if it could boost up to like three or four or six million dollars at the box office and obviously it's not going to get a chance to do that it's great for someone like me because i just didn't get a chance to see emma i missed the screenings i didn't get a chance to see it in theaters and it's something that i want to watch despite um what you may believe about my interest in jane austen stories uh i'm definitely going to watch it and i'm i'll probably pay 1999 on an idle Friday night. I'm certainly not leaving my house. Yeah, let's talk about the price.

Okay. So $19.99, we had a conversation last week about how much I would pay to stream, I guess, No Time to Die, which is a bigger budget and a more expensive movie. It's a bigger budget and a more expensive movie it is it's a tent pole and but i think i started at 20 and talked myself up to 30 and you mocked me and said that i would have to pay a hundred dollars i'd like listeners of this podcast to know that my husband was then like oh yeah i definitely spent a hundred dollars of our money on no time to Die. Hell yeah. Over my wishes. So he's sending 50 bucks of my money. But finally, we had the prices released.

I believe our boss, Bill Simmons, he was willing to offer 50 bucks for a release, at least according, that was his Twitter. But 20 bucks, I feel vindicated. I feel like this is great. No, yeah, you're raising your hand. I know. I'm setting you up. Go ahead. There are some caveats here. There are a lot of caveats. Some of which we already know. One, The Invisible Man is already at the end of its run, as you noted. And The Invisible Man is already a hit. And in many ways, this might be one of the savviest

things I've ever seen a movie studio do, which is they're going to get a chance to crest into even more money because they make a higher profit from the gross when they put a movie on VOD than when they put it in theaters, which usually they have to split it 50-50 with the exhibitor. So in this case, they're getting a bigger profit from the iTunes and the Amazons of the world. But people are so hungry for new content. If they miss The Invisible Man in theaters, they might be more willing than usual because of the amount of press that this news has gotten to spend money on it that's one two the hunt is basically a fiasco so it was already a red letter in the ledger and now even though it only made five million dollars it's fairly low budgeted movie the 20 price point

might actually seem high to some people who were otherwise going to be thinking about just waiting for it to hit netflix or wherever it was going to wind up on its streaming life. Now there's like a reason like people like us, I wrote about it. We're going to talk about it probably in a week or two on the podcast. There's going to be more discourse around it than there otherwise could have been. And so this is just a way to turn that red to black in the ledger for them. Emma, it probably just doesn't cost much for them to do this. And the only reason that, you know, we should probably make this clear. The reason that movie studios don't typically do this for movies that flop immediately

is because they've essentially negotiated a window that is typically three months with all of the major exhibitors. So the idea is if Emma opens on February 28th, you have to wait all the way until I guess the end of May to make that movie available on iTunes or in at Redbox or at your wherever you end up renting or purchasing your films. And that window is so key. But if there are no movie theaters open, the deals around windowing are essentially null and void. So studios can do whatever they want. The 1999 number is interesting if this was

no time to die the number would be higher i know i know but also i we should say a couple things about that we watched all these movies get pushed back in fact more movies were pushed back there after we last spoke last thursday um including movies like mulan which we didn't even know for sure we're going to be pushed back for the Broccoli family was way ahead of the curve on this. They pushed No Time to Die way earlier than everybody else. And they identified a date that was kind of soft in November that, you know, God willing, everything with the coronavirus starts to calm and that we start to get back to some sense of normalcy this fall. And the movie still has a chance to succeed in a major international way.

Universal took a similar tact by moving Fast 9 into next spring, giving it a lot of room to restart its marketing. There was a note in the New York Times about how much money Disney is likely to lose based on the Mulan postponement, which doesn't have a new date yet. I think it was north of like 100 million, given the P&A that they've already applied to this movie, which was going to come out, you know, in two weeks. So you've got all of these ancillary costs around these movies. And a movie like No Time to Die obviously has a much bigger budget than a movie like Emma. And it has a much bigger expectation at the global box office. And I don't want to get too ahead of my skis on this conversation because I think it's

an interesting thing for us to unpack for a while. But I don't think that that price point makes any sense for big ticket movies. And in fact, this may lead to big ticket movies being the only movies that open in theaters going forward. Now, that may take years to become commonplace, but I don't think we could ever really consider No Time to Die. We only have to consider these kind of low to mid-tier, not quite indie, but not quite event movies in this realm.

