Sony Pictures Chairman and CEO Tom Rothman delivered a fiery declaration to movie exhibitors at their big annual Las Vegas trade show, CinemaCon, suggesting the theatrical business has stared down the threat posed by video streaming and has successfully emerged safe on the other side.
“For the past three years, as the punditocracy pissed on your business, we at Sony held fast. We were the only major studio devoted entirely to theatrical,” Rothman said to applause during his Monday evening keynote. (The Penske showbiz trades were among those covering the event.) “We were sure in the conviction that movies in movie theaters couldn’t just survive, but triumph.
“The other thing pundits say is movie stars don’t matter anymore. I really hope all my competitors believe that shit. True movie stars matter more than ever, they are just more rare than ever. Streamers don’t create movie stars, only global hit movies do.”
Sure, the domestic box office is back from COVID oblivion that was 2020, when it only generated a combined $2.1 billion.
But despite a resent resurgence of the theatrical box office revenue, there's still plenty of strong evidence to suggest that theatrical exhibition remains in secular decline. First quarter domestic box office revenue totaled $1.722 billion, according to Box Office Mojo, down over 28% from Q1 2019, the last comparable non-COVID first quarter.
And certainly, it's become an increasingly popular retrograde position to, er, douse the video streaming fire, too, with media conglomerates, led by Warner Bros. Discovery, renewing their vows to theatrical distribution and pulling back on loss-leader strategies that once emphasized expansion of subscription streaming scale.
No, we're not trying to rain on CinemaCon's long-awaited feel-good parade -- it's good to know that theatrical distribution will be around for the foreseeable future. But we could do without movie execs turning this into a zero-sum contest between theatrical and streaming.
Perhaps Rothman forgot for a moment that it was Sony Pictures itself (at least the TV side of the operation) that recently launched a hit, HBO's The Last of Us, that turned Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey into, well, streaming stars.
Also, it was pure-play streaming company Netflix that just generated $2.117 billion in free cash flow in a single quarter, as well as $1.305 billion in net income. Show us a traditional film or TV unit that's done that recently.
