Marcus Corp. chairman and CEO Greg Marcus wants studios to hold off marketing a film as available to watch at home during an exclusive theatrical run. Windows are now longer, he acknowledged, but the timing of messaging is just as important in boosting moviegoing.
PVOD or TVOD, premium and transactional video on demand, follow theatrical release, generally with a 45-day window. But often “people just get an email and it says, ‘available at home’. They’re not paying attention to when it’s available. It just feels like it’s at home and they’re thinking it’s free when it really could be $20-$25 bucks to rent it for a couple of days. So really the first thing that the industry needs to do, is to move from that because that’s very, very deleterious,” he said on a call after quarterly earnings.
“It just says ‘available at home, click here if you want to see it’. You may not even click. But, maybe it’s something you just heard about. You mentally say, ‘Oh wow, it’s at home so fast … It sends a message you should wait,” he tells Deadline.
“That’s something that’s going to take time as we go along, and the consumer starts to realize that it’s not [freely] available. It’s the thing that we’ve found the most challenging,” Marcus said on the call.
He cited industry data showing the same customer purchasing a film in the home whether it hits after two weeks or two months. “The propensity to buy transactional video on demand at that price really is about the same in week 2 through week 8. In other words, that customer is a specific customer,” he said.
“Our position as an industry has been, look, if that same customer is going to be there, you’re impacting a lot of other downstream customers when you put it out there in week two. If you could wait, you’ll have roughly the same number of transactional sales, and yet you will now increase the theatrical box office, which works to your benefit. So that seems like a win-win and I think that the industry is coming around … because they’re seeing the same research that we see.”
The consensus window to free streaming (SVOD) is about 90 days. Marcus would like it to be longer. “We think, and I think the data shows, that the trade-off, of being able to have something in theater that that does business, that catches the customer’s eye … ultimately [helps] when it shows up as a tile on your screen and they are trying to pick what to watch.”
Windows vary by studio. Disney’s are the longest. Universal promised a 45-day exclusive theatrical window for all its major releases starting in 2027. David Ellison’s new Skydance committed to the 45-day and 90-day PVOD and SVOD windows, along with restrictions on marketing home viewing options. A turning point was CinemaCon last spring after years since the pandemic where windows had been a highly contentious issue between studios and exhibitors.
Milwaukee-based Marcus Corp., which also owns a chain of hotels and resorts, had an upbeat third quarter with a strong box office driven, Marcus said, in large part by the nation’s youth returning to cinemas. It’s a phenomenon everyone’s been talking about that bodes well for the future of moviegoing.
“When we look at the segmentation of who wants to go to the movies, the audience that is the most robust now is the younger audience. “Having that long-term customer, a kid who’s young who starts to build that habit of going to the movies … In the long run, that’s great for the business.”
That said, “I would like the older audience back. And if we can get some more dramas and comedies in to get … the adults off the couch, that would be great.”