There's all kinds of complexity around this. Notably, Trolls World Tour, the movie that I told you we would devote an episode to well before we knew how deep and serious the coronavirus story was going to get, is also getting a release on April 10th, both in theaters and on all platforms. Now, what's the deal with them still putting the movie in theaters? Why are they doing that? I have no idea whether it's to like try to honor some of the, you know, the windowing and the deals that you that you mentioned and trying to because, you know, they are relying on these relationships to an extent. And so to to not totally screw over theaters before they have to, maybe they're holding out hope that something is going to change. I, you know, and also I have to tell you, I have mostly been inside for social distancing reasons also because it's been raining in Los Angeles for forever. But I went to like the reservoir where there's like a path near my home and on Sunday when it stopped raining and there were so many kids on scooters, so many kids,

because the minute it stopped raining, parents are just desperate to take their kids anywhere. And if you provide someone an opportunity to do something with their children a month from now, and it's safe to do so, they're probably going to do it. Now, will we be in a situation there in terms of movie theaters, in terms of being out in public? I have really no idea, but it kind of seems like hedging bets. I mean, that would be my best guess. No, it's a good call. I had a similar experience going for a walk yesterday in the park, and there were a lot of families there, an almost chilling number of families. I left earlier than I had planned to because I was like, there are too many people around me. And you're right. I know that a lot of the parents in my life are concerned about how to manage their

life with their children in their homes for likely months at a time. And so something like this is a brief salve. I know just a few of the parents on the Ringer staff are quite concerned about having Trolls World Tour on repeat in their home for the next couple of months as well seems like a kind of a torturous musical uh sonic experience um what do you what do you think about making trolls world tour the first um all hands big picture live watch we just we open up a zoom channel for all listeners who want to watch the movie along with us. We keep a camera on your face the whole time for the whole 97 minutes. You get to see how you're feeling while watching the movie.

You in? Sure. You know, why not? Wow. You heard it here. You know, I do want to say, I was going to say this for recommendations, but I did do a live watch with friends this weekend. Oh, how did that go yeah it was great we didn't we didn't do teleconferencing just because we mostly just we picked a time

and these are it's like a group about five friends of mine and we're on a group chat and you know we picked sunday at 6 30 pst 9 30 est and we picked a movie and we all just like hit play at the same time and then just like texted and watched it and it was by the way we picked Under the Tuscan Sun which is a very strange movie but perfect for this sort of thing you don't want to pick anything too good because then you have nothing to text about you want to have a lot of questions about why Diane Lane has chosen to do any of the things that she chooses to do in this movie, except for make out with the handsome Italian man. But it was pretty fun. And I recommend it to other people.

It was a nice way of watching a less than great movie, but also still being engaged with it at home and having friends. How did you communicate? Was it on your phone via text? Were you in like a group chat situation? What were you doing? We were just on our group chat and we were just texting the whole time. Okay, but no one could see each other, right? No, not for this.

Just I think like it was Sunday night. I didn't really feel like, you know, being seen. But I do think that someone could probably figure out that. I don't know. I could figure out the text for this i did also have like facetime like dates with various friends over the weekend and that worked as well so someone must know the technology i don't really think we need to do this for trolls world tour but you know i do think that it's a fun way to watch movies i'm just recommending it to people are you sensing that there's a kind of new normal in terms of the interaction that you're having

with people? Like even this podcast, have you grown more comfortable doing this, doing jam session just via video Zoom conference? No, not specifically. I think I find the podcast thing pretty weird. I don't know. I'm just in my kitchen right now and I don't know where my husband is. And we had to coordinate like our zoom connections, you know, because he's working from home too. And he has a bunch of meetings and you can't have two at once because then it starts freezing. And I feel no. So it still feels a little strange. But I have found that when you do set up like the group watch or the FaceTime or the things that you wouldn't normally do, it's like there's a pleasant novelty to it. It's like, oh, you can still

speak to people. You can still share interest about movies or other things. Yeah, I'm getting a little bit more comfortable with it. I think that the... I've noticed that a couple of movie studios have been sending out programmed screener links that are active only for the length of time that the movie will run. So rather than, hey, I watched a movie on a screener link called Slay the Dragon, which was a documentary about redistricting. It was very interesting. That's coming out in April. That was a link. They just sent me a link to the movie and I could watch it at my leisure and it expired in 14 days. But there were other companies that were sending links that you had to sit down at 6.30 p.m. on a Sunday, much like you did to watch Under the Tuscan Sun, and the link would

be dead at 9 p.m. on Sunday. And I feel like pretty quickly, the industry and humanity is going to grow more and more comfortable with a lot of these things. And the vagaries, the industry and humanity is going to grow more and more comfortable with a lot of these things. And the vagaries, the sort of wasted time, the wasted space in our society, especially depending on how long this takes, is going to start to retract. And we're going to start to cut out the fat in some cases. And I feel like that's part of this Invisible Man hunt, Emma Troika of 1999 experiences coming on Friday that the studios might realize that they don't need to put Emma into movie theaters. You know, they might actually be able to make their money back if they have a smart marketing plan and they put it on the right platform and deliver it to the right people. So I'm kind of curious, just projecting long term, if this... Forget about what it means even for the specific business in the box office, but just in terms of consumer habits, what we expect, and what these companies are comfortable doing, if there will be... I mean,

