Streamation

I have wondered all throughout the spring and summer of this disastrous year if the most recent animated features were all going to go to streaming, and possibly relegate animated features to the small screen only in the foreseeable future.

Sometimes the Chicken Little in my head goes off in scenarios like these, because animation has had it rough a few times before, and sometimes in the mainstream features world, development can be stagnant to these eyes and ears. Perhaps a reflection of my own biases (because we all have them, as much as we don’t like to admit it), I had worried that more experimental and game-changing animation wouldn’t see much of a rise in the mainstream theatrical playing field (a renaissance that the success of something like Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse possibly hinted at), and that this type of storytelling would be denied from hitting theaters in favor of more digestible work and blockbuster fare.

Of course, the Chicken Little in my head is far more worried about the world around me. If, for a second, you think that I care more about entertainments than human lives, I want to confirm to you that this is not the case. Every day I’m disgusted at what’s happening this year, every day I’m angry at the sheer mishandling of this pandemic from our “leaders”, every day I’m furious about the rising official death toll and that this astronomical amount of deaths is not being taken seriously by some out there in my home country… For me, mentally, every month since this summer has been riddled with anxiety and panic, and subsequent exhaustion. Every day, I’m terrified about what the future could bring. All of this is my number one concern.

Anything about animation being possibly sidelined in some way or another post-pandemic is nowhere near as important, but… I still have some thoughts on the matter, because I’ve seen others get concerned about this time and time again… And I want to go over why I remain optimistic about animation’s future in a currently out-of-reach world where we can see each other in person and these films in communal public experiences again. Optimism is often looked down upon, but it’s what I like to operate on, because to not think of ways around problems is a dead-end that I’ve been to many times before in my younger, more cynical days. When I was a teenager. In my late 20s, I want to say that it. Is. Not. Worth. It.

The Walt Disney Company’s recent decision to put Soul, the new Pete Docter film made at Pixar that’s currently getting critical raves, on Disney+ free to subscribers is yet another instance of the animated feature getting sent to the small screen while many big blockbusters (as in, films that were completed and were to be released this earlier this year) get to wait for a theatrical release later on down the line…

This year, we saw almost all of the mainstream animated crop skip theaters. Trolls World Tour perhaps ushered all of this in, as Universal and DreamWorks opted to drop that film on VOD on the day it was set to open wide in theaters. It was a smart move because the lockdown was put into effect less than a month before the planned April 10th debut. So much had probably been spent on the marketing that it wouldn’t have been worth it to delay it again, and restart the campaign, thus spending even more marketing dollars… Some drive-ins and open venues booked the film the same day folks were able to rent it for $20 at home. Universal apparently was very happy with the film’s results, as it apparently broke records and even grossed $100 million domestically. In no time, Disney put the Pixar fantasy adventure Onward – whose theatrical run was cut right off by the pandemic – on VOD and then on Disney+ with no charge to subscribers. Warner Bros. soon followed with Scoob! on VOD. Paramount intends to debut The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run in the US on CBS All Access only in early 2021. (It had a brief theatrical run up north.) However, Universal opted to delay Illumination’s would-be summer biggie Minions: The Rise of Gru to July 2021, while the rest of that studio’s slate (which includes Sing 2 and the Super Mario Bros. movie) saw a domino effect. Warner Animation Group moved their hybrid Tom & Jerry out of the Christmas season and into late winter of next year. Disney Animation’s Raya and the Last Dragon went from Thanksgiving of this year to March of next year. Sony Animation altered most of their slate, and put their innovative Connected in a TBD slot, as they apparently still want to release it in theaters and are willing to wait until the world is a largely-COVID-19 free place.

At first, it seemed like Soul was still on track for a June release, but then Disney moved it to November 20th… But that date is not too far away now, and thus Disney decided to put it on Plus on Christmas Day. This is perhaps their way of still getting the Best Animated Feature Oscar which they usually lock and win every year. (This past decade, only Paramount’s Rango and Sony’s Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse managed to beat the monster mouse.) Of course, as someone who cherishes the theater experience and wishes to see a film like this on the big screen in a better world, I kept asking myself… Why? Why is it that Black Widow (a likely completed film) and other finished live-action/VFX-heavy blockbusters can wait, but animated movies have to go straight to the small screen? Is this the industry’s not-so-subtle way of saying that animation is small-screen fodder unworthy of theaters? Or is something else at play here?

