[COLUMN] Event Cinema Sees a Renaissance | by Darren Mooney

This weekend sees the release of Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, a concert film chronicling the artist’s Renaissance World Tour. The film is tracking for a global opening weekend of between $30m and $40m. This is an impressive figure for a concert film under any circumstances, but it is particularly notable Renaissance is the second major concert film of the season. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is arriving on streaming the week after next, having grossed $249m worldwide in theatres.

That haul would be impressive on its own terms, but The Eras Tour has outperformed several of the season’s major would-be blockbusters, pulling ahead of The Marvels ($187m and counting), The Creator ($104m) and The Exorcist: Believer ($135m). At the moment, The Eras Tour sits just inside the domestic box office top ten for the year. One of the upcoming potential blockbusters like Wonka or Aquaman 2 could displace it, but that is still a tremendous accomplishment.

The Eras Tour swept into cinemas, bringing an enthusiastic audience with it. Fans attending screenings were encouraged to engage with the concert film on a much more active level than with most releases, exchanging friendship bracelets or dancing in the aisles. Theatre chain AMC encouraged this behavior. Given the enthusiasm of the “BeyHive”, it seems safe to assume that the Renaissance screenings will be similarly energetic.

The reflexive response here might be to condemn such behavior in the sanctity of the movie theatre, as audiences should be respectful of the experience. However, there have always been films where – through mutual consent – those norms can be violated. It’s accepted practice for the audience to get up and dance to Stop Making Sense, Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings have their own rules, and the “rowdy” screenings for Cats suggest another tradition in the making.

What is particularly interesting about both The Eras Tour and Renaissance is that they are not being released by a major studio. Swift reportedly shopped The Eras Tour around the major studios, but eventually settled on a distribution deal with AMC theatres. Beyoncé and her team apparently initially negotiated with studios and streamers, before also opting to make a deal directly with AMC. In doing so, these artists bypassed the middlemen.

They also made an argument for the value of the theatrical experience and communal moviegoing, which has been a challenge for the major studios. In hindsight, it feels perfect that Swift and Beyoncé dealt directly with theatres. For fans of these artists, The Eras Tour and Renaissance are films that demand to be experienced on the big screen in the presence of other fans. It is not an experience that can be replicated on even the most high-end home media system.

This has been a rough year for most of the major studios. Allowing for the pandemic, this year will be the first year since 2014 that Disney has not had a billion-dollar release. The superhero genre, which has been the industry’s bread-and-butter for over a decade now, is in clear and demonstrable decline. Even seemingly surefire hits like Fast X and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part I have struggled to break even. Nostalgia is no longer cutting it.

There is a sense in which studios can no longer rely on the model that has sustained for the better part of a decade. The big push into the modern era of sprawling franchises and shared universes was built on a simple business assumption: if audiences buy into the larger franchise, they'll turn up to any release associated with the brand. This may explain the unlikely success of movies like Ant-Man and the Wasp or Captain Marvel, movies buoyed by the popularity of the larger Marvel brand.

There is an argument that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was best understood as a television show that happened to release blockbuster episodes. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but it does capture some of the sense of its popularity. Some audience members did go to films they would not otherwise care about because they were invested in the larger story. This made moviegoing something of a routine or a commitment. It was a force of habit.

In some ways, this was a progression of how movie-going used to work. People used to go “to the movies” and would see whatever happened to be on regardless of genre. As theatre manager Cara Ogburn recalls, “A lot of people used to go to a movie a week or multiple movies a week, and they’d be like, ‘Hey, I’m just going to stop by.’” At some point, that stopped being the case, with blockbusters being the exception. These days, it seems like those exceptions no longer apply.

It's easy to understand why this happened. While ticket prices have increased in line with inflation, incomes have not. This creates an impression that going to the cinema is more expensive than it used to be and a real challenge for those who want to attend. Many theatre chains are facing bankruptcy, leading them to fire projectionists and ushers, which degrades the experience itself. Plus, narrowing release windows mean most movies end up on streaming quite quickly, so why not wait?

However, while things are undoubtedly grim, the past year has demonstrated that audiences will turn out for specific releases. Avatar: The Way of Water grossed over $2.3bn upon its release last December, not bad for a sequel to a movie that many claim has no cultural footprint, with over $1bn of those being 3D tickets. This year, audiences flocked to see the twinned releases of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, under the catchy portmanteau “Barbenheimer.”

