leiaorgana
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Jan 25, 2015
I just coincidentally came across this article that agrees with and backs up several of my own personal viewpoints on the matter about people just expecting things to be shortly on Disney+ and not being able to afford to go to the cinema atm It talks about Ant-Man 3 and Marvel at first but if you scroll down a bit it moves onto Elemental and Pixar.Mario/Nintendo already has a decades long established fanbase though so it was always going to do well regardless. There was a small controversy over Chris Pratt voicing Mario at first but it wasn’t enough to put people off or the people that were on the fence about it went to hate watch it anyway and then enjoyed it. (Haven’t seen it myself yet so can’t comment on it).
And yes, you could argue that Pixar and Disney too both have decades long fanbase as well so it should be a piece of cake for them to get people in seats but I do think personally that Elemental wasn’t marketed properly and that people weren’t really sure what it was about and just decided to wait for it to be on Disney+ and I’m very much one of those people as well. As someone who puts the B in LGBT, some of the more recent takes on this thread have been very jarring for me to read and I personally don’t think it was a representation thing that put people off going to watch Elemental. Money’s tight in a lot of places right now and especially outside of the US. I very much fall into the current category of “why would I pay to go see Elemental/Indy 5/TLM remake/GOTG Vol. 3 at the cinema when they’ll be on Disney+ in a few months time and I’m already paying for that so I can happily just wait a little longer to see them?” I’m not sure about cinema costs in the US but in some parts of the U.K. (like the cities) it can easily cost way over £100 for a family of four (for example) to go see a film and that’s just ticket prices alone. It doesn’t even factor in snacks and parking so I really do think the pandemic and Disney+ especially changed people’s viewing/cinema going habits and I can say that for myself too. Why would I want to go to a dirty cinema filled with annoying people who don’t know how to behave and I end up missing chunks of the film to go to the restroom when I could just simply wait a little longer and enjoy a film from the comfort of my home?
Of course the big blockbusters that are best viewed on a bigger screen are going to pull more people in but unfortunately, I just don’t think people are prepared to cough up for films that they’re not sure about until word of mouth spreads about them. The Barbieheimer meme has been the best marketing tool for the cinema in years and maybe Disney and other studios need to lean more into that and support other films to start getting butts back in seats as a whole.
https://nofilmschool.com/disney-binge-watching-strategy-backfiring