After months of assurances that it would debut in theaters, Disney has decided to hedge its bets and release its upcoming film Black Widow to both theaters and Disney+, along with a handful of other upcoming films.
The studio is also bumping back the date that the film will premiere from May to July, a recognition that while we have several vaccines to combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the virus remains a problem for the theatrical industry.
According to Variety, Disney will release Black Widow and Cruella to theaters and streaming simultaneously, for a premium, $30 fee. Black Widow will now debut on July 7th, but Cruella will keep its May 28th date.
With the shift, Disney is bumping several of its other films: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was due out on July 9th, but it’s now headed to theaters on September 3rd. (It’s not expected at this point to be released to Disney+ on that date.) Pixar’s upcoming film Luca will keep its release date of June 18th, but it’ll debut skip theaters and debut on Disney+ (This one won’t have a fee attached to it.)
Several other films are getting switched around as well: Ryan Reynolds’ action film Free Guy is moving to August 13th, The King’s Men is moving to December 22nd, Deep Water is moving to January 14th 2022, and Death on the Nile will debut on February 11th, 2022.
The move to simultaneous releases follows the lead of other studios: Warner Bros. announced last year that all of its 2021 releases (Dune, Matrix 4, etc) will head to theaters and its streaming service, HBO Max on the same day, and Disney has released a handful of its films to Disney+ already, like Soul back in December, and more recently, Raya and the Last Dragon earlier this month. Unlike its rival — which isn’t charging for any of its movies — Disney doesn’t really need the incentive to build up its subscriber base, and has been selectively charging for some of its more anticipated films, using the revenue to offset what it might otherwise get from traditional box offices.
The move also means that it’ll be the first Marvel film to debut on the platform, something Disney has resisted doing, with Marvel studio chief Kevin Feige saying back in December that “fans have been patient,” and with other Disney officials holding a steadfast line in the sand that the film will debut in May in theaters after several shifts in its release date. That began to change last week as Disney CEO Bob Chapek said that the decision for an exclusive theatrical window would be a “last-minute” call, the first real concession that the public might not be ready to return to theaters, despite positive signs that the pandemic might soon be coming to a close.
I’m not surprised.
Like Thnaos, heh, this was becoming inevitable.
I’m really looking forward to seeing this, but I’m not spending $30 for an ephemeral Disney+ “purchase”. I’ll save that money for the 4K blu-ray release.
@2,
Same. While I’m as frustrated by the delays as anyone, I’m fine being patient on this one.
Fee on top of a subscription. Nope. That’s double dipping.
I went to see Monster Hunter in the local theater about a month or so ago. (Don’t judge me.) There was a total of six people in the theater, including myself. I doubt I’ll have much problem social distancing in the theater when I see Black Widow.
On one hand, I get having the fee since the subscription was never intended to give you first run access. I suppose it also depends on family size – 30.00 is about what we’d spend anyway.
That said, there’s also something about the movie experience itselff that you are paying for, so 30 might be pushing it. I might pay 20 or so for early access but we’ll probably wait for rental.
@@.-@ – It’s a blockbuster Marvel movie. It wasn’t a tightly budgeted film made for the streaming service. Actually, it touches on one of my fears about the death of the movie theater, as we won’t get the $200-$300M blockbusters any more. Disney needs to make up money for these big blockbusters they have coming up. HBO Max, as I understand it, is taking massive losses to subsidize the streaming service.
@austin: I would mourn the death of the movie theater if it remained an ideal experience. Often, it is not. From sticky floors, to people pulling out their phones, to people behind you sneezing and coughing, to the massively gouging snack prices.
What’s left? The size of the screen? Even there the resolution is often poorly projected and grainy. Add in often improper sound (maybe uneven: too loud, too booming, too much bass) and I’m Ok with watching a movie at home on relatively large screen in a controlled environment.
The studio theater release model will have to change. They just don’t see it yet. Surcharges on streaming to offset accounting losses because theaters are dying… no, not sympathetic to that.
The first episode of Falcon and Winter Soldier showed an action scene possibly bigger than anything we saw Falcon do in the movies. Film technology is at a point where we can get quality stuff, or at least spectacle that we used to expect from movies, on a streaming service. The pivot is happening. It’ll just be painful for some.
The decline of theatres is yet another pre-Covid trend that’s being accelerated by it. I’m ambivalent about this one. I do miss the theatre experience. But I missed it long before the pandemic. The obscene cost of tickets kept me away for the most part in recent years–that and the fact that Hollywood has put out very few movies in recent decades that I even care to see. On the other hand, a good theatre creates an experience that I’ve yet to see replicated on even the most sophisticated home viewing system, and perhaps never can be.
Pierce Brosnan as Dr. Fate:
black-adam-adds-pierce-brosnans-dr-fate
Add Aldis Hodge as Hawkman and this is shaping up to be interesting.
I don’t have a problem in principle with an access charge for “first-run” content – that precedent was set long ago, when it was the norm at video retail stores to rent new releases for higher fees and shorter periods. But as some folks have noted above, I think Disney+’s $30 flat fee fails to account for all the variables in the streaming equation. It’s a much better deal for larger families and/or those with top-of-the-line home media setups than it is for a one-person household with average tech (that being my demographic), especially when set against the eventual price of a disc release.
On my own behalf, I won’t pay that $30 fee – but if Disney+ offered me a one-time streaming “ticket” for $5-$10, I’d be considerably more tempted…and I think that in the longer term, we’re likely to see some significant evolution in the pricing levels for “rental” of streaming content (which has been around for quite awhile now), vs. the archive/library model offered by Disney+, Netflix, Amazon, Paramount+ and so on. Nor would it surprise me to see some content providers, particularly on the independent side, adopt a per-episode subscription model for episodes of a series – essentially, a video version of Patreon.
This is all definitely part of a rapidly evolving visual-media marketplace. I’ve observed before that technology changes have made it immensely easier for independent creators to make and distribute quality video content – especially if it’s not SFX-intensive, as is the case with the MCU. What we’re seeing with the major “library/archive” providers, I think, is an effort to remain relevant in the evolving landscape by acquiring and curating quality content – because if they don’t, indie-producers of video content will start to grow and prosper really dramatically, in much the same way that authors in the last decade or so have drastically reshaped the self-publishing landscape in ways that have made it a significantly larger and more professional market segment than it once was.
Which is likely very much on Disney/Marvel’s mind as they launch the streaming side of the MCU, because I think they already realize that at some point, the market balance will shift to the extent that the streaming series will make more money more steadily than the movies will, and that will cause a corresponding shift in the kinds of storytelling we see in the series vs. the movies.
Yeah, we haven’t really invested in a lot of AV tech in our house. We have a smallish flat screen SmartTV and a few laptops and that’s it. We do have a decent sound system/projector (not phenomenal, but okay) in our basement that the previous owners installed but it’s hooked to a DVD player. This is fine for us, honestly (and still better than what I grew up with, that’s for sure), but for movies that I’m really looking forward to (which is usually only a few a year) I do find that the movie theater experience is something special (nor have I really had much of a problem with unruly patrons or messy theaters). It’s not just the equipment, but in some ways the energy of being with the crowd, the atmosphere.
So I don’t want to see movie theaters go away entirely but I wonder if more of the ‘fancy’ type theaters will crop up; we have a few that offer larger/fancier seats, better food options, drinks, etc. and the average movie experience will be in a person’s home especially as the tech becomes more accessible.