by Oliver Snape
The reason is that we started to have another kind of entertainment even though we still have the possibility to watch movies through the internet. One of the big reasons is the video game industry – video games have already surpassed the movie industry.
Let’s look at some numbers. The game industry has already reached $181 billion in revenue, where some analysts predict that in 2022, it will reach a number of $196; compared with the movie industry, the movie industry reached in 2019 for the very first time $101 Billion. Due to the pandemic covid-19 in 2020, this number decreased significantly.
But does that mean the movie industry is dying? Absolutely it’s not dying, but it’s changing to adapt with the new times we are living in, according to Forbes.
If we talk about theaters, definitely we can say that they are near it, especially due to the pandemic, where many theaters were forced to close for a year in order to control the infection levels, this not only forced them to close but as well it reflected in general on the Movie industry.
Can we consider this is the pandemic’s fault? No, this decline started in 2002. If we compare between the year 2020 till 2019, we can definitely see a big drop in worldwide movie ticket sales. The only thing that covid-19 did was to accelerate this process a little bit.
So where will all this go? Nowadays, with the trend of services subscriptions like Netflix and Disney, they will take over the theaters in the near future. And it will be the services that will make this industry of movies moving forward.
More movies are made exclusive for such services, like Enola Holmes, one of the best successes for Netflix. With Disney+, more movies will become exclusives for their platform.
This change happens in other industries as well. Times never stay the same, and if we look at the music industry for example, we rarely buy physical albums, everything is acquired by subscriptions, like AppleMusic, Spotify, YandexMusic, and so on.
If we look at Netflix numbers between 2019 and 2020, they had a growth of 76% and reached an extraordinary number of more than two hundred million subscribers. That is a total net income of over 2.76 billion dollars just in 2020.
What about the new service of Disney+? Let’s first talk about Disney movies; it’s well known to everyone that Disney bought Marvel for 4 billion dollars. Which means that all Marvel movies are now Disney’s movies.
In 2018, in the top 10 movies, 5 were Marvel’s movies, and in 2019 as well. You may wonder why we are talking about Disney and Marvel movies? The answer is: with these new services, soon Marvel movies will disappear from the cinema, and will be exclusives of a new platform.
These two companies that we spoke about now are not the only ones, there is HBO and many others, so the market decided definitely to take a turn of never coming back.
We strongly believe that TV channels and other ways to watch movies may disappear with time, as well as movie theaters. The new generation prefers to watch on the internet, either by subscription platforms or by illegal streams or downloads. And let’s face it, with the possibility now to stream movies on portable devices or to download them directly thanks to fast internet connection that nowadays is available everywhere, why should people stick to older ways?
With all these services, the movie sector felt the impact in many areas, and with the covid-19 pandemic, many were delayed, the same applies to these services. But because theaters depend on them, they were the most affected.
So to conclude this, by the numbers we presented here and the path that the movie industry is taking, we can surely reaffirm that this industry is not dying but evolving, but humanity will need to sacrifice some sectors like theaters with time. So we recommend that you enjoy them while they last. In the not so far future they will be just memories like when we rented movies from video clubs.