These screenings were events. Attendees wore costumes. Many audiences saw both films over the same weekend, with some even seeing them on the same day. These twinned releases generated enthusiasm and excitement for cinema, turning moviegoing into an experience. The joy was palpable, to the extent that studios inevitably tried to find ways to inorganically cash in on that success by proposing successor events like “Saw Patrol.”

There were reports of a similar reaction to another of the year’s surprise breakout hits, Five Nights at Freddy’s. There were reports of fans attending the screening in cosplay and of audience behavior comparable to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. For fans of the property, this wasn’t just a movie; it was an event. Appropriately enough, given the success of The Eras Tour and the looming release of Renaissance, comparable to attending a concert.

The key seems to be that audiences don’t want the same thing that studios have been providing for the past decade. Audiences seem to respond to events, to movies that stand out from the crowd and offer a singular viewing experience. In this context, it is perhaps worth acknowledging the recent releases of both Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. These are movies that stand quite apart from the popular blockbusters of the past few years.

Although both were expensive movies, they were both made by the streaming giant Apple TV+. The theatrical release of Killers of the Flower Moon was not originally intended to be as significant as it eventually became. Apple avoided a festival launch for Napoleon, raising questions about their long-term distribution plans. It seems safe to concede that any money that these movies earn in their limited theatrical release is “found.”

To date, Killers of the Flower Moon has earned $152m at the global box office, placing it ahead of more conventional blockbuster fare like Blue Beetle ($129m) and outperforming comparable recent prestige plays like West Side Story ($46m) or The Fabelmans ($76m) by several orders of magnitude. Napoleon grossed $79m on its opening weekend alone. These are impressive numbers for movies that were produced primarily for streaming. They also suggest an enthusiastic audience.

The common thread here seems to be that these movies are events. Killers of the Flower Moon is a sprawling epic that runs well over three hours. It’s a major work from a major filmmaker. Napoleon is a period war epic, offering battle scenes that justify the big screen. These are movies that stand apart from so much of the season’s offerings. For many movie-goers, particularly those who came of age during the pandemic, this was their first chance to see movies like this in a theatre.

Apparently, younger audiences are turning out to these films. 44% of the opening weekend audience for Killers of the Flower Moon was under 30. Even a more modest success, like Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, attracted an opening weekend audience where 65% of attendees were 35 or younger. There is, perhaps, something hopeful in this. It suggests an appetite for movies that exist outside the narrow framework of contemporary franchise filmmaking.

There are a few caveats to note here. The most obvious is that it seems like streaming is a factor. Five Nights at Freddy performed well considering it was released simultaneously on Peacock, but experienced a massive drop in its second weekend. In contrast, delaying the home media release of Oppenheimer and The Eras Tour seems to have built up demand. Oppenheimer proved to have tremendous legs, grossing $950m worldwide and completely sold out on 4K just days after its release.

While Netflix tends to announce streaming dates for movies like The Killer or Rebel Moon before releasing them in theatres, Apple has yet to set a streaming date for Killers of the Flower Moon or Napoleon. As such, for moviegoers with any serious interest in watching those films, there is no incentive to wait for the inevitable streaming release. This would seem to be self-evident, but it is good to see it borne out in the data. Part of making a movie an event means making it exclusive.

The second thing to note is that theatres seem to be leaning into this trend. Not only are they actively encouraging audiences to embrace the experiential nature of such screenings, they have begun embracing methods more familiar to concert promoters, such as variable pricing depending on a seat’s location. It is entirely possible that this movement might accelerate the trend that is already pushing theatres towards a more luxury-based model. Cinema may get more expensive.

Finally, this poses an obvious challenge to studios. It is very hard to manufacture an event. There is no formula for it that can be easily replicated. It has to develop organically and spontaneously. However, studios can encourage these possibilities by increasing the variety among their major releases so audiences can try something new, embracing filmmakers who offer something singular or distinctive, and by widening the exclusive theatrical window.

Of course, even these decisions won’t guarantee a potential event movie, but they will create an environment where such an organic success is more likely. These are challenging times for studios and for theatres. It feels like a profound change is taking place, like the ground is shifting underfoot. There’s no telling how things will end up, but there remains potential for a true renaissance.