2020: Cinema's Lost Year, Five Years Later

Five years ago, COVID-19 became a true pandemic and swept across the world. The prime pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 are a time almost everyone would like to forget, but it truly was a watershed couple of years. Not only did millions die, the efforts to contain the disease led to a vast array of changes in everything public policy, vaccine development, education, and our culture in general. On a darker note, the profound isolation helped turbocharge a notable drop in mental wellbeing and social trust, and we'll being paying for it for decades to come.

With all that being said, one aspect of COVID's ground zero year is how it affected our pop culture, especially film. First, take a look at the image below. I mean, really look at it.

Although it showcases the top picks of only one outlet, this collage is a veritable tapestry of some of the most acclaimed films of 2020, beloved by critics and the audiences who saw them...

...the audiences who saw them.

Due to widespread business closures meant to slow COVID's spread, many of these movies saw little to no theatrical distribution, and the ones lucky enough to get a decent release struggled to perform. It's understandable that many people wouldn't want to spend hours in a confined space with strangers who may have been carrying a virus that, while statistically rarely fatal, was still highly unpleasant and easily transmissible. Still, it was deeply depressing to see the hallowed halls of the cinemas lay barren for months on end. Even I, a movie sicko who lives for the theatrical experience, avoided returning until several months into 2021, in part to avoid getting ill, but also because I felt it would've been depressing to see some of my favorite places in such a sorry state.

To be sure, some of 2020's greats probably didn't suffer much from the lack of a theatrical audience. Da 5 Bloods, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom ,Mank, and The Trial of the Chicago 7 were all Netflix originals, so they didn't need to worry about theaters in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a net gain for films with offbeat or uncommercial subject matter, given that there was a newly captive audience stuck at home for their free time and desperate for entertainment. But for the most part, the pandemic-era theater closures (and how studios responded to them) were a massive blow to the film industry. This was apparent even before the big March shutdown, when Pixar's Onward opened to a disappointing $39.1 million amid worrying reports of COVID outbreaks overseas. Before any revisionists say this was a result of the movie's poor quality, keep in mind that it got solid responses from critics, and attracted a much bigger audience once it hit streaming and video-on-demand. It was an unpleasant surprise for Hollywood, and it was only going to get worse as the virus rolled across America.

With businesses of all kinds shutting down in mid-March, theaters followed suit. In response, many films scheduled to open in 2020 were delayed, including big tentpole projects such as Black Widow, Dune, Top Gun: Maverick, and Wonder Woman: 1984. The studios knew they were guaranteed to take a big hit, but like other corporations, they knew doing nothing for months wasn't a viable option. Even if all the theaters quickly reopened, many people were going to avoid them until the virus was under control. They knew they had to act fast and come up with an alternative to their typical business model if they wanted to survive the pandemic. The solution was to pivot to streaming: as long as COVID was a major concern, movies would be released either as VOD-exclusives, or as part of a "day-and-date" strategy in which they'd be available for streaming and in theaters simultaneously.

As an ad-hoc solution, I actually think the studios made a defensible call. We were all flying blind in uncharted waters, dealing with a situation hardly anyone (at least in the developed world) had any experience with. Of course 2020 was going to be a hard year for their bottom line, but emphasizing streaming would keep audiences engaged while they were stuck at home for entertainment, and they could pivot back to theaters when vaccines were available and people felt better about going out in public. Where studios went wrong was in failing to reassess when facts on the ground changed. Box office was still lagging pre-pandemic years well into 2021, but when Spider-Man: No Way Home was a massive hit at the end of the year, that should have signaled that things at least had the potential to go back to normal.

Unfortunately, studios stuck with day-and-date releasing for far too long, and the theatrical-to-home release window has stayed at a pitifully short 30-45 days post-reopening. This has been nothing short of disastrous for theatrical attendance, because regular viewers who might be on the fence about any given movie now know that they may only have to wait a month and a half, if that, to watch it at home. Disney has arguably been hit the hardest by this new normal, particularly their subsidiary brands Marvel and Pixar. CEOs Bob Iger and (especially) Bob Chapek put a lot of chips on Disney+, seeing streaming as the wave of the future, and put a lot of resources into promoting it and expanding its library. This worked...too well. Marvel put a big emphasis on a glut of Disney+ series that spread their creatives thin and oversaturated the brand, contributing to declining profitability for even highly acclaimed entries like this year's Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four. Meanwhile, several high-profile Pixar films went straight to streaming even into 2022, which conditioned families with young children to stay home. After all, if even a great movie like Turning Red can bypass big screens altogether, why shell out a ton of cash for anything else?

Although the other major studios (Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount, Sony) didn't go as gung-ho for streaming as Disney, they still suffered from being slow to shift away from it. In 2021, Warner Bros., at the urging of then-parent company AT&T, instituted day-and-date for all their releases that year, which helped HBO Max earn new subscribers, it did Warner no favors at the box office. I'm not saying The Suicide Squad and The Matrix Resurrections would've been massive hits without streaming, but the fact that they were available at home pretty much immediately certainly compounded their financial struggles. In fact, numerous big budget spectacles have underperformed or even outright bombed at an alarming rate post-COVID, and changes in audience behavior loom large as one of many factors.

Many pundits love to pontificate about the death of cinema, and while I think they're being hyperbolic, the appetite for going to the movies among casual fans has obviously diminished. I'm a weirdo who loves going even if what I'm watching sucks or the building is run-down, but most people aren't like that, and we no longer have to wait half a year to watch a new release at home. The short theatrical-to-VOD window, combined with inflated prices and lack of rule-enforcement by theater operators, is deadly to the business model, and when comparing the box office charts from 2019 to 2024, one can see that we're living in a different world in which it's harder to make big money at the multiplex.

Even with the long-term damage the events of 2020 wrought upon the movie business, one of the under-appreciated aspects of the upheaval was that we essentially had a whole year (or two if you count 2021) in which a whole bunch great films were just sort of...forgotten. Or never had a chance to make an impression. Everything from prestige dramas (One Night in Miami, Promising Young Woman, the aforementioned Netflix originals) to genre greats (Color Out of Space, The Invisible Man, Possessor) to truly impressive family fare (Soul), aren't discussed as much nearly as they should be. Hell, even the year's Best Picture winner, Nomadland, feels more like a footnote in cinematic history than a highlight. Sure, 2020 might not have been the strongest year, due large part to how many films got delayed to 2021, and beyond, but even the gems we got seem to have suffered from association with a time the world regards as nothing but a deluge of misery and woe. It's too bad, because we could use a reminder we got some good with the bad, even if they were "just entertainment".

Nothing in this piece hasn't already been said by someone more articulate and more intelligent, but I figure it still needs saying. Yes, studios need to adapt to the new entertainment environment, particularly in keeping budgets reasonable so not every would-be blockbuster needs to bring in over half a billion dollars just to break even. But they should also be proactive in forging a new path forward. Extend theatrical windows so people know they have to see your latest movie on the big screen. Treat streaming as a complement to theaters rather than a replacement. Do everything you can to make the theatrical experience pleasant: find ways to lower prices, enforce rules against poor conduct, etc. I love going to the movies, and I don't want my favorite pastime to become a curiosity, a relic of a bygone era.

Anyway, enjoy yourselves as summer turns to fall, and check out your local movie theater. And maybe, just maybe, look up what came out when COVID was at its peak. There's plenty of good films just waiting to be discovered, and if they could speak, they'd surely be quoting the great Ringo Starr: "don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue."