How do you measure the financial success of a movie in the streaming era? This question keeps arising amid coverage of the Christmas Day showdown between from Disney’s Pixar and ( ) from Warner Brothers. Soul Wonder Woman 1984 WW84 What made these two film releases special was their streaming distribution strategy. Disney released exclusively on its Disney+ streaming service. Warner Brothers distributed on HBO Max (owned by AT&T, which owns Warner Brothers) alongside a release in traditional movie theaters. Soul WW84 Both Disney and Warner Brothers bypassed the traditional approach of giving movie theaters a 90-day window to exhibit a film before going directly to viewers online. That’s because during the pandemic, , and theaters are on the verge of collapse. attendance in movie theaters has plunged dramatically With the Old Hollywood distribution system dying, studios are adopting a , streaming-first approach. and are two prominent examples being watched closely. And this much is clear: we don’t know what success looks like. New Hollywood Soul WW84 New Hollywood Rising How did we get here? Let’s take a quick recap. First of all, the rise of streaming and the decline of movie theaters precede the pandemic. Before 2020, . movie theater attendance was already declining Meanwhile, New Hollywood streaming companies emerged to upend the staid Old Hollywood system of distributing films through movie theaters. The Old Hollywood studios leaned first on movie theaters to earn money, and success was measured in box office sales. The movie theaters shared in that success, protected by a 90-day theatrical window before studios distributed movies direct to consumers via DVD or streaming and earned additional revenue. But the streaming companies began to create their own movies, and when they did, they either shortened that 90-day window considerably or bypassed movie chains completely, which angered the Old Hollywood establishment, especially movie chains. And then, something unexpected happened: a global pandemic shut down movie theaters en masse, denying Old Hollywood their all-important global revenue streams. As a result, movie studios, saddled with expensive films in the can for 2020-21 but nowhere to show them, find themselves crawling to the streaming services for help. Some studios have sold their titles to streaming companies. Others have taken their chances distributing movies in theaters. But others have tried some more creative approaches: Universal Pictures released r by skipping theaters and going straight to digital rental for $19.99 – . In fact, was more lucrative for Universal than its predecessor, , even though earned more revenue than Trolls , because Universal didn’t have to split revenue with movie theaters. Trolls World Tou which accumulated $100 million in revenue Trolls World Tour Trolls Trolls World Tour Trolls World Tour Disney and Warner Brothers are in the unusual position of enjoying access to in-house streaming platforms, which are proving to be labs for experimenting. is not the first movie Disney has released on Disney+ -- the company released on Disney+ and movie theaters in September. And Warner Brothers said that in 2021, the studio will release its entire slate of films on HBO Max first before showing them in theaters, a highly controversial move especially because HBO Max subscribers lag far behind competitors such as Amazon Video, Disney+, and Netflix. Soul Mulan v. : Who Won? Soul WW84 And here’s where measuring success gets really complicated and murky. Several days after the release of and , the only clear yardstick of financial success is the – a far cry from the $103.3 million that the first earned in pre-pandemic days, but a record for the pandemic era. Soul WW84 $16.7 million domestic ticket sales that WW84 pulled down in theaters on its opening weekend Wonder Woman And that’s the only solid number we have for either or . AT&T also said that . Disney released no viewer numbers for . But measurement firm Samba TV that 2.4 million Disney+ households in the U.S. watched over the holiday weekend, versus 2.2 million U.S. households streaming on HBO Max. (Samba TV tracks data from audiences who have opted-in to share their viewing activity.) But who really knows? And how does tracking viewer data figure into understanding a movie’s success? Soul WW84 “nearly half” of HBO Max subscribers watched WW84 on Christmas Day Soul says Soul WW84 Four Ways to Measure Success Thus far, these measurement models have emerged: , which are still very relevant because they provide hard numbers, even if movie theaters are barely clinging to life. After all, Warner Brothers pointed to that $16.7 million in domestic movie ticket sales as a reason for , which will be distributed the old fashioned way, through theaters. , the action comedy film , released during the dog days of January, was the Number One film of 2020, with a worldwide gross of $426 million. Most certainly its top ranking is a result of the January release date occurring before the pandemic took hold. By contrast, the top film of 2019, , raked in $2.8 billion globally. Up until 2020, every top movie since 2010 had earned at least $1 billion globally. Traditional box office sales approving the production of a new Wonder Woman movie According to Box Office Mojo Bad Boys for Life Avengers: End Game – another hard number because it’s all about revenue. As we’ve seen with , digital rental revenue can be even more lucrative for studios than theaters. Disney’s approach with also relied on digital rentals because Disney charged Disney+ subscribers $29.99 to watch the movie. based on that fee. ( .) (DEG) tracks digital rentals and sales, but unlike Box Office Mojo, DEG does not provide actual figures. According to DEG, during the week of December 26, was the most watched film, based on U.S. Digital Sales, digital rentals (VOD), DVD, and Blu-ray sales. (The data does not premium video on demand or disc rentals.) Digital rentals Trolls World Tour Mulan Mulan earned $33.5 million on its opening weekend So far, Mulan has also earned $66.8 million in theaters globally Digital Entertainment Group National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation . Although streaming services report subscriber totals, they do not attribute those numbers to any single movie. So industry watchers are relying on app downloads as a proxy statistics. According to Sensor Tower, research firm, ; and Disney+ saw a 28 percent . , 554,000 users signed up for HBO Max over Christmas weekend, when was released. Of course, app downloads provide an incomplete picture. But for now, app download data will need to suffice, and understanding the interplay between downloads and a movie’s streaming success remains a complicated affair. App downloads downloads of Disney+ spiked 68 percent the weekend of Mulan’s release surge in app downloads over Christmas weekend during Soul’s release According to market research firm Apptopia WW84 . Different companies use different formulas to measure audience viewership. For example, Nielsen that the Martin Scorsese 2019 film was watched by 17.1 million unique viewers in the United States in the first five days of its streaming release. Nielsen relies on a metric known as average minute audience -- a measure of time spent viewing (i.e., the average number of viewers calculated based on a movie’s total runtime) rather than the total number of people who watched a title. Meanwhile, Netflix released its own viewership totals for . , more than 26 million accounts globally viewed within its first seven days on Netflix. Netflix said it counts as a viewer anyone who completes 70 percent of a film. The aforementioned Samba TV tracks opt-in viewership with a technology known as automatic content recognition to track audience levels. But, it’s unclear how useful viewership data really is. Viewership totals are useful for marketing and PR. But those figures are typically used by networks to attract advertisers, and neither Disney+ nor Netflix accepts advertising. Streaming views said The Irishman Netflix The Irishman According to Netflix The Irishman It’s clear that most New Hollywood streaming services as a whole are succeeding based on their . At the same time, creating movies (and original content for TV) is a costly business, and it remains a mystery how well individual movies contribute to the bottom line of a New Hollywood company. As Michael Pachter, an analyst from Wedbush, , “The streaming metrics provided by Netflix are pretty useless. Who cares how many people watched a particular movie (other than them and the press)? It doesn’t translate to revenue unless the movie is the reason to join the streaming service.” soaring stock prices and subscriber growth complained to CNBC But as film viewership continues to shift online, and streaming becomes more competitive, New Hollywood may need to become more transparent. Note: I invest in AT&T, Disney, and Netflix.

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