Is day and date ‘dead as a serious business model?’. It’s no secret that Brandon Blake, our industry expert and entertainment attorney with Blake & Wang P.A, has been calling time of death for a while now. Just last week, we’ve seen further calls from within the industry to dismiss what’s turned out to be little more than a bad stop-gap best left relegated to the pandemic era.
Simultaneous Release: Sounds Better than it Works
Of course, day and date releases did serve a necessary function at the height of the pandemic, but if the 2021 and 2022 theatrical release slate have proven anything at all, it’s that it just didn’t work out as planned.
Not only has the public proven to be far more supportive of the theatrical industry as a cheaper ‘night out’ that’s easy to enjoy across a range of ages and tastes, but one unanticipated shark rose from the waters to bite away huge chunks of the industry’s profit- piracy.
A loophole no one really considered, sending pristine movie prints to the digital world was nothing short of Christmas come early for many hackers and pirates, enabling them to get release-quality copies onto torrent sites and other sources within mere days. And why pay even streaming subscription prices when you can access a perfect copy immediately and for nothing?
A Failed Experiment
Day and date releases were embraced by many major studios during the pandemic, and fast came to be seen as a way to tantalize subscribers for streaming services and cut theaters out of the industry profit model. Warner Brothers, for example, sent the entirety of its 2021 slate to HBO Max, including the much-anticipated Dune. Their abrupt reversal for 2022 speaks volumes, and current Warner Bros titles are embracing the new-normal 45-day theatrical window with glee.
Robust theatrical widows do assist the industry in pushing back the timeline for high-quality piracy. We’ve long known that the peak window for piracy falls at the moment of home release, and bringing that release date forward to the literal first showing did the industry no favors. Even premium VOD services were not enough of a security blanket to prevent this. Prerelease piracy, for example, can drain as much as 20% off of a production’s revenue.
There’s a growing movement within the industry to keep the focus on the fact that piracy is nothing other than theft. Directly impacting not just the release studio, but the creative workforce and the overall community, it does little but disincentivize creative content and sap profits. 2022 is set to be a year with a greater push to see lawmakers, consumers, and the media focus on these forms of digital thievery.
Combined with the clear recovery now underway in the theatrical industry- one that will need the support of a continuous content pipeline feeding pictures to the screens- and a robust 2022 slate of releases, it’s time to be honest. Day and date did nothing for the industry as a whole. Nor did it even boost the bottom lines of the streamers who’d hoped to keep more profit in-house due to piracy losses.
While the truncated 45-day release window is likely a fixture of the new normal, let’s let day and date fade to the annals of pandemic history, where it belongs.
