Drew Turney
The big names heading straight to VOD platforms continues to grow. From Pee-Wee Herman and Guillermo Del Toro to Adam Sandler and Woody Allen, stars both fictional and real are signing up for straight-to-consumer platforms, and some of the above examples seem tailor made for it.
Most Sandler movies in particular are beer-and-pizza-video-night movies more than they were ever designed to be appreciated in a cinema.
And it’s not just personalities or properties getting in on the action. The number of production companies and studios signing deals to bring content straight to your device or TV is mounting up so fast there won’t be many left not doing it.
Lionsgate and Tribeca are teaming up for a subscription service and the CBS network is launching a digital-only channel about pop culture and history.
Even the big studios ostensibly competing for eyeballs love VOD, because as Variety recently reported, they’re going to make nine hundred and eleventy squillion dollars from channeling their movies to digital platforms this year.
One big milestone came up last year as digital downloads reached $1.5bn in revenue for the first time.
Even though the movie industry dithered over digital for a long time, their economic base still hasn’t collapsed like the music industry did, and the studios are now lining up for when digital becomes a thing.
Not just a thing, a thing. The big studios took $10.3bn at the US box office in 2014. It’s likely to be quite a lot higher globally and the $1.5bn mentioned above could be deceptively low, since revenue reporting around VOD is still pretty opaque.
But even taken at face value we’re talking about VOD representing more than 10 percent of the revenue of even the major studios. Doesn’t sound like much, except that the VOD total in 2013 was much lower, and will likely be much higher this year.
So the real question might not be about when digital becomes a serious contender anymore, it might be around when it will eclipse cinema altogether.
We asked producer Adi Shankar, the wunderkind behind Adi Shankar Films (formerly 1984 Private Defense Contractors), one of the names behind Liam Neeson’s ”A Walk Among the Tombstones” and 2013’s ”Dredd 3D”. Also a pioneer of short form content on digital channels, Shankar says theatres are already an endangered species.
“Within four years theatres will become niche,” he says. “To survive in the niche climate theaters will have to become specific – theatre that caters to horror fans or theaters exclusively for family entertainment, etc.”
New on digital now and recently, Amira and Sam, the cute, funny, warm and kind-of-heart-wrenching story of an Iraq war veteran and the feisty Iraqi girl woman he finds himself taking care of.
You can also finally see Ouija, the horror movie finished a couple of years back that took forever to hit screens.
”Downton Abbey” fans can see Golden Globe award winning star Joanna Froggat in Still Life, playing a woman who connects with a London council worker (Eddie Marsan) as he tracks down the next of kin of those who’ve died alone.
You can also see a very different Elizabeth Banks from the perky Effie Trinkett (”The Hunger Games”) in ”Little Accidents” , a drama about the secrets, lies and grief of a small mining community.
