Growth may yet be returning to the box office after a challenging recovery period following the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent prioritisation by studios on their own services. Despite fostering an expectation in audiences for titles to appear on streaming in no time, the box office for this summer’s blockbusters in the US has already surpassed Summer 2023 and with two weekends to go, may yet be inches away from reaching the huge success of 2023, itself boosted by Barbenheimer.
The US Pay-One destinations of summer’s big winners have become all the more predictable in recent years thanks to vertical integration. Where once in 2018 ‘Incredibles 2’, Disney’s biggest blockbuster, was sold to Netflix in the US, now this year’s Disney winner ‘Inside Out 2’ will inevitably come to Disney+ in Pay-One. Before this however the title was released this week on transactional services, mirroring the timelines of some of Disney’s movies from the summer of 2023.
Disney’s release strategy has become one of the most consistent among studios both in the US and abroad, with titles typically coming to transactional two months after a theatrical release, with a Disney+ premiere a little over a month after this. Exceptions of course do occur, 2022’s ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ took six months to come to Disney+. Its extraordinary success at the box office most likely helped justify both a longer theatrical run and transactional exclusivity ahead of its eventual Pay-One release on both Disney+ and Max at the same time. With similar hopes for mainstream success for ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’, the studio deployed a similar release strategy in timing but, having freed itself from previous obligations to Warner, was able to ensure the title was exclusive to Disney+ when it eventually came to Pay-One.
Only two of the 2023 summer blockbusters saw a PVOD release in the US despite the market’s higher engagement in premium transactional windows. ‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ from Paramount was one, arriving at a PVOD price for two weeks ahead of a simultaneous release on Paramount+ and regular transactional pricing.
Meanwhile for its smash hit ‘Barbie’, Warner chose to release the title at its premium price past the typical 45 day window, almost two months after its world premiere, before eventually bringing the title to Max a full five months after theatrical release. Barbie’s same-day counterpart ‘Oppenheimer’ from Universal however had no PVOD release, instead taking the longest of all the summer blockbusters to reach its Pay-One home. Seven months after its theatrical release, and after four months of exclusivity on transactional, ‘Oppenheimer’ came to Peacock.
The Pay-One window presents its own balancing act. ‘Oppenheimer’ for instance spent the first few months of 2024 on Peacock, only to go to Amazon Prime, before it coming back to Peacock once more later this year. In international markets the Pay-One services for summer blockbusters can vary even further.
Disney is the most consistent of the studios, prioritising vertical integration of their titles on Disney+ (or Disney+ Hotstar in India) across all markets with the exception of France. Regulations in France currently restrict theatrical releases from appearing on streaming services for 18 months after their debut in theatres, meaning that Pay TV operator Canal+ is the most active buyer of titles from all types of studios. Paramount adopts a similar approach with its titles and Paramount+, but are more open to co-exclusivity. In Australia the studio makes its titles available on both Paramount+ and Foxtel’s BINGE service, while in the UK it frequently premieres its movies across both Paramount+ and Sky Cinema within as little time as two months.
Foxtel engages in co-exclusivity deals with many studios including Universal and Warner, with both studios licensing their titles to Netflix as well as BINGE. Meanwhile in India, Amazon Prime is one of the most active buyers in the region, but it is Viacom18’s JioCinema that managed to acquire the full Barbenheimer experience. The SVOD has long been a reliable home for Paramount content, given the studio’s stake it held in Viacom18 until April 2024, but it has also become an aggressive buyer of major scripted series and movies from third-parties.
Despite the challenges that streaming can put on the box office, the industry has shown great resilience, even if its post-COVID recovery has been gradual. While studios are able to inject their SVOD services with more value by vertically integrating their biggest blockbusters, the opportunity is clearly there to monetise at both the box office and in multiple transactional windows. Abroad there remain many high-profile, hungry buyers of Pay-One titles like Netflix and Amazon Prime, and studios are finding ways to licence content to third-parties while also supporting their own services. Releasing strategies may be starting to stabilise a little more but experimentation is still key, so the industry is far from reaching a new post-COVID, post-steaming status-quo in movie windowing.
.svg)
