For my third article review, I have chosen an article titled “Hollywood is About to Lose $5 Billion to Coronavirus” by Jason Hellerman from the website No Film School. In the article, Hellerman talks about how Hollywood will be losing nearly $5 Billion dollars in potential profits due to movie theaters closing in countries such as China and South Korea as a result of a spreading form of COVID-19 that is called the coronavirus. Hollywood movies are distributed globally across many different countries and gain a very significant amount of revenue from foreign box office sales.
In China alone, a huge market for movies, over 70,000 theaters have been temporarily shut down due to the virus, meaning movies will not gain the additional profit they normally could have by being released in places such as China for example. In other places, such as Italy, half of all the movie theaters are closed, further hurting potential profits. Due to these circumstances, movies that would be released now and have been postponed will eventually be released alongside more new movies when theaters reopen, bringing much more competition then normal. At the same time, this event can be beneficial for companies such as Netflix and Amazon, whose services release movie directly online so a person does not even have to leave home to see them.
I learned from this article that intercontinental problems, such as the Coronavirus in this case, can have a major impact on the business of moviemaking. Although this wouldn’t necessarily have any ramifications for myself as a filmmaker, it will cause problems for many movie studios in Hollywood. With so many theaters being closed across places such as China and Italy, movie studios will see a sharp decline in their profits from foreign box offices, resulting in a loss of potential profits. Although such a loss of profit is a bad thing, it appears for now that this will only be a temporary situation. As such, once things clear up and the theaters that have been closed reopen for business, movie studios will once again begin to receive overseas profit.
After reading this article, some of the questions I have include how long this event will last in which theaters are closed, which no one knows for sure right now, and how long will it take for the movie studios hurt by this event to rebound and regain profits, which I would be interested to know. I will also be interested to see how large streaming companies such as Amazon and Netflix use this as an opportunity to take advantage of the situation for their own gain. To find out more questions, I will continue to look in the news for updates of the situation overseas to see when cinemas that are currently shut down are reopened.
Article Link:
Lukas Sedelmeier’s Film Blog 