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Amazon Plans To Release 12 Movies a Year In Theaters and On Prime
An anonymous reader writes "Amazon has announced that it will begin to produce and acquire original movies for theatrical release and early window distribution on Amazon Prime Instant Video. From the article: "This is a big move from Amazon, as it seeks to narrow the theatrical release window to between four and eight weeks. It can often take up to a year for films to land on subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video, however they do typically land on DVD/Blu-ray within around four months. Production for the aptly titled 'Amazon Original Movies' program will kick off in 2015, and plans are afoot to create around a dozen original titles for release in cinemas each year."
Thanks for the Amazon ad!
You're getting paid? I hope.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Blah blah blah on the internet!
Our grandchildren will envy us for the heady times we live in.
They have run out of ideas and have officially gone insane. The best way to lose tons of money is to get into the entertainment industry. Remember how it worked out for the WB and UPN, and they were already experienced players in the industry.
for "buy to own" download and if it sells for $2 a year later just in case I delete it or lose a hd. at $2-5 "to own" I'd probably buy 100's of movies per year, yah eventually I'd have them all but if they're so cheap I wouldn't care if I lost them.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
...considering the kind of crap they sell on Amazon, it's more like they will release 12 flops a year.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
I think Amazon's doing this to blunt attempts by content providers, whether HBO, ESPN, etc. (or even the production companies themselves) to bypass middlemen like cable companies, Netflix, Amazon, etc. by bringing their own paid streaming content to market.
As an Amazon Prime member, I have this to say: COOL!!
and Netflix sucks. The stores had literally thousands of movies to choose from, but Netflix? A few dozen mediocre titles... I want my DVD backlog opportunity back, not more productions, from yet another source!!!
Theater owners want exclusivity in releases. They don't want to show a movie that can be seen elsewhere in the same local market.
Well, good for them! I'm glad they want to hold on to a dying archaic model of overpriced sodas and popcorn in a big room.
This is how the businesses work.
Ah, no. This is how failed businesses work. By not adopting to the times.
In case the incumbants haven't noticed by now, the millenial generation of moviegoers is perfectly willing to watch a new-release movie on a damn 3" cell phone screen with earbuds. And content providers don't need a theater to make revenue. Sony likely paved the way with the rather forced online release of The Interview.
And as anti-social as "social" media has made humans in general, I don't see this trend changing. At all
Bottom line is incumbents better wake the hell up and smell what the single-serve k-cup generation is serving themselves.
Oh come on, Netflix has several hundred mediocre titles available for streaming, give some credit :)
Also just FYI, Netflix does have a service where they mail you DVDs with a much larger library than streaming, you might not have heard of it it's only been around since 1997
Transparent won a couple of Golden Globes, but "Bosch" hasn't started streaming yet and Chris Carter's "The After" mysteriously got cancelled almost a year after it was a winner in the same pilot voting "election" as Bosch.
I think someone trying to reinvent the "system" of creating filmed content is laudable and worthwhile, I'm just curious if Amazon really has put more thought into this than "vertical integration" and assuming that whatever insight they have into package delivery logistics and cloud computing is somehow universally applicable to something like film/tv production. They wouldn't be the first "geniuses" to take hubris to a new level only to discover that doing A well means nothing when it comes to doing B well. We see plenty of that when A and B aren't all that different.
I think faster (and more complete) turnaround of announced content would definitely help, I also wonder if it would make sense to rethink some of the streaming assumptions -- like, why straightjacket yourself into the one hour episode format? Why not two hour episodes, but fewer of them? Does the entire series have to available all at once, or could faster release cycles from pilots to episodes be accomplished by releasing a group of episodes every 60-90 days to allow for simultaneous shooting and releases?
Should they dilute their resources producing a bunch of one-hour pilots, or should they be a little more discriminating and look at a pilot instead as a more complete story arc and make 3 episodes? That way even failures that didn't become series could at least be watchable, self-contained miniseries adding value to the catalog instead of just becoming trivial ephemera? Maybe the desire to make more typical "movies" is part of this.