do you feel like there's radical change afoot? Yes, of course. I mean, I think we're already experiencing it, but I don't think that movie theaters are gone, done forever. I think that it's going to change dramatically. And to the extent that you were talking about studios realizing maybe we don't need to do this the way we've always been doing this, I think to an extent that was already happening. And the technology of how we watch movies has changed and audience behavior was already changing pretty dramatically. And so in a lot of cases, the studios have been kind of given, I don't want to say an opportunity, especially. It's not an opportunity because a lot of people are going to, you know, are going to suffer from this, but it's a, it's just a

situation in which they can try specifically some release behaviors that are different from what theaters used to mandate. And I think some things will work and some things will not. It's really interesting. It's not just about being free from that theatrical exclusive window. There is like a technology element to it. You know, the Disney quote in the New York Times was about Disney being worried about Mulan and piracy, which is obviously a major issue. But also Disney Plus is not yet for parents in the United States, but they don't have the ability to do a worldwide release. And that takes a lot of time to build those sorts of things. So there are a lot of different considerations in terms of how studios can make first run movies available to people more quickly, but I think they'll be investigating them. Yeah, for sure. It's a really good point you're making that these are not necessarily worldwide concerns. Even a place like a company like Netflix is not available in China, for example. And so,

you know, you're not able to open the movies as widely as you would want to. I think those big, big tentpole movies are the ones that are most likely to continue staying in theaters for a long time. The number one movie that people have just anecdotally asked me about is Black Widow. Will Black Widow move? If Black Widow moves, what does that mean? And you know, on Thursday when we spoke, or even on Friday, I would have said never because Black Widow was a full six weeks away. And it's probably the most consequential release now that Fast 9 and No Time to Die have been pushed. That's going to come, I don't know, probably until the fall. And it means a lot to Disney's bottom line.

It means a lot to whatever this MCU apparatus is that has been built. You know, think about the TV shows that are premiering on Disney Plus at some point. Is something going to appear in Black Widow that people need to before the something in falcon and winter soldier makes sense to them i mean it seems absurd but these things are so highly designed that if you remove one piece of the puzzle the whole thing could fall apart on them so i would have said on friday no and now i will movie theaters be open on may 1st it certainly doesn't seem like it it really doesn't to me either. I mean, a delay seems the most likely, but who knows? It's so strange.

I've said I don't know more times in the last week on this podcast, but in life than I've ever said in my entire life before. And it's not a sentence that I like saying, but who knows? I know, it's pretty crazy. We'll be probably doing a lot of idle speculation about this, literally idle because we are idling in our homes, rocking

back and forth. I thought the film critic Tom Schoen put it very well and kind of summed up a lot of what we're saying here. He said on Twitter, my hunch is that the dial will not reset to its original position once this is over. In this and many other areas, COVID-19 reinforces too many pre-existing trend lines. So while the box office, it went down a little bit in 2019, but it was up big time in 2018. But just because the total gross number is up doesn't mean that more people are going to the movies. In fact, it basically means fewer and fewer people have been going to the movies over the last 5 10 15 years same same conversation we've been having about the oscars and viewership and the power of choice and you know when we were discussing this at work earlier today um chris ryan raised a point that you've

made a lot of times which is at what point does free outweigh 1999 at what point does mediocrity on a budget trump uh exclusivity with modest quality you know like the hunt is not a great movie and it's fizzy because there's a political and social controversy around it and it's kind of fun to talk about. But is it really that much better than Spencer Confidential? Is it really that much more important than Lost Girls? I think that people are going to start to weigh that in the long term

and the short term too. What do you think? I agree with all of that. And I do also think, I don't know how much weighing they'll be doing. I think there's just really like consumer behavior

and your viewing habits are already, especially in the home, established at this point. And people have subscriptions and they're used to paying however many dollars a month to have like all the Netflix movies, all the Amazon Prime movies, or Hulu or HBO or all the things that are already subscribing and people like, I just think if you're already used to having that mega choice for quote free, even though it's not free, you're subscribing, just so you know, if you've forgotten that it's on your credit card, just so you know, it is on your credit card. It's not free, but it is much lower than 1999. And, you know,

people are used to being able to switch around. People are used to watching things in a certain way. And I don't know that just because everything is suddenly available, especially at a higher price, that everyone will be like, sure, I'll pay $19.99 to watch The Hunt now versus watching it when it's available on Netflix or Amazon Prime or other streaming service that I already subscribe to. I mean,

you know, specifically, I think The Hunt will do well because it's the novelty, right? It's the first one. So people are going to be like, oh, wow, I can get this movie now. And I think that's very smart. And I think 1999 was like a very smart price point. One thing I'm curious about, because I do agree with you that movies like No Time to Die or like really big budget movies would be more expensive. But now that 1999 is already out there and it's a price point, are people going to be like, sure, I'll pay 50 bucks for No Time to Die? You raise a really good point.

