In case you hadn’t heard…
The film industry has changed a wee bit in the last fifteen years. We continue to exist in what has been coined the Second Golden Age of Television. Thanks in large part to the Streaming Wars—the battle for eyeballs (that may be over?) between the likes of Netflix, Hulu, Max, Amazon, Apple and more—high-quality television shows (and, to a lesser extent, movies) are made, distributed, released and consumed around the world every single day, and for very affordable prices.
Streaming is more affordable than cable in many cases also, though the comparison gets a little hairy when it comes to basic and expanded cable packages, as well as the fact that many communications companies also offer (or, more accurately, leverage) customers into bundling their cable and internet access together. Some also offer phone service as an add-on as well.
Making it even hairier is the fact that in order to stream at all you need that fast, reliable internet from said communications companies. But you also don’t use said internet service just for streaming so what sort of percentage are we looking at here?
Yada yada yada. It’s hairy.
Though it’s somewhat of an apples to oranges comparison, I think a clearer picture of just how affordable streaming is can be painted by looking at the cost of streaming vs. the cost of going to the movie theater.
According to The New York Times, the average U.S. movie ticket in 2022 cost $11.75. For reference, in case you haven’t been in a while, that $11.75 goes toward one screening of one film, and that one film typically runs between 80 and 120 minutes long.
Compare that to a $6.99 charge for a month’s worth of access (with ads) to Netflix, who according to CordCutting has over 5,000 titles available in the United States, and over 13,000 titles available globally, many of which include television shows with multiple seasons.
Which translates to far more minutes of viewing offered than a single film with a two-hour run time, and at a far lower price of admission.
Even as streaming services raise their fees, it’s hard to make the case to spend the kind of dough a trip to the cinema requires when your margins are thin, particularly when quality TVs have never been cheaper and there’s just so much available through your remote.
Does that mean that movies and their first homes (theaters) are dying?
Yeah? Kind of? But not really?
Quite ironically, Netflix is making huge pushes toward debuting some of their most anticipated premieres in theaters, the very industry they’ve blown to smithereens.
But the stakes have changed. The entire game has changed. Not that long ago—as recently as the 1990s and early 2000s, in fact—the best filmmakers, the most sought-after actors, and the most talented screenwriters turned their noses up at the idea of television providing them their livelihood.
Today, as you’re likely aware, so many of them have transitioned to the smaller screen.
At the core of Why?, as maybe you’ve put together already, is: that’s where the viewers are. The hour-long drama has been unlocked. The limited series has been unlocked. The quality his high. And because the bar keeps getting set higher and higher in terms of quality, that’s what viewers have come to expect and demand of their TV shows.
If you’ve taken anything adjacent to Econ 101, you know that supply of course follows demand.
Because the Netflixes and the Hulus and the Apples have built their independent sandboxes in which they can play—and by “play” I mean produce original programming—they can take big swings when they damn well feel like it, and when they do it’s often on TV shows. Because, as illustrated with an earlier example, when TV shows connect it means that rather than spending two hours with a movie, in a ten-episode season viewers will be spending roughly ten hours on the platform.
But those ten hours aren’t just being spent with the actors and filmmakers and the stories they’re collaborating to tell. Those ten hours are being spent with the brand.
I’ll concede that an argument can be made that buying a ticket for a movie from Universal or Sony or Dreamworks equates to time spent with the brand. But this just feels different.
I’ll provide an example, but first consider this: according to this Buzzfeed article, when HBO launched Game of Thrones in 2011, they spent $6 million per episode bringing it to life.
Fast forward to 2022, to Amazon spending $465 million on just the first eight episodes of The Rings of Power (based on the material found within the appendices of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books), which shakes out to $58.1 million per episode.
