What does Mulan mean to the larger conversation about PVOD?

Disney+ complicates the conversation... of course

When you’re immersed in a creative project, it can bleed into the rest of your life in unexpected ways.

One aspect of the ‘80s book that has caught me off-guard as I’m working on it is the way it can feel like time travel. Every chapter begins with some personal context before breaking down the films of that month, and as I’m writing it, there’s the feeling of memoir to it. It’s memoir defined entirely by the way I interacted with movies during that decade, but it covers the time from when I was ten to when I was twenty, years that saw major upheaval and change in my life. Writing about that time has led to a lot of reflection on those changes and on my choices during those years, and it’s not always a fun or an easy process.

But it’s also interesting really pushing myself to remember those days because I remember more than I would have guessed, and there’s something soothing about being lost in a world of ‘80s movies at a time when it feels like the world is on fire.

I like to pretend I’ve retired from writing fiction, but I haven’t. There’s one idea, in particular, that has had its hooks in me for a few years now and after I take some time off from it, I find myself returning to it each time to try again. Part of what I’m writing about in that piece is the way we build bubbles for ourselves to shut out the things that upset us about the outside world and I suspect the ‘80s book serves that purpose in my life these days. It is a massive project that will only ever be accomplished if I chip away at it little by little in my free time. It requires enough attention that I get lost in it. And sure enough, the more I do, the more it looks like an actual book that could actually exist.

But it can’t be front and center right now. Not unless or until I find a publisher for it. The biggest frustration I face at the moment is that my one gig that pays a living wage is on pause, and thanks to the incredible collision of ill-planned labor laws in California, the global pandemic, and the cratering of my industry because of an advertising collapse, there is no work to fill in around the edges of things.

It’s all about distracting ourselves right now because I’m pretty sure I’ve never lived through this kind of sustained full-frontal assault on my nervous system for this long before. I don’t think I’m relentlessly cynical or constantly downbeat, but I also don’t think I’m blindly optimistic. I think I’ve always been able to maintain a generally positive attitude about the future. I don’t think you can have kids if you don’t believe that the future will work out, and in general, things went well for a long time. These last few years, though… good god. It was rough on a personal level before things went haywire on a global scale, and I’ve had to develop some pretty aggressive methods of compartmentalizing the negative while trying to get things back on track.

The announcement today that Disney is attempting a new model for the September 4th release of Mulan is clearly the biggest story in the industry this week. I’m curious to see how the pricing works out for them in the end and I suspect it will be a major, major success. You have to have a subscription to Disney+ to be able to pay the PVOD price of $30 to rent the film, or you can just wait until the end of October when the film will be available for any subscriber to the service. It may even be sooner but the end of October was the original plan, and that would still create a window where it was theatrical and PVOD exclusive first. Disney+ has 60.5 million subscribers worldwide, and you’ve got to imagine a pretty solid percentage of those subscribers are going to pay that extra money so they have something new to watch right this moment, regardless of when it’ll be available via the service they’re already paying for, simply because that’s how the Disney brand works. Families are very driven by “the new,” and Disney is fiendishly good at marketing to kids and impressing upon them the idea that they are missing out if they don’t get to see something at the same time as their friends. While they claim this isn’t a new model for future releases and simply a one-off experiment, and the theatrical component is only in markets where there is no Disney+, my guess is that this will simply be step one in the theatrical and PVOD exclusive process for the studio.

Think about how quickly that phrase is becoming a familiar part of the conversation. Bill & Ted Face The Music is going to be coming out in the US as a theatrical/PVOD title on September 1st, and you don’t have to pay a subscription rate to anything to rent it. I think it’s interesting that the emphasis is on the PVOD release, with a mention that you can catch in theaters if you feel like it. That’s a pretty wild shift and I think Bill & Ted deserves to be commended for embracing the idea so fully. I hope their theatrical plan includes drive-ins because that’s where we’ll go if that happens. You have control over your environment at a drive-in, and you still get something that resembles a communal experience.

While families are definitely going to bite for Mulan, I’m not sure they’ll have the same kind of immediate cross-over appeal to everyone else, though, and they’re not running the same kind of experiment as everyone else. By making sure you have to have Disney+ before they will let you rent the movie, they’re maintaining complete control of the pipeline. It sounds like you won’t be able to just rent the film through the regular platforms. Instead, it’ll be something that will unlock within the Disney+ environment, where they’ll have very firm control over how long you’ll have access to it and what you can do with it during your rental window. They will keep every dollar everyone spends, with nothing funneled off to any of the middle-man services that normally jump in, hands out, ready to get paid for the privilege of standing between you and the content you consume. Disney will also get to keep all of the data they gather during this experiment and they’ll control how much access anyone else has to that data, which is honestly the most important thing they’ll get out of the entire process.

