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I’m writing this blog entry later than usual since after the comic was done, Dawn and I decided to take a break and watch Godzilla vs. Kong. At home, mind you… by this time tomorrow we should have our second doses of vaccine and hopefully won’t be laid up too badly from it.
This is around the time of year we would usually have been casting around for some big, noisy movie of no guaranteed complexity to watch in a theater. Just something for the two of us to get out of the house, get drunk at an adjoining restaurant and then toddle across the mall to experience. Kaiju and kaiju-adjacent films such as Pacific Rim and Kong: Skull Island had been heroically filling that need and it was with heavy (but cautious) hearts that we did not continue that tradition in 2020.
But one thing Covid has definitely seemed to do on the entertainment front has been to fast-track the rise of subscription and/or on-demand streaming services, including the heretofore unheard of option of opening up a new film to home viewing at the same time as its theatrical release. They’re still figuring out how all that’s going to work, it seems. Some like Disney are charging premium prices for it even if you already have a subscription to Disney Plus. Some like Warner Bros. are offering GvK for no extra charge to HBO Max customers. That kind of makes it hard to put any revenue figures on the “home release” but it certainly seems to have been a popular choice, as well as exceeding all expectations at the theaters themselves.
While I’m not one of the folks who braved going out to a public showing, after watching at home I definitely feel the temptation. There were a lot of awesome moments I couldn’t help but think would have been so much more awesome on a huge screen with seat-shaking surround sound vibrating through my being. Spectacle might be the simplest form of entertainment but it has its power, and even though I wouldn’t call our home setup terrible it still doesn’t compare to the thrill of a theatrical excursion. I think the fact GvK performed so well at theaters despite streaming being available says a lot. Maybe both options can co-exist, even once the pandemic is past us?
But that’s just a layman’s opinion and the insiders of Hollywood seem to be spinning a different story. I suppose time will tell if everything really does go back to business as usual, or if some new hybrid model emerges for the future.