Maybe it’s because I live in Seattle (where Amazon’s headquarters are) and am therefore reminded on a weekly—and sometimes daily—basis just how ferocious Amazon is when it comes to brand awareness, but I don’t doubt for a second that Amazon knew when investing in this intellectual property that their return on investment wouldn’t be made in viewership, or in Prime Video subscriptions, but that it was an investment they were very willing to not get an immediate return on.
I’d bet that they were prepared to whether the storms of churn that has ravaged other streamers—churn with streaming is when someone signs up, say, at a discounted rate for the first month, binges one TV show, and then cancels after the watch the finale, before they can be charged for a second month. They’d already built the infrastructure necessary to combat password sharing.
They were willing to gamble big on The Rings of Power because they’re arrogant. Because they’re ruthless. Because they’re good at what they do. Because they have faith that the new viewers the property would attract would buy into the Amazon ecosystem over the duration of their viewing. Maybe that includes an Audible subscription. A Kindle. An Amazon Music subscription. Whole Foods orders. Or maybe just buying a whole bunch of home goods.
I don’t know.
But I do know that everything they do—everything any profit-seeking company does—is aimed to increase the lifetime value (LTV) of each customer.
Keep in mind that this is not coming from Amazon, but nearly ten years ago The Motley Fool calculated that the LTV of an Amazon Prime subscriber was $2,283. Note also that A) this was prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, throughout which Amazon’s value skyrocketed, and B) Amazon Prime Video didn’t even start until 2016.
Using an inflation calculator, $2,283 in 2014 equals the “buying power” of $2,977.84 today. Do some quick, rugged math with what this article from Collider reports regarding viewership of The Rings of Power (an estimated 100 million people), and yeah…
If only 1% of that viewership were introduced to the Amazon ecosystem due to The Rings of Power 1%, at $2,977.84 LTV that equates to nearly $3 billion.
Turn $465 million into $3 billion? Not a bad investment.
Look, it’s best not to sugarcoat it. Companies want you to spend a lot of money on their products over a long period of time. If they had it their way, you’d be spending money with them from the moment you were born, and you’d remain loyal to the minute you die.
And when you’re Amazon, and when you’re Apple, you can view your streaming platform just as that: a lead generator. A pathway to the actual core of the business. And a mighty pretty pathway, I might add, thanks to the oceans of money that can be fire-hosed in its direction at will.
Other streamers don’t have that luxury. Not even Netflix, the juggernaut that it is. No, Netflix is a media company. Their business is movies and television. If they take a $465 million swing on a TV show and it flops, it impacts them differently, in that the hit is likely to alter their overall course as a company.
Okay, now let’s change gears for a moment. Let’s swing the camera over….here, to two movies that at the time of this writing are very new, and that I have yet to see: Barbie and Oppenheimer.
The basics on Barbie: Run time? 1 hour, 54 minutes. Budget? $145 million. Box office thus far? Over $775 million.
And on Oppenheimer: Run time? 3 hours. Budget? $100 million. Box office thus far? Over $400 million.
Take into account that movie theaters—the chains still in business, that is (at least in most cases)—keep 40% of each $11.75 ticket sold and these are still great returns on investment already. And there’s nothing those returns can do but increase as time goes on.
Will they cross over from millions to billions? Maybe. Probably.
But I can’t stress this enough: what we’re seeing with Barbie and Oppenheimer, and movies, and movies in theaters… it’s rare. Creating and distributing a movie that goes on to be a financial win just through its theater run has for a very long time been rare. But it’s unheard of today, particularly for movies like these, that aren’t tied to previously-established intellectual properties. It isn’t Star Wars, or Marvel, or Top Gun, or Avatar.
Does this mean that the tide is shifting? Does this mean that the movie theater has been saved?
I don’t know. Perhaps this is me being pessimistic, but I doubt it. As icky as it makes me feel at times, with what has been unearthed in the last fifteen years, the numbers just don’t add up anymore. Making movies is risky.
So is making television. It’s just arguably less so, particularly when, as mentioned, the neck of the company isn’t on the line.