There’s no word from today’s quarterly stockholder call about what conversations Disney has had with theater owners about this plan. The calls I’ve made to the people I know in the theatrical world have mostly painted a picture of a chaotic landscape. AMC’s deal with Universal did not win either company fans who weren’t part of the deal, and it may have done more to hurt Universal’s plan for the changing theatrical window than help it. Theater owners are hurting and they’re scared and when a company the size of Disney just announces their plans without getting the industry onboard first, it’s clear that they don’t consider theater owners their partners. If theaters are going to survive and maintain relationships with studios, they’re going to have to accept some pretty outrageous changes in the terms of engagement. Disney’s primary goal is keeping the tap turned on at the theme parks and in ongoing consumer interaction. They need families to come to the parks, and they need families to spend money at the parks and at home. They need families to buy the t-shirts and the bedsheets and the toothpaste and the Lego sets and if they can control the entire pipeline by which those families watch their product, they’ll do it. Theaters need Disney more than Disney needs theaters right now.

That’s not true of every company, of course, and it would be short-sighted and shitty of Disney to really lean on the power difference. Won’t stop them from doing it, but I can’t honestly say I think Disney’s screwing anyone here. I don’t think this is the model anyone else should follow, and I think Disney should have made it PVOD for everyone, with a discount if you’re a Disney+ subscriber, but that’s not for me to figure out. Is $30 a lot for one viewing of one film? Well… kind of. If you’re watching it by yourself, that’s not worth it unless you’re a huge Niki Caro fan or a big Mulan fan. And if so, have at it. Spend that money. But if you’re a family of four and you’re going to see Mulan together in Los Angeles in the theater on a normal occasion and you get concessions and you park, you’re probably all in for $100 without breaking a sweat. It’s easy to spend that much. $30 suddenly seems like a real bargain when you look at it that way.

I’m not sure I’ll personally pay for Mulan. If I’m offered a chance to screen it for review, I’ll do it, but I’ve got Disney+ and I can wait a few months if I have to. I’ve heard good things from the people who saw it just before everything shut down. It was one of the last films to have press screenings, and they even had their big red-carpet premiere. Disney was feeling good about the reactions they were getting and this move certainly isn’t because they have no faith in the film or because they view it as somehow lesser. If anything, this is them setting Mulan apart. After all, they could have tried this with Hamilton, and it probably would have worked. My 80-year-old parents subscribed to Disney+ for a month specifically so they could watch Hamilton, and then they canceled their subscription. In essence, my parents did pay to PVOD Hamilton, and they probably would have paid more than they did for that experience.

Disney understands that the point isn’t the venue; the point is creating the idea that something is an experience, not just a product. They’re going to make Mulan an event by treating it like this, and they’re going to have families talking about the film. It’s going to be a weird frenzied moment because everyone who is aiming to release a big long-pending film right now in the U.S. is aiming at that same five or six day period of time, and that means everyone’s competing for the same attention. I’m interested in Bill & Ted first, Mulan second, and then I’m sitting out Tenet altogether if I have to go see it in a movie theater. My priorities aren’t the same as anyone else, though, and I would imagine Tenet and Mulan both will own big chunks of the conversation because there has been such a dearth of big-ticket movie entertainment this summer.

How much this actually influences future releases will be determined wholly by the way these releases are received. If you want the PVOD option moving forward, you’ll have to show up and support whatever you’re interested in. And if you believe wholeheartedly that the theatrical experience is safe and you’re ready for it, then I hope you enjoy yourself. I’m not going to spend my time and energy scolding everyone over the way they’re handling these things. I could get worked up about the weird choice to release The New Mutants “in theaters” on August 28th with no mention whatsoever about a PVOD option while the same studio is going to roll out the Mulan release a few days later, but what would that serve? After all, The New Mutants is part of the Fox deal, and they’ve got all sorts of existing agreements regarding streaming that I can’t speak to, as frustrating as it is. I could ask what they’re going to do with Black Widow, especially considering they can’t really release the Disney+ TV shows until audiences have seen Black Widow because of the way Marvel builds their interlocked narratives, but if they didn’t answer that question today, then my guess is Disney does not have the answer to that question yet. Clearly, Mulan is the film they’re going to use to test all of this, and so be it. I’ll see The New Mutants at the drive-in or I’ll wait for it at home. I’ll see Black Widow when they’re ready to release it. I’ll support the experiment, but I also want to see the studios reaching out to theaters that aren’t part of giant chains to make sure they’re looped into the conversation.

Basically, it’s the wild west right now, and people are going to get hurt. The faster people start looking to build real infrastructure for releasing big-ticket films during a pandemic, the sooner studios and exhibitors both start making money again. There will be plenty of missteps on the way to figuring things out, and the truth is that with a major economic depression rolling in, even $30 might seem tough to some families. Pricing, windows of availability, and the platforms studios will use to release these films… those things are all negotiable right now, all up for grabs.

And, man, Disney’s ready to do some grabbing.

I’ll be back tomorrow with the stuff I had planned for today, and that’ll be for subscribers only. As always, I deeply appreciate you guys. You make it possible for me to publish an occasional freebie, like today’s newsletter.

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Image courtesy of Disney