Movie financing is a weird game. It is easy to get hosed for a lot of money if you don't hedge your bets. Also you are dealing with a lot of different unions. I know it seems easy, find a good project, fund it. But tripleAAA titles are hard to come by, then you have to secure a director that is free, sign actors with a free schedule. That's the easy parts. Plus the exhibitors have close relations with the distributors who might not want AMC releasing other products. They can and will hold back the number of screens you can show say X-men on if you don't play ball. Costing the exhibitors a lot of their profits. Everyone worth getting has part of the profits in their contracts. Don't forget cost overruns, city funds, agent lawyers. And that is still the easy parts. The movie has to be advertised, and compete with over movies in theaters. Also see Hollywood Accounting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... https://www.techdirt.com/artic... http://www.theatlantic.com/bus... I predict this will end very badly
This sounds like market failure to me, particularly when the price differential between buying a new release on your phone and watching it in a theater is only a few bucks, as it is now. Like why would you want to pay $13 for a movie on your cellphone when going to the Arclight matinee is $16?
I guess it's more convenient but it's a little tragic when people don't have enough free time to leave the house to go to a movie theater, which is just about the lowest-impact social activity the western world has yet devised.
I've been working in the movie business for 15 years or so, I'm in my thirties so I'm not a millennial but I get the arguments you're laying out. But we still live in a world where if your film can only find Internet distribution, it's a horrible failure that'll never make its budget back. I've worked on films with $300k budgets that were really good, and the on demand/Netflix/iTunes money just comes nowhere close to paying the budget. The promise of Internet distribution as a supplementary good to theatrical distribution is, at present, a fraud. People just aren't willing to pay the same amount for movies in their home as they are at a theater, expensive soda and all.
The only way it could work is by either crushing the budgets of all films down to a few hundred thousand dollars, or loading the movies with basically wall-to-wall advertising. (But let's not beat around the bush, the breaking of American film industry, and putting it under vassalage to Internet Venture Capitalists is a feature, not a bug, to some people.)
Streaming can't make a $200 million international opening, particularly on platforms like Prime and Netflix because...
If people were actually buying movies single-serve this wouldn't be half as bad a problem as it is. Right now most of the consumer money spent on streaming is spent at all-you-can-eat business models, like Netflix, where nothing is done to price-differentiate actual movies from the shittiest Asylum crap. Or to even price differentiate the act of watching a movie from not.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
"The After" was absolutely terrible. I am pretty sure it was a ballot box stuffing / fake user rating bonanza. IT had 15,000 reviews which is 5-10x as many as most classic shows (like X-files, Firefly, Star Trek), and as much as Transparent which won 2 major awards (not my cup of tea but clearly more popular than The After).
It had 2x the reviews as many popular movies such a Hunger Games 2, World War Z, the new Star Treks, etc etc. The whole thing was like the start of a bad joke. "A clown, lawyer, hooker, cop, escaped con, etc etc walk into a garage and the world ends. What do?"
Amazon was right to can it. I hop they toss it off the site entirely. /my 2c
meep
Try your local library. Obviously, local selection will vary, but my library has a decent selection of movie titles and gets new ones in as they are released. They also have a website where I can request titles from the regional library system so that a DVD will be sent to my local library for me to pick it up. I can also renew online so I don't need to drag it back to the library just to get another couple of days with the DVD before paying late fees.
And the best feature of all? It's free. Well, effectively free. You pay for it in your taxes but you're going to pay for it whether you use it or not so you might as well use it. Plus, I'd rather my tax money go to local libraries than some other things it goes to.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Dude, are you insane?
For $25 I can buy the Bluray, and watch it in my own home theater in a reclining leather seat, eat my own snacks, drink beer, and pause it if I want to take a leak.
Not leaving my fscking house is low impact, and it costs me a fraction of movie theaters. I figure they're pretty much doomed as a business model.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The GP said "phone." Besides, your screen at home isn't as good and I guarantee you that unless you have $10,000 in acoustic treatment you don't have a theatrical sound experience -- I'm a sound designer so I'm a little partial to that, I admit.
You don't see any value in getting out of the house, getting dinner, meeting people, dressing up a little? I'm not being prescriptive, here, I'm not saying you people should pay more for a theater, I'm saying, flatly, that they do, that theaters are still a really competitive distribution platform, and the alternatives work but they don't generate the same revenue.
Mass market theaters will probably continue their decline but I'm not sure producers and distributors should significantly adjust their business models today. Particularly when the business models for streaming are much less favorable to producers and filmmakers, and much more favorable to middle men like Netflix. Netflix Accounting is a lot harder on writers and actors that Hollywood Accounting.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
LOL ... allow me to clarify this for you, in case there is any chance nobody has told you this ... for the vast majority of the people in the world, people who talk about such drivel are complete, unmitigated wankers. Most of us really only hear "good enough", and simply roll our eyes at people like you.
