Streaming services are dominating movies, which concerns many who are interested in the art of film.
The video streaming market is currently valued at over $500 billion, and it is expected to grow to over $1.9 trillion by 2024. Even Netflix, the biggest streaming service in the world, has over 200 million subscribers worldwide. Along with that, the list of unique titles has surpassed 800,000 in the United States alone, and the number of streaming platforms continues to rise every day. It’s crazy to think about but when did this all change? And how does this change affect the movie theaters?
In the 2010s, there were only three streaming services! Streaming has been around since the 2000s. It has influenced a lot of the current streaming services we have today, but there was a point in time when there was a major upscale in streaming services. That was Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and Hulu. According to Exploding Topics, 38.1% of all TV usage is dedicated to streaming and Statista reports that 83% of consumers in the United States are using streaming services in 2023. As of last year, there were 239 video streaming service businesses in the United States, which is a 17.4% increase from 2022.
Well, to put this into perspective, let’s think back to 2010, when there were only three streaming services. Cable was used more often than streaming services back then. Mostly everyone was using YouTube, Hulu, or Netflix, but most people used DVDs or went to the theaters, rather than wait for them to go directly to streaming services. By 2015, about 52% of households subscribed to a streaming service, and that percentage has gone up to 83%. There is more of an incentive for people to use streaming services now in 2024 because there is a larger selection of movies and films, especially for more independent projects.
Streaming platforms currently post exclusive content that is not played in theaters, so many movies end up going directly to streaming instead of having their time on the big screen.
In the past, if a movie underperformed at the box office, it was directly banished to streaming that it is going directly to streaming afterwards, which was the case with a lot of movies in 2023. The movie “Barbie” surpassed its original budget by making $1.446 billion in the theaters. It was easy to assume that it would continue to make a profit on MAX, which would mean Warner Brothers would continue to profit from it. This is an example of why a popular movie might move quickly to streaming services.
Despite this, there are people that tend to prefer watching newly released movies in theaters, but that is a small percentage compared to the amount of people that use streaming services. The problem is that movies that go directly to streaming services often underperform and are then not worth the investment that the streaming service and/or the advertisers made. Some examples include “Palm Springs” which released on MAX, ”Ghosted” on Apple TV, and “Sound of Metal” which released on Amazon Prime. All three of these releases bombed, both critically and financially.
When it comes to consumers and the convenience of streaming services, does this mean that movie theaters will become obsolete? Or will the film industry continue to put movies out in theaters? Only time will tell.