I mean, there's modulated pricing on rentals. So I rented a movie on Sunday called VFW, which is like a really grimy, independent horror action movie. And I rented it on iTunes and it was $6.99. And sometimes when you rent a new straight to VOD release, it's $4.99. And in some cases, it's $3.99. And if you're budget conscious, you eyeball that sort of thing. And you're aware of it for the same reasons that you're talking about. And I think that that illusion of free around subscription is such a fascinating social conundrum for so many people. I think if you have a family and you're on a budget and you are looking essentially at your T&E, your entertainment expenses in your family's life, Netflix is $14.99 and Amazon Prime is, what is it, $120 a year. I don't want to come off sounding like a billionaire not knowing how much these things cost.

But the truth is, I don't look at those specific numbers because they're like a part of my bloodstream at this point. I just know that I'm going to be subscribing to things. I was trying to tally the number of subscriptions that I have. And obviously, this is work. And we spend time. I spend time watching the Criterion channel because I love it and because it's useful for work. I spent a lot of my time over the weekend on Shudder.com,

like you just watching horror movies to quote unquote relax. Most people can't afford to do that. They have to pick and choose what their subscriptions are. And as more and more of these services come along, too, I think it presents even more of a conundrum for filmmakers and for these studios. Like, we haven't even seen HBO Max or the Peacock yet. And those are two streaming services that are going to have original movies from Comcast Universal and from Warner Media.

And there's just going to be more shit there. There's going to be more stuff to watch there. So that 1999 is smart. It may not seem as smart when you've got 11 subscriptions to 11 streaming services. And that doesn't even account for like, what if you're a gamer? I don't know. I don't know if you are what have you subscribed to the nyc cooking app you know like i don't subscribe to that but a lot of people do and that's like entertainment for some people like the way that we entertain ourselves is so diffuse now and so unusual and so um i don't know so uh so calculated and curated to our our personal desires the idea of shutter to me 10 years ago was

fucking impossible. And now they're like, would you like to watch every Hellraiser movie and not have to worry about going to Blockbuster and taking out an individual video cassette eight weeks in a row? Like, it's amazing how easy it is to get lost in this stuff. So on the one hand, the universal choice, I think, is genius and inevitable. And on the other hand the universal choice i think is genius and inevitable and on the other hand i think you make a really good point like people might be like ah i'm i'm good i got you know i can watch um lego masters on apple tv plus for significantly less with my youtube tv subscription like that's just how people are living their lives now right and and i think everything that you just said about the price stuff is a very

important point but i think there is also an addition i found this weekend that like my behavior is just conditioned to watch things at home very differently than what i when i go to the movies or when i am like putting on my big picture hat and like watching things for work and you know do you have a big picture hat? No, but we should get them. I would wear it. I'll wear it when I have to watch Trolls World Tour. This is our opportunity to debut big pick energy as a catchphrase. Oh, yeah.

Okay, let's do that. That's from Jason Gallagher. If someone wants to, I mean, I'll wear the big pick energy hat. I just also want to say that Under the Tuscan Sun, let me just, I just want to share about under the Tuscan sun. Diane Lane, who's the main character winds up in Tuscany because her best friends, a lesbian couple give her their tickets to a tour in Italy, but it's a, it's a, it's a gay tour and the tour company's called gay in a way. And they have awesome hats that say gay in a way.

And she's just wearing it for about a third of the movie. And it's incredible. And I would also buy that hat. Anyway, behavior when you watch things at home. One of the subscriptions that I have is for Acorn TV, which is how you can watch a lot of British TV shows from two years ago to 10 years ago to 30 years ago. They have a lot of the Poirot's on there. But I really did find once I remembered that I had this description subscription on Saturday afternoon, that it was more natural for me to just kind of sit there and

idly watch some old British show than to seek out the like the great piece of cinema that I would watch so that we could take it seriously on this podcast. And that's a little bit because, as I have mentioned before, I have a terrible attention span at home and I'm always shopping on Amazon or doing other stuff. I'm a terrible product of my generation and it's my fault only.

