Time is the measure of success or failure in the streaming world.
Gal Gadot’s “Heart of Stone” earned 143 million hours in its first ten days of Netflix availability. That fell short of Chris Hemsworth’s “Extraction 2” and Jennifer Lopez’s “The Mother,” which each notched 175 million hours in that period. All three movies and Zack Snyder’s upcoming two-part film “Rebel Moon” represent a swiftly disappearing notion in the streaming world: The big-budget, English-language streaming movie is becoming a comparative rarity.
One industry executive told TheWrap, “Peak streaming is over; Wall Street no longer loves it.”
Compared to just a couple of years ago, the sheer amount of direct-to-streaming movies has plummeted. Netflix pioneered big-budget streaming movies and will release just above 40 English-language films in 2023, compared to 75 in 2022. Insiders and analysts blame a change in financial tune.
Wall Street no longer rewards spending big bucks for big streaming movies as a show of force. They wanted subscription figures at all costs from 2017 to 2022, but now they want revenue and profit. Years of streaming viewership data have shown that, on the whole, titles released first in theaters perform better on streaming than direct-to-consumer pictures.
In late February 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav admitted that HBO Max movies were “providing really no value to us.” That echoed his year-long rebuttal of AT&T’s emphasis on HBO Max content and conventional wisdom within the entertainment industry, where his sentiments have become industry-wide policy.
Not quite a mountain of (feature film) content
Zack Stentz, who wrote Netflix’s “Rim of the World,” stated, “I’ve seen a drawing back from the heights of 2018 and 2019.”
It wasn’t like most streaming platforms overflowed with streaming-centric films even in the “boom times.”…