But I’ll go on record one more to say: I don’t really know. With the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strikes, I don’t know if anyone really does. Maybe we’re seeing the end of the Second Golden Age of television. Maybe we’re seeing the dawn of something else entirely.
Maybe instead of this this new but also not-so-new desire to lure a viewer into becoming an entry-level subscriber—and to gradually turn the knob so that subscriber becomes a loyal customer who not only pays monthly, but who might even open their wallet a little bit wider—maybe something else is emerging.
Time will tell.
There is one thing of which I am certain though: whether it’s through a TV show or through a movie, moving pictures are here to stay, because they provide both artist and viewer one of the most powerful forms of storytelling we’ve ever known, and maybe ever will know.
That’s why, as someone whose storytelling roots lie in moving pictures, it has always been a top goal of mine to have a story I’ve written adapted into something people can watch. There’s something to be said about the reach an adaptation would enable, sure—after all, according to Words Rated, the average person watches TV for 2 hours and 51 minutes every day, compared to the 16 minutes and 48 seconds they spend reading—but when things are done well across the board, I feel like there’s very little that can burrow inside of you the way moving pictures can.
Enter: my first novel, And in the Dark They Are Born, a story I’ve always felt would translate quite well to the screen.
EXT. VITRI’S HOUSE - DUSK
At first, my vision for the novel’s adaptation was a feature-length film, and so three or four years after I finished the novel I started in on that. And it went…well? Adapting something from book to screen isn’t easy, even if what you’re adapting is something you wrote. I don’t recall any real hiccups, though. Nothing out of the norm, anyway.
But it was around this time that my viewing habits changed. TV was exploding and I was buying in, yes, as a viewer, but also as a creator. Many of the shows that were becoming hits, after all, had been adapted from novels.
Outlander comes to mind. Handmaid’s Tale. Big Little Lies. The aforementioned Game of Thrones.
I don’t want to beat the “TV show as novel” claim over the head (read this article from The Atlantic in 2012 for more on that, and/or this one from The New York Times, too), but I do think that TV is a far better vehicle for novel adaptations than films. Try our best to remove the branding / investment angle from the equation, and what TV does offer is the time and space for important elements of a novel to actually make the jump to the screen—elements that fans of the novel love and long for when they’re cut for the sake of run time and pacing.
So, I got to work.
I started adapting what was then called Wounded Tongue into a TV series. Among many other things—including the addition a third perspective, that of Zuri, a yellow-masked woman I think you’ll love—I changed the series’ title to The American Queen.
The majority of energy, of course, has gone into the pilot episode, which I’ve attached for you to download if you’re so inclined.
If you do, shoot me an email and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear from you.
Download The American Queen Pilot
Adapted from And in the Dark They Are Born by Garrett Francis
64 pages
Drama / Thriller
What'd You Think?
Did you enjoy what you just read? If you did, while I’m determined to keep everything I write on here free, if you find yourself in a position to support me and the work I care so deeply about, please consider a paid subscription, as it is hands down the best way to offer support.
If a paid subscription isn’t in the cards for you right now, no sweat. I’m also on Buy Me a Coffee, where you can send one-time or recurring tip my way. And I do love coffee.
If you enjoy my work and neither of those options work for you at this time, sharing my work with a friend is an amazing way to show your support.
If your novel is any indication of how cinematic it is, I've no doubt The American Queen would be too. I'll read it ASAP and let you know my thoughts. It's good to see some great films still doing well at the theater. I think in part because people want to see something good, and alas, I've seen decline in the quality in shows and movies as of late. I think the movies/shows that preach to the audience and independent projects will do fantastic, whether through cinema or online.
It IS all a swiftly tilting landscape, Garrett - you are braver than me, taking a stab at getting your novel on screen. I just wish Netflix would stop canceling shows without resolving them (while I still throw money at them every month...)
I like the rebrand and the new title block - I'm inspired!