But I do also think if you're not used to expecting the great movies in your home, then you're like, eh, you know what? I'll just check out this Netflix show. Like I'll just watch another episode of the West Wing or whatever. Like I'll just kind of do what I normally do. And that it's hard to overcome that type of program behavior because the streaming services do have such a headstart with us. I think it runs even deeper than that. I think you've totally tapped into something that is really, really profound. And most people who consider themselves aesthetics or thoughtful about culture would be or probably fall prey to, myself included, but would be unwilling to admit,

which is it's the desert island complex. If I were stuck on a desert island, if I could only have one thing, it would probably be the Criterion channel, right? There's a world of film history in there and masterpieces galore. And that's what I really feel good about is that I'm learning about this stuff and I'm learning about myself while watching these movies. On the other hand, if you did a real-time accounting of my weekend, a great deal of it was spent looking at my phone while not paying attention to MSNBC. And that was like hours and hours. And some of it was because of COVID-19, obviously. But some of it was just because I just have kind of like a

moron lizard brain. I'm just one of those people who's like, sure, I would love to be reading Tolstoy right now, but what I really need to do is look at my phone like an idiot. And I think that's also a challenge that people will start to reckon with when they have to spend their money on these things. The more and more of these things that we're faced with, the more and more we have to confront how we're spending our money. And ultimately, in a kind of grotesque, kind of darkly capitalist view of the world, who we are. When you're in your house, you're only what you're experiencing in your house, which is what you've put in your house. And we have more in our house than we ever did 10, 20, 50 years ago. But those things are just not as sophisticated as I might imagine them to be,

or not even as kind of freewheeling and experimental. It's just like, it's more of a comfort food experience. In a perverse way, looking at my phone while watching MSNBC is more comforting than sitting down to watch a Shohei Imamura movie that I've never seen before and trying to figure out where it fits in the arc of his filmography. And it's not that that's work to me. It's not work. I like it, but it needs to be much more controlled and the for whatever reason i feel like that sort of experience is slipping through my fingers as we go through this period of time well there's there is art or you know work or life as like a challenge and i

don't mean that like in a negative way but you you want to sometimes seek out things that that do challenge you and that are hard and you have to engage with them, whether it's a movie or something that you're doing at work. Life shouldn't be easy all the time or else it gets boring. But you don't always want challenges in your home. That's kind of like the opposite of the definition of home. And I definitely don't always want challenges in times of anxiety. And I responded to this by not watching MSNBC at all. I do subscribe to the New York Times cooking app. And I have been making a lot. I've got into baking this weekend, which.

Wow. Yeah, I'm not a precise measurer or a scientist. So I had to learn about yeast, but I did. But I just don't think. Wait, wait, go back for a second. You're not a precise measurer or a scientist? The order of that description was very strange. Are those two things related? Yeah, because baking is really science.

Okay. It's about exact ingredients and basically chemical reactions in order to create flavors, but also textures and, you know, the reactions that make your dose. But I figured it out. I figured out the yeast and I made some delicious focaccia that we had for lunch today. So I'm, you know, I am Ina Garten. But I find that to be comforting. And I think that is what I'm looking for in the various ways right now. And that does not lend itself to adventurous movie watching right now.

And that is a reflection of me. But I think a lot of people are going to feel that way in one way or another. And then are you supposed to sit down and like do homework for three hours every night? Because that's sometimes what it can feel like in your home. It can. It can. And part of that is just the absence of the theater experience, which is something that we haven't really talked about that much. But that I think for both of us is just it's still meaningful to be in the dark in a theater setting. And not only for them.

Yeah. It's so good. It not only forces you to pay attention, it forces you to engage in a way intellectually that you otherwise wouldn't. Even watching a movie with total concentration in your house is still different somehow to me. And maybe some of that is nostalgia creep, but that's something I'm authentically going to miss for at least a couple of months. Just to not have that at all, this is easily going to be the longest stretch of time I don't go to the movie theater of my life. And that's going to be really weird. I don't know how to put it more eloquently than that.

It's just very strange to have it excised from my routine. I think it's a loss. And it's like a small loss relatively to basically anything else that's going on in the world. But I feel the same way. I just, it feels like an event. There is something about like the giant nature of that screen and the fact that everyone is there together committing their time to one thing

that does give it a significance and makes it memorable that you just can't create in your home, which just 20 minutes ago was playing MSNBC. So that's obviously one of the major downsides of this potential new reality of movie watching. Are there other downsides in your mind aside from balancing your subscription budget and not being able to go into a movie theater? If this is the new normal, in fact, for us, are we losing anything else? Or is there ultimately convenience at the end of the road and the user behavior of movie fans will change one generation later and this will just be how

it'll be? I think that's something that you and I are going to talk about a lot in the coming months. I do worry about the types of movies that get made and the types of movies that don't get made. Because I think we've talked a lot about it with Netflix movies of just kind of what you need to put on a screen in order to have someone at home watch it like the whole time instead of being a terrible Amanda-like person and looking at their phone and buying things on Amazon and making focaccia. It does actually affect like the what's in the movie. It affects the cinematography and the pacing and the script writing and the music cues and who is in the movie. So I worry that if we go more towards streaming, people will, you know, whoever is making the movies

will try to game things a little more. And that's, you just, you don't want movies to be gamed, you know? Yeah, that's an interesting concept. I mean, on the one hand, I think you could say there's probably no creative art more gamed than movies. There's the most market-t tested art form in the world.

