A month or so ago I was reading Scott Mendelson's Substack about Aquaman 2 and Migration the latest animated release from Illumination, the people behind Sing and Minions. Pre-pandemic and especially pre-big streaming era (like up until 2017 or so) kid's movies were pretty much guaranteed moneymakers. Pixar, Disney, Shrek, Despicable Me, Trolls, Ice Age, etc all made tons of money and most spawned franchises with multiple sequels and TV shows and merchandising.
But in 2023 Pixar's Elemental didn't do great. Disney's Wish didn't do great. Migration wasn't really doing great. The most successful animated movie was Super Mario Bros in the winter.
One of Mendelson's newsletters said:
This also means this is the first time they will be dealing with the overall downturn for original, non-IP animation that has been in play since 2018. Pixar’s Coco was the last original animated blockbuster, earning $800 million worldwide in late 2017.
I had a thought: maybe besides "inflation" and rising theater ticket/concession costs, parents are figuring out that they don't have to go to a theater. They can wait 2-3 months and just let the kids watch the movie on streaming. If it doesn't stream the same day in some cases. Instead of having to wrangle the kids and get to the theater at a certain time and deal with lines, concessions, bathrooms, Covid, and whatever, they can just turn on the TV, bring up the app, serve their own snacks, and use their own bathrooms. It's a lot cheaper and easier.
It's a big change from back in my day. Home video only really started in the late 70s and early 80s. Even then it could take the better part of a year before a big release like ET or Return of the Jedi would be on VHS tape. By the 90s it was quicker. Still, even in the 2010s it'd probably be 6 months or so before you could buy a movie on DVD or digital. It'd be even longer for it to show up on HBO, Showtime, or some other cable channel.
But now with so many streaming services, each one needs content to draw users to it. Adding a big theater release like Barbie, the latest MCU release, or an animated movie is a way to get views and hopefully subscribers.
When you see numbers for animated movies sagging, is part of it because parents have figured out that they don't need to go to the movies anymore? They can save time and aggravation and only wait a couple of months, so for the kids maybe not a lot of FOMO. The pandemic also probably helped to break kids and their parents of the need to see every new release right away.
By trying to get more subscribers for their streaming services, maybe studios are damaging their profits. That is the risk with having so many streaming options and also when the movie studios are trying to sell movie tickets and streaming subscriptions at the same time. When the major streaming services were mostly not movie studios as well (back when you mostly just had Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu) there was kind of a separation and really less motivation for studios to put something on streaming sooner.
Now that every studio has their own streaming service too, there's pressure to put it on streaming to get views/subscribers. Studio execs naïvely thought they'd have their cake and eat it too. They thought people would watch it in the theater and then turn around to watch it on streaming a few months later. But maybe that's not happening as much anymore. The studios saw how much Netflix was making and wanted a piece of the action, but it turns out that it might be damaging their business instead of helping it.
The caveat might be that this is more for original movies. Trolls 3 and Across the Spider-Verse did pretty well. Besides being IP-related movies they probably also had more of a following among teens/young adults. Like teens/young adults who were kids when the first Trolls came out would be more likely to go see that than a more kid-friendly original movie like Wish or Migration. And Spider-Man pulls from all age demos plus some who maybe aren't huge Spidey fans but liked the first one. Super Mario being a video game franchise from the 80s also probably had broader support.
That's just my theory at any rate.
(Bolstering my theory is Mendelson's newsletter today saying that the top 7 movies streamed this year were all animated movies. Some like Moana, Encanto, and Frozen were older ones too.)
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