No, seriously, you might care. The rest of us, not so much. I look at anybody who would spend $10K in acoustic treatment as a fool who needed to part with some money.
I'm betting the overwhelming majority of people can't tell the difference except "louder". So the warmly yellow sound with bright bass and minty undertones ... sounds like marketing drivel to my middle aged ears with no musical talent to back them up.
Are you drunk? Do you know anybody who dresses up to go to the movies and meets people there? What is this, 1964? Let's all put on our Sunday best and go to the cinema and meet up with the Jones and act like we're all upscale and stuff? Really?
What the hell are you talking about? Do people do this? I've never known a single person to dress up to go a movie.
But, we don't give a crap about your revenue. We care about our own pocket books, and our own experience. And, for me, a movie theater has passed the point where it provides any value to me.
Sticky floors, overpriced food, and some little shit who won't put his phone away.
At a certain point, I'll trade all of the bullshit "theatrical sound experience" for "sitting in the comfort of my own damned home experience".
It's now been over two years since I was in a movie theater. And I don't see myself going back.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
All these third party people making movies and nobody has thought about a firefly movie which we all know will make money given how much its short tenure has woeven its way into pop culture.
Besides, your screen at home isn't as good
Not remotely true. Most digital theater projectors are 2k, which at this point I'm willing to call crap. I watched a movie with some subtitles at the beginning the other day, seeing the white text split into a grid of pixels was very off-putting. Plus it takes effort to find optimal seating.
As to audio,
Headphones do it better, if you really care, and
The total lack of control of other people makes that a pretty moot point.
I generally agree with you in terms of the market, but trying to argue that most movie theaters are providing a "premium" experience requires a fair bit of romantic idealism coupled with selection bias when you actually go.
I know, this is the challenge to anyone that would dare strive for excellence, the rest of the world is constantly trying to drag you back to mediocrity. Thus Netflix basically does the equivalent of delivering McDonalds to your house, and it's so convenient and cheap, people start telling themselves that only purists or dorks can tell the difference between McDonalds and Morton's prime rib.
By "dress up," of course I mean, get dressed at all and meeting people, instead of sitting in your living room watching Guardians of the Galaxy in a dirty Homestar Runner t-shirt while swiping through Tinder...
Yeah but the people who make the movies care about the revenue. The GP said that theaters were a dying business model, that's really not true.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
They really don't. I mean, you might prefer them but they're a substandard experience, even if you're using "surround" headphones that apply HRTFs and phase de-correlation, they just don't render space very well and even really nice ones are fatiguing. They also remove the sound's spatial relationship with the center channel and the screen which is usually important. Most people also have their headphones set too damn loud and are giving themselves cumulative hearing damage.
I think if you set up an SPL meter and checked the ambient distractions in your home you'd find them much worse than a theater.
I agree theaters pretty much have to do reserved seating and need to have proper enforcement against distractions to remain competitive. Some do.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
What the heck are you talking about?
Netflix has FAR FAR more DVDs than any local store can have.
(BTW, I haven't been a subscriber for a while now, but was for well over a decade...)
You're assuming people are buying these movies on their phones. I think what the original poster was instead talking about is people watching Netflix or Amazon Prime video on their phones. Or streaming/downloading from their Tivos (which I do far more often on my iPad, but sometimes on my phone).
That is, they're not paying the relatively high (yes, I know I said it wasn't really that high in another post) prices compared to a movie ticket or buying the DVD/Bluray.
> In case the incumbants haven't noticed by now, the millenial generation of moviegoers is perfectly willing to watch a new-release movie on a damn 3" cell phone screen with earbuds
No, they DON'T watch movies on their cell phones. That's why movies are enjoying record revenue numbers over the last few years.
Only the nerdiest of nerds watch movies on their phones, and they aren't a market that matters.
You don't cater your business model around these dorks.
Let me gently remind you (as Thomas Friedman has) that from a communication standpoint, our world is flatter today than back when we thought it was actually flat.
There are also more people on this flattened planet than ever before. And that number will likely never decline.
Taking all of that into consideration, I happily throw almost every historical statistic related to multi-year analysis out the damn window. Every single minute your potential market grows, and can be taken viral within seconds. That would include those "nerds" who pay $10 for a bucket of popcorn as well as those nerds perfectly content to pay Netflix on their cell phones and home TVs
And given the demand for Netflix, I'd say there's a few billion reasons why you would want to listen to those dorks, or else you may not need to worry about a business model anymore. Or a business for that matter.