Maybe, maybe, maybe gaming now, maybe video games have surpassed it at some point. But prior to that, I mean, the, the amount of market research that movie studios did starting in the 1970s

and eighties is, is legendary, but there was still this ephemeral non-technological feeling of movie magic that a lot of powerful producers, executives, filmmakers, and writers, and actors were able to implement into these projects. And we've seen that kind of eroding over the last 10 years anyhow, but because big tech has so invaded the space of making movies. And I think that you're right.

It's like it's a continued degradation, which doesn't mean that most movies are bad. I think, you know, most movies are okay. A lot of movies are bad. Some movies are wonderful still. Like I don't, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here, but you know, the Netflix experience has been very, very, um, frustrating over the last few years. And they have obviously funded incredible movies like the Irishman and marriage story and few years and they have obviously funded incredible movies like the irishman and marriage story and roma and they're obviously committed to a certain kind of high level filmmaking which i appreciate but their middle of the road studio garbage for lack of a better word just feels worse than your regular studio middle of-of-the-road garbage. And that might be a specific example of what you're

saying, that the Spencer Confidentials feel actually just a little bit worse than, I don't know, Ted 2, which I don't like Ted 2 either. I didn't think that was a good movie either. In fact, maybe it was more offensive, but it seemed to be a little bit more competently made. And there seemed to be a little bit more of a point, as absurd as that is to say, about a movie like Ted 2. do you know what i'm saying yeah i do i think another related thing is that you mentioned that netflix has obviously spent tremendous amounts of money on movies like roma and irishman but it makes it its specialty is those lower budget movies where you can just tell that less money is being spent and i'm a firm believer

in and spend more to to make more when it comes to movies like you can just tell when movies have a lower budget especially the studio type movies you can tell where they've cut corners and that's another concern of like if the business model for making movies straight to streaming is to spend less on the movie itself then that's that's tough for all that's why you've always been that's why you've been a huge defender of the transformer series over the years yeah you love a big budget movie yeah i do like a big budget movie actually at least if you're gonna go big okay you know we're gonna be here if you're gonna ask for my time then spend money on it you heard it it here first. Go big, says Amanda Dobbins.

Let's choose a movie, one each, that we'd like to see that's coming out this year that we think could work straight to VOD. Okay. Obviously, we're taking off the board The No Time to Die. We're taking off the board The Black Widows. I think you and I want to see those movies

on a big screen. We like the experience of seeing those movies on a big screen. What we're looking for here is a movie that is like The Invisible Man that would be better in a movie theater, but probably would be pretty effective at home. What is your pick? Death on the

Nile, baby. Give it to me now. I don't even care that they screwed up the timeline and so can't even solve the case. Just release it. It'll be great. You might need to explain Death on the Nile for people who have not listened to you

rave about it for the last couple years. Death on the Nile is an adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel by Kenneth Branagh. It is the follow up to the successful, if mediocre, Murder on the Orient Express.

I wasn't a fan, but I am an Agatha Christie nerd, so I like that people are still making these movies. But it's now part of the extended Hercule Poirot universe that Kenneth Branagh is making. And when I saw Murder on the Orient Express, the newest version in a theater in Pasadena, and I was the youngest person there by many years. And so it seems like there is an audience for these, but it would be an at-home

audience. So let's make it happen. It's a good good pick you just reminded me of something kind of grim which is sad to me the more i think about it but one of the reasons that specialty movies like never rarely sometimes always are most hurt by this is because the people who tend to go to those movies the most are older people they have older audiences and older audiences are obviously more susceptible to coronavirus than than folks. And so they've been cautioned to not go to things like this, which means that whole side of the business, which is a different side of the death on the Nile and Black Widow side of the business, is kind of in trouble if there's long-term fear about entering movie theaters here.

Maybe we'll talk about that more in a couple of weeks or something, but there's like a pretty scary boomerang effect for all independent cinema right now if you really think about it. My pick is The Many Saints of Newark, which is the prequel

to The Sopranos, which is written by David Chase and directed by Alan Taylor, who is a frequent director of episodes of The Sopranos. And my rationale for this is obvious, which is that The Sopranos is a TV show. And The Many Saints of Newark is functionally a TV show. And we just saw this with the Breaking Bad movie that came out last year,

which was a sequel to the final season of Breaking Bad with prequel elements. And that movie did play in some movie theaters, that Breaking Bad movie. But for the most part, it was a Netflix experience. And it was fine. I didn't think that the movie was great, but it did its job and it did it perfectly fine at home, which is where I watched every other episode of Breaking Bad.

