It was a packed house at the AMC Town Center in Las Vegas in September when Ben Affleck slid into the darkened theater. He wanted to see how his new movie, “Air,” would play to a test audience, some of whose members might have just shown up to escape the scorching heat outside.
To his surprise, audiences went wild for the film, about Nike’s efforts in the 1980s to lure a young Michael Jordan to his struggling basketball brand. The viewers applauded when Chris Tucker appeared on screen, and they cheered for Viola Davis.
“People cheered before they spoke,” Affleck said in an interview.
And that left him feeling rather deflated. He left the theater and called Matt Damon, his old associate and new business partner.
“God, man, this is tragic,” Mr. Affleck recalled to Mr. Damon. “I haven’t seen a movie at a theater like this in years. And it goes on a streamer.”
He added: “I felt like Charlie Brown with the football.”
But a funny thing happened on the way to Amazon’s Prime Video service, which funded the $130 million movie. After similar raucous screenings in Los Angeles, Amazon decided the film would hit theaters first — this week on 3,500 screens in the United States and more than 70 other markets worldwide. It will run for at least a month and will be the company’s biggest theatrical release since the company started making movies in 2015.
“Originally we thought, well, our customers are on Prime, so that’s where we should deliver our movies, but we’re now thinking about the wider audience and assuming most of the United States are Prime members anyway,” Jennifer Salke, said the head of Amazon and MGM Studios in an interview. “So why not offer these movies in theaters and allow people to come back to that experience and move directly to Prime after that?”
She added: “It’s just the beginning for us.”
Amazon now says its ultimate goal is to release 10 to 12 movies a year in theaters. Not everything will appear on as many screens as “Air” or play for so long. Rather, any theatrical strategy will be based on perceived box office potential. And other movies will still debut on Prime Video.
The news is a huge win for the beleaguered theatrical exhibition business, with year-to-date ticket sales down 25 percent from pre-pandemic levels.
“It’s not just about playing ‘Air,'” says Greg Marcus, CEO of the Marcus Corporation, a Milwaukee-based movie entertainment and lodging company. “The bigger, more important story is the commitment to make a theatrical slate so that some of it will work and some of it won’t. Success should be judged across an entire slate and includes all revenue generated over the life of the slate.
Within the media industry
Between the advent of streaming and changes in consumer habits due to the pandemic, Hollywood has been constantly re-evaluating how it thinks about movie theaters. The general wisdom of the past year is that superhero movies still draw crowds (even as the numbers dwindle), as do movies featuring wild spectacle (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) or established characters (“Creed III”).
Less certain are the movies Mr. Affleck prefers to act in, especially when he’s behind the camera: adult dramas with a touch of comedy and a heartfelt feel-good streak, like his Oscar-winning “Argo.” Recent Oscar contenders, such as Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” have disappointed at the box office.
But a strong performance for “Air” could signal to the industry that adult films are still viable in theaters. Apple, which previously shunned the theaters, already has plans to release both Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” in theaters this year.
That could encourage other distributors to release more movies in theaters, and filmmakers who are eager to stream money but still crave seeing their work on the big screen can look to Amazon. (“Air” grossed $3.2 million at the box office Wednesday, and Amazon expects it to bring in a modest $16 million this weekend.)
“I think there’s a legitimate reason to believe that some movies are better experienced in theaters with a group of people,” Affleck said. “If they can provide robust theatrical releases where the movies are well supported, then it will move Amazon to the front of the pack.”
When Ms. Salke, a veteran television executive, took over the studio from Amazon in 2018, her knowledge of the film business was fleeting at best. She had overseen television at NBC for many years and spearheaded hits like “This Is Us.” At the start of her tenure, she earned nearly $50 million for five films at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The films, including “Late Night” and “Brittany Runs a Marathon,” underperformed.
Suddenly, Amazon, which had been a friend to the theater world with its films “Manchester by the Sea” and “The Big Sick,” was no longer interested in the cutthroat world of box office receipts, where the entire industry knows whether a movie is a success or not. a failure on Saturday morning of the opening weekend.
“It was like, why put ourselves through that step if it’s going to tear down the movie and require us to double our investment in marketing to go to Prime to flip that story a little bit?” she said.
When Amazon bought Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 2021, there were fears that the historic label would be reduced to a tile on the Prime website. MGM had recently been revived by Michael DeLuca and Pamela Abdy and made theater commitments to filmmakers like Mr. Scott, Paul Thomas Anderson and Sarah Polley.
Instead, Ms. Salke seems to have been influenced by the executives at MGM. She also saw how films Amazon acquired during the pandemic — such as “Coming 2 America” and “The Tomorrow War” — performed as stream-first movies.
“The performance of those movies on the service already made us feel like we want to get bigger on the movie side,” she said. “Then we buy MGM and close that deal. We have more movies.”
While Mr. DeLuca and Mrs. Abdy left for jobs at Warner Bros., the MGM executives who remained had shown Amazon what a successful theatrical strategy might look like. It culminated in the early March release of “Creed III”, which has grossed nearly $150 million in North America and outperformed its predecessors.
In the meantime, Mrs. Salke has consolidated her power. The company’s new head of film, Courtenay Valenti, who has retired from a long career at Warner Bros. will oversee both Amazon and MGM, will report to her instead of Mike Hopkins, Ms. Salke’s boss and senior vice president of Prime Video, Amazon Studios and MGM. And Ms. Salke said she wouldn’t deviate from her theatrical strategy no matter how “Air” performed.
“We are committed,” she said.
There is no guarantee that Amazon’s strategy for “Air” will succeed. With many moviegoers needing a spectacle before buying a ticket, a movie that is shot mostly in office buildings and never shows the face of the actor playing Michael Jordan can be a hard sell.
Sue Kroll, the studio’s new head of marketing, says that despite the film’s setting and talkative nature, “Air” has the makings of a crowd pleaser.
“It really takes you to a different place,” she said of the movie, which stars Mr. Damon stars as Sonny Vaccaro, a sad-sacked basketball scout who was asked to find up-and-coming basketball stars to endorse Nike footwear.
“It’s emotional. It is funny. And it has a lot of heart,” Ms. Kroll added. “I think it could pave the way for a lot of other great movies that need to be seen in theaters.”
The company hopes so. At the end of April Guy Ritchie’s ‘The Covenant’ will be released, an MGM movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal as an army sergeant ambushed in Afghanistan. On September 15, it will release “Challengers,” an MGM movie starring Zendaya as a tennis player turned coach. “Saltburn,” a film by “Promising Young Woman” director Emerald Fennell, which Amazon bought from Cannes last year, will premiere sometime this fall.
Ms. Valenti, who started last month, is still putting together her full agenda. “There’s great development here, but movies don’t grow on trees,” she said before adding that she thinks her job will become easier because of Amazon’s commitment to getting its movies to market wherever they end up.
“The only way to attract the best talent, the best filmmakers, the best storytellers to make their larger-than-life movies here,” Ms. Valenti continued, “is because they need to know that their movies aren’t going to die in the quicksand.” of the service.”
