While promoting his 2021 drama Stillwater on the popular internet interview show Hot Ones, Oscar winner Matt Damon discussed with poignancy how the “decline of the DVD” has impacted how certain films are made in Hollywood.
While you won’t have much trouble getting a Marvel or Star Wars film off the ground these days, certain types of higher-budget films geared for adults have struggled to find their permanent place in the ever-changing cinematic landscape.
Audiences aren’t packing theaters on weekends for star-driven courtroom thrillers, buddy comedies or crime dramas with consistency like they used to in the 1990s, a time when Damon built his star power (like Good Will Hunting, The Rainmaker and Rounders) and leveraged it to make the kinds of adult-focused movies that reached beyond the visual effects and intellectual properties of Hollywood blockbusters.
As Damon told Hot Ones‘ Sean Evans in that interview, the decline of home video sales has put more pressure on immediate box office totals to make the difference for films, whereas home video revenue used to provide a buffer for certain films that didn’t immediately find their audiences in theaters.
At its peak, physical media sales indeed gave those films a second chance to break even financially and get more of a chance to get greenlit in the first place. The rise of streaming and digital film releases put a major dent into the home video market that it has never fully recovered from.
“The DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream,” Damon said in the interview. “Technology has just made that obsolete. And so the movies that we used to make, you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theater because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release, and six months later, you’d get a whole [other] chunk. It would be like reopening the movie, almost.
“And when that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make.”
Well, Damon and his longtime collaborator Ben Affleck seem to be trying to build an exit ramp away from the hubbub of tentpole filmmaking with their new production studio, Artists Equity, with their 2023 Amazon/MGM sports drama Air, starring them both and directed by Affleck, making more than $90 million at the box office before its Amazon Prime Video streaming debut.
The production company’s latest venture, the Apple TV+ heist comedy The Instigators, puts Damon and fellow Oscar winner Casey Affleck (Ben’s brother) in the exact type of movie that used to staff fall Fridays at the multiplex in the 1990s. That film kicked off a brief run in theaters on Aug. 2 before hitting the Apple TV+ streaming service on Aug. 9.
After Apple saw it and Sony’s July space race romantic comedy Fly Me to the Moon struggle at the box office and rerouted it and Sony’s September crime comedy Wolfs with George Clooney and Brad Pitt to the same, quick theater-to-streaming window of The Instigators, it begs the question of this is the new path for Apple TV+ in how they release certain adult-oriented projects with recognizable talent that may not be guarantees at the box office. Apple plans to reportedly rein in its Hollywood spending in general, which could impact the funds put into press and advertisement needed for theatrical release.
Indeed, as opposed to typical theatrical runs, starry projects like The Instigators and Wolfs may well go to streaming quickly after theaters, if they reach theaters at all. Even the films that do make it to wide release can have their theatrical windows shortened substantially so they’re available at home for digital purchase with the premium video on demand offering.
The PVOD boom heightened out of necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic and now provides a particularly fascinating wrinkle to the financial equation for individual films. The 2022 Viking epic The Northman didn’t perform well at the box office, for example, but it reportedly was a financial win for Focus Features in part because of PVOD sales. Typically going for roughly the same amount of money ($19.99) as a single DVD purchase would have in the 2000s, will this newer stream of revenue buffet a bit of where home video sales have fallen off?
To Damon, there isn’t enough data just yet on PVOD sales to see if they’re a real boost to making more adult-driven projects.
“I don’t think, right now, it’s enough to kind of move the needle in the sense that it’s changing the movies that people are making,” Damon told For the Win about PVOD while promoting The Instigators. “Everyone’s still trying to figure it out. There’s all these downstream revenues… It does still feel like, as you can kind of see for all the different strategies of the streamers, and some give releases to theatrical releases.
“It just feels still like things are still shaking out. We’re in this big period of disruption, so I kind of feel like there’s not enough data yet… I think there are really creative ways, and we’re trying to do some of that with Artists Equity.”
Damon added that a new Artists Equity deal he and Affleck reached with Netflix on the Joe Carnahan film RIP reflects how things are adapting in the marketplace. Damon said that project will bonus out financially based on the performance on the streaming platform.
“Everyone’s paying attention to all of it, but it feels like it’s all in this state of disruption right now,” Damon said.
To Casey Affleck, the fact that a film like The Instigators is so readily available on streaming for a global audience is in and of itself a victory.
“That’s great,” he said of the film’s wide net of an audience. “I mean, I love going to the movies. I love going and seeing a movie with other people. It’s really fun. … But I also really love that people around the world are going to get access to movies that they just [wouldn’t have had originally]. That never would’ve happened. You couldn’t be in movie theaters all around the world like that. You just couldn’t reach them. There are a lot of people that can’t even get to a movie theater.
“So I’m not going to bemoan the state of things too much. I’m sorry that some of the movie theaters, chains have closed and are struggling. That’s terrible. I’m really glad that there are places like Apple… that don’t have to be making movies, that are. They’re making movies; they’re making them available in a way that also works for them. And that keeps everybody working.”
The Instigators is streaming on Apple TV+ now.
Since hearing Matt Damon talk about how the "death of the DVD" has impacted making certain types of films in Hollywood on Hot Ones, I've wondered if the rise of premium video on demand has countered some of that lost revenue.
Well, I got to ask him (and Casey Affleck!) about it… pic.twitter.com/CGLBH0jL53
— Cory Woodroof (@CoryWoodroof47) July 28, 2024