Likewise, The Sopranos. I would be more than happy to just watch this in my home. I don't need to have the grandeur of a 500-seat movie hall to get excited about The Many Saints of a 500 seat movie hall to get excited about the many saints of Newark and what happens to a very young Tony Soprano. I'm ready to see it right now. Notably in the movie, the young Tony Soprano is played by Tony Soprano's son, which should be kind of mind blowing. I think it's a 60 set movie and I'd like to watch it soon. It's not supposed to come out until September 25th. I think Death

on the Nile is also in the fall, right? Yeah, it's October. It's your Star is Born weekend. Oh, right, of course. One of the most important weekends of the year in the movies. Hopefully, we're back in theaters by the end of September. I, God, that would be... What the hell are we going to do here if that's the case?

I really don't know. I guess we will just watch a lot of trolls and minions very excited about our minions episode um damn do we know what's going on with minions have they give us an update on that no because it's not till july but it's it's they'll keep us posted i've i have postponed my trip to visit the large minion in the valley i I think that's wise. I have to assume if anything is infected right now, it is certainly the large minion. It's the giant minion. God. Remember when we started doing this show like 18 months ago and we talked about very serious films at the Oscars and talked about Roma and how it was going to win Best Picture and

now we're reduced to talking about Trolls World Tour and the third Minions movie. How did that happen? I think you learned about it all week on MSNBC but I'm at least excited about the Minions. Okay? I think it's a fascinating sociological document. I appreciate it. You already recommended in a

in a you know abstract way Under the Tuscan Sun. Is there another movie that you want to tell people about that they should watch while they're cooped up in their house over the next couple of days yeah it's from a similar rubric but i actually think this movie is good uh and not discussed enough you know what under the tuscan sun was like pleasant but it doesn't make a lot of sense uh i if you want to it, get in touch and we can talk about all the different plot lines that don't need to be in there. But the movie that I would

like to recommend is a movie called The American President, which was released in 1995, directed by Rob Reiner and written by Aaron Sorkin, and is sort of both a test case for everything that becomes the West Wing and also one of the underrated romantic comedies of the 90s. If you can get past the basic premise of the president seeking a romantic relationship with someone that he's working on, it was a different time. He does it respectfully. We got to get past it. Anyway, I think this movie is delightful. I think that my dad and I went to see this movie multiple times in theaters in 1995 when I would have been 11 years old. So I think it's like a formative rom-com for me.

And obviously, it is written by Aaron Sorkin, who is my comfort food of all comfort foods. And it's got Michael Douglas and Annette Bening. Martin Sheen is in it, but not in the president role. You've got Michael J. Fox and a lot of other kind of people, Sorkin-esque people who wind up in the West Wing in five or six years later. And it's like a liberal fantasy. But if you know that, then maybe that'll be a bomb to you. And very funny. What do you think of our friend David Marchese's Q&A with Aaron Sorkin in the New York Times magazine? Well, I just thought it was delightful. I mean, it's the most Sorkin-y document of all

time, which you know. I mean, like him writing a whole fake West Wing episode about what Joe Biden should do. I don't even know what to say, sir. That a whole fake West Wing episode about what Joe Biden should do. I don't even know what to say, sir. That's like peak, peak Sorkin. And I have been watching the West Wing as well. And I mean, like, we don't have to make this about politics, but it was a different time. Anyway, I liked that he was engaged. He's clearly still thinking about things in his own Sorkin-y way.

You liked the newsroom. I certainly did. I think I like the newsroom for the same reason I like all of his shows and movies, which is that they are all fantasies that are deeply inspired by the kind of pageantry of Gilbert and Sullivan shows. And if you go into those shows or those movies, expecting realism or expecting even like, um, uh, a rigid, uh, attachment to facts, you fucked up. That's not what he does. You know, he, he creates his own kind of

phantasmic, um, you know, imagined version of reality. And it's very amped up. Everyone is hyper intelligent. Everyone is largely, I don't know, sort of open and empathetic to Aaron Sorkin's view of the world. And I loved how David kind of interrogated his idea of like whether or not he was trying to represent decency in his characters and even in his very unlikable characters like jeff daniels's character from the newsroom i thought that line of inquiry was so smart um and you know we should say aaron sorkin has another movie coming out this fall that um that would also be a pretty good movie to watch at home i have to imagine yes i did think about putting that on the list but i would still like for it to be a theater experience

i think i find people very confident people who clearly have empathy and a small sense of community because he really does workplace shows right all of his shows or even his movies are about people who band together for a cause and they all they all love each other and united in their cause and then they are just kind of talking really fast at each other i find that extremely comforting i also watched all the president's men over the weekend which is yeah which which which i did as a comfort situation i mean i know it's a movie about you know conspiracy and paranoia but to me i just watch a bunch of people in a room like solving problems and yelling at each other and you know obviously sorkin is like hugely indebted to william goldman

so i i that's my comfort food and i think american president's a nice version of it let me use this as an elegant segue because the movie that i'm going to recommend was written by william goldman it is not one of the hallowed editions of the William Goldman files. It's a movie called Magic. It's from 1978. It's based on a novel that he wrote. And if you read this novel, you'll be very surprised to know that William Goldman wrote it because it's pretty weird. It's basically an extended Twilight Zone episode. It's got quite an elegant collection of performers in it. It stars Anthony Hopkins in really one of his best ever performances that not a lot of people have it's got quite a quite an elegant collection of performers in it it stars anthony hopkins and really one of his best ever performances that not a lot of people have seen and stars and margaret

and burgess meredith um it's directed by richard attenborough who you know directed movies like gandhi um it's got some pretty uh classical figures but it's basically the story of a ventriloquist and magician who takes his show on the road and slowly goes insane as his dummy becomes a representation of his id uh it's like a murderous fantasy yes you're raising your finger amanda i was raising my hand but i guess there's this finger so is now the time just to ask what's up with you and just watching like creepy as fuck movies during tense times? Like what is that about? What's up with me is I just have a lot of problems.

I just have a lot of unresolved anger, guilt, and fury. And I'm just trying to work through it by emptying it, evacuating it into these very strange movies. I think that like it's an iron sharpens iron sort of a situation. If you watch a movie, I watched Fail Safe on Saturday, which is perhaps the most intense movie ever made. It is like a stone cold masterpiece, very strange. It's got more closeups than any movie I've ever seen. Every shot, the camera is under some man's nose inside of a war room.

It's so brutal, but it actually weirdly made me feel better. And in magic, watching Anthony Hopkins slowly lose his mind with this dummy, which is, it's absurd. Obviously it's like almost a joke. It's almost a satire of a movie like this, but it's also played so straight that it kind of takes you away. It took, it takes me away from COVID-19. It takes me away from watching our president on television on Friday afternoon. That was a terrible experience that I had. I needed to get far away from that. And so I turned to these very cracked movies. If I went to something soft, it would be easy for my mind to drift back into the pain. I need a wall. I need a large wall that is full of, I don't know, I don't know, horror, violence, cynicism,

decrepitude. What else? I don't know. I just feel like I have enough of that in my head. So then I just want to watch a Nancy Meyers movie and make focaccia. I don't know. I'm sure that if there is a licensed therapist listening who wants to diagnose these two forms of avoidance, please let us know.

Yeah, these are literally the walls that divide us. What are we going to do in the future? What do you want to do on these next couple episodes? I feel like we need to give people things to prepare for because there's only so long that we're going to be able to say, I don't know what's going to happen to the movie business. Right. Though, just full fair warning to everyone listening. We're going to be saying, I don't know what's going to happen to the movie business, like a lot in the next weeks and probably months and years it is a tumultuous time in a lot of ways and we talk about movies here on the big picture um i think we should make hats but that doesn't really solve what to do on the podcast

that's good for our first vlog you know like like we needle stitch some big pick energy into a hat. That sounds like a good episode. I would do a mailbag. I would do a top five episode. I think, you know, I asked people on Friday what they wanted to hear and got a lot of response. But I don't know if anything truly struck as what we should do. I was thinking about mailbag and whether there's even like you know specific mailbag recommendations like if someone sent I a lot of people have been doing this I'm not you know inventing the the wheel here or something but you know you write in like you like these types

of movies or you're looking for some sort of specific type of thing. And we could try to answer some of those open to a more general mailbag. I do think some version of like movie club instead of book club would be good though. We would have to figure out how to pick those without descending into like anxiety and madness because Sean picked some scary movie. I won't do that. I won't do that. I'll pick something.

We, we should, we'll that i'll pick something we we should we'll we'll find something middle of the road something that that splits the difference for for a movie club i think that's a good idea and people maybe we demarcate a very specific time when everybody watches it yeah and you know i think we will talk about the hunt and apparently we'll talk about trolls and i think we'll'll see if more movies are starting to be released in different ways. We'll cover that both in terms of industry ramifications and also what's in the movies. Okay. So we have half of a plan.

We'll talk more about what that plan is going to be in the near future. In the meantime, I hope everybody stays safe. Thank you for continuing to listen to The Big Picture despite not leaving your home. If you do have to leave your home, please use caution and be thoughtful. And thank you again for listening to the show. And thanks again, Amanda. Thank you.