Are you talkin’ to me - a film column by Jamie Hill
It’s a strange world we live in.
Cinema, like live music and theatre performances, has been battered beyond repair by the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown.
Films that were due for a 2020 release have had to either be postponed (think Black Widow and James Bond) or be released straight to the small screen (Trolls: World Tour and The King of Staten Island).
And this is where things get interesting. In the past few years streaming platforms have been going from strength to strength with more and more films bypassing the big screen altogether and making their merry way straight to Netflix or Amazon Prime or even Apple.
Take for example Martin Scorcese’s latest epic The Irishman reuniting the Goodfellas and Casino team-up of Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro with a sprinkling of Al Pacino thrown in for good measure. This by its very nature should have been one of the year’s biggest cinema releases but on Netflix it managed to reach a far larger audience.
The same could be said of Extraction with Chris Hemsworth, also released on Netflix, or Tom Hanks submarine battler The Greyhound which went straight to Apple TV.
So it is extra interesting to hear of Disney’s plans for the release of its big budget 2020 tentpole movie Mulan - the live-action remake of the animation.
Rather than simply postponing it until social distancing measures are reduced so they could get more bums on seats at the cinema, the studio have decided to release the film on their streaming service Disney+ but charge £19.99 extra for the privilege when it is released on 4 September.
Whoah! I hear you collectively cry. £20 to watch a film at home. Not on your nelly.
But then you think about it.
A cinema trip with my two daughters usually costs me about £50. Tickets alone will set you back over £30 and then you have to pay the extortionate pricing for the popcorn and drinks setting you back at least another £20. That’s not to mention having to pay for parking at my local multiplex.
So, overall, it actually saves you money. Think of it like a car journey. The more people who are in your car, the cheaper the journey becomes. So obviously the maths don’t work if you plan to watch it on your own but if you invite every friend and family member over it soon becomes a pretty cost effective way of having a cinema experience at home.
We’ll have to wait and see whether wider audiences will feel the same.
I will definitely be making an event of it with my daughters as the trailer looks fantastic - reminding me more of the House of Flying Daggers than anything I’ve seen from Disney before. I’ve also really liked some of their live-action remakes with only The Lion King being one that I could have done without. (Aladdin and The Jungle Book were awesome.)
But there is also a part of me that feels that this could sadly be the future for film with cinemas becoming more and more obsolete. There’s a certain magic of the cinema as you sit in a room of strