90th Academy Awards (Oscars)

they mean a Nickelodeon

The Academy is eventually gonna have to unclench and let go of that stick up their ass. Streaming isn't going away. And with ticket prices rising and audiences seeing less movies a year (meaning they're more likely to gravitate to big spectacles that streaming can't yet replicate), more and more prestige films are gonna end up on the internet in coming years. Mark my words. In a short time, Amazon, Netflix and Hulu will have become the new art house theaters.

What for? It is not so difficult to ensure that a movie qualifies. You only need to show it in one theatre after all.

If the streaming movies manage to reach Academy award quality, they can always do the minimum showing for an award chance.

The actual issue here is the budget. How much a streaming service spends on a movie is very limited because at the end of the day, they don't bring in any extra-money you can't just as well get with a well-made TV show. After all at best they draw in subscribers. Even for a middle-budget movie you need theatre money.

Why not just include a "best action/adventure film" category? That could entail a lot of potential "blockbusters".

But then you'd get demands for Best Comedy, Best Thriller, Best Romance, Best Musical, and so on.

Because the genie is already out of the bottle. Streaming is here to stay and we're already in a situation where the tiny arthouse hits the Academy loves praising are not being watched in theaters. These sorts of films going direct to streaming will be the new normal in a few years, you can take that to the bank.

You're overestimating how much these movies make anyway. These days a lot of the prestige/awards bait flicks that get put out are made for a financial loss just given how niche the appeal is. Even Hidden Figures, probably one of the most popular award-winners in recent years, made far less than your average blockbuster.

Edited by comicwriter on Aug 25th 2018 at 10:48:11 AM

As I said, you run it in one theatre and it qualifies. If those movie makers want an Academy Award chance, that's all they have to do. There is no need to include streaming, just like there was no need to include TV movies back in the day.

And movies like Hidden figures might not have had the best box office run, but by running in theatres first they could collect some money before going to the next stage of monetarization,

You have to run it in a theater for at least two weeks. Depending on the size of the theater, that can cost anywhere from $500 to $5000 for one showing. On average, there are five showings a day. Multiply that by 7 days a week, for two weeks, and you're looking at a $35,000 to $350,000 price tag just to hit the bare minimum qualification for the Oscars.

You know that if you run a movie in theatres people will actually go to watch it, right?

If that's always the case, we'd have no Box Office Bomb.

We also have usually a higher "viewer per theatre" average if a movie is released in less theatres. If a movie isn't good or interesting enough to fill some seats in a single theatre for a week or two, it isn't good enough to get nominated for an academy award.

Marvel is not interested in any "Popular Film" crap Oscar for Black Panther.

http://www.vulture.com/2018/08/marvel-doesnt-want-black-panther-for-oscars-popular-film.html

As the box office thread will indicate, no, that is not always the case.

They only need to make enough money to cover the cost for the theatre, not enough to cover the whole budget.

Really, there is no reason for Netflix not to run movies they are confident about in theatres for a short time. They have done it before.

Even that's a dodgy prospect these days. And it's only gonna get worse in the coming years.

There I disagree. See, I have heard the discussion before. Supposedly home video would replace the theatre experience. It didn't, and streaming won't either. Some theatres won't survive, but at the end of the day, watching a movie on the big screen is an experience you can't get at home.

You say that, but it's been well documented that overall movie attendance has been dropping the last few years, and like it or not, streaming (along with other factors like inflated prices) has been a big part of that.

I can't even tell what's being argued here.

If the academy should considerate movies which go directly to streaming (and I guess TV...after all, what's the difference?) or not. I say no, because the requirement for being included can easily be meet even for a movie which heads to streaming, others consider the barrier to high and apparently expect that theatres will go the way of the dodo eventually.

Theaters won't go extinct, but I can definitely see them becoming a secondary concern for the film studios, and for audiences, becoming something where you need to drive to a big city and pay 40 or 50 dollars for the experience, like you would for a play.

The average cost for a movie ticket is $14. Assuming a two-week run, 5 showings a day, 750 capacity theater room, one would to have to guarantee at least 1500 viewers a day in order to make back the $350,000 to pay back the theater, and that's with zero profit.^note Numbers are harder to calculate for the smaller and cheaper theater rooms, because of the lack of capacity information, but in some cases theaters will not let you rent those unless you can guarantee a high amount of viewers each day.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Aug 26th 2018 at 2:59:02 AM

Except, if all they're interested in is Oscar eligibility, they can shop around to find the absolute cheapest theater available, rather than going with the statistical average.

Also, this is actually peanuts compared to what a movie cost overall, or the advertising they get if the have an academy nominated movie exclusive on their streaming service.

See, that's changing the argument from "it's easy to qualify for the Oscars, you just need to play in one theater" to "you can totally make your money back via free advertising from the nomination", which will only be a handful of films.

"You can afford to pay a theater thousands of dollars if you already had thousands to spend on your movie."

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Aug 26th 2018 at 4:06:37 AM

The point is that it isn't a high hurdle to overcome. And the Academy has to draw the line somewhere.

Plus, so far I haven't even seen anything on Netflix which made me think "wow, this should be a best picture winner!"