Then it dawned on me… Suppose Black Widow keeps its current May 7, 2021 release date. Suppose true action is taken with this pandemic on American soil right after Inauguration Day, from someone other than the incumbent… Three months pass, much-needed strict measures successfully flatten the curve (think countries like New Zealand and Vietnam, but on our scale), and most businesses like movie theaters can open again… And this is the overly-optimistic prediction here… How many people are going to be able to go theaters – in this scenario – in May? Or will even be WILLING to go theaters? Many people still might be too spooked…

The fact is, most of the time, the Marvel-type blockbusters are the films that make the most money at the box office every year. Plenty of animated films make big numbers, too. Soul, in a world with more responsible leaders, could’ve possibly been up there with the other Pixar blockbusters in terms of gross. (It was being positioned as the summer smash, while Onward curiously got the shaft.) It makes one wonder… Wouldn’t this lose MORE money by being free to people paying $7/mo for a streaming service? After all, the studio’s live-action Mulan – which was NOT free on Disney+ up until recently – apparently didn’t do too hot. I don’t get Hollywood math in these instances, and likely never will. Perhaps Soul is simply taking a hit for the team (some other Disney releases of 2020 have done so as well), plus that Oscar is a juicy prospect. Heck, in a year with so few live-action movies, would Soul be the first animated feature since Toy Story 3 to get a nomination for Best *Picture*? If it ever did, that would make it the first animated feature in a decade to get such a nomination, and the *fourth* one overall. (In the Academy’s lengthy history, only Beauty and the Beast, Up, and Toy Story 3 were nominated for Best Picture in their respective years.)

Maybe Disney fears that the Marvel biggie Black Widow will still have trouble at the box office in even the most optimistic scenario, but are unwilling to delay it yet again to late 2021 or even into 2022. I’d imagine Disney lost so much this year, along with the other studios. They want their surest bet, a Marvel movie featuring a mainstay Avenger who made her first appearance in 2010, to make as much money as it can to recoup their losses. This situation, strangely, isn’t dissimilar to where the Disney studio was after World War II. Throughout the 1940s, Walt was deep in debt and his studio was only getting by on anthology features, and re-releases of the first few features. Of course, Walt was able to expand into other territories (live-action movies, nature documentaries, etc.) and eventually pulled through, notably with the surefire hit that was Cinderella in 1950. Today, the studios have halted live-action movies because of an unpredictable novel coronavirus. The studios can’t film real life people, because real life people have to distance and be safe, and keep others safe as well. (Somehow, in America, that is seen by some as a very hard thing to do.) Animation, in a way, is keeping things afloat, as the talent can make these films from home or in some remote location other than a studio. As such, all of the animated films slated to come out this year will have been ready, but… The world isn’t safe, so they can’t be shown where they are meant to be seen… And it looks as if Disney doesn’t want to wait with an original movie like Soul (if this were something like Toy Story 4, it might be a much different story), and possibly lose money on it because lots of audiences won’t be able to come and see their film. Curiously, Universal and AMC have struck that much talked about deal where a Universal film can run in theaters for a few weeks, and then go straight to VOD, a strategy that could work out for a film that is flopping in theaters. (Is DreamWorks’ The Croods: A New Age – slated for a theatrical release in Thanksgiving – the first film of theirs to test out this strategy?) However, Disney doesn’t have such a pact with anyone, because they have – again – their own big streaming service.

“The future ain’t what it used to be.” You got THAT right!

The animated features are convenient because they were finished remotely. Studios looking to get *something, ANYTHING* out during this period are probably head-over-heels for those pesky cartoons (you know, the very pesky cartoons that make them plenty of money year after year), and some of them hope that the big “event” movies will somewhat save their collective rears when it is safe to go to the cinema again. In terms of blockbuster-type movies, 2021 has, what? Four Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, two not-MCU Marvel movies (Sony’s Morbius and Venom sequel), one DC movie, a fourth Matrix, another Ghostbusters movie, In The Heights, Top Gun: Maverick, A Quiet Place Part II, F9… Are any of those even going to make the numbers they would’ve made in any other year? Will this be a seismic collapse of the big budget tentpole that has been predicted for a long while? Expecting something to more than double a $150 million budget in the coming climate might just be a thing of the past… Or at least, until the world is safer, whenever that may be. Again, we have no idea what will happen between now and next spring, and I specifically choose that timeframe because the upcoming election is crucial to where will be in the middle of next year.

For the time being, it is easy to worry that animation is getting sidelined yet again, but we also have to remember that plenty of lower budget live-action pictures have come to VOD/streaming as well. The studios didn’t wait on releasing films like The Lovebirds, The King of Staten Island, Da 5 Bloods, many others theatrically on a later date. I think for now, the studios are holding back the big blockbuster-type movies because they’ll at least make *enough* money to make up for the crushing losses they have all experienced this year. With completed animated movies (any original animated movie is a good-sized gamble) and low budget fare, not so much. The silver lining is, we get to see these films sooner.

But before we can make a case for mainstream feature animation’s future, we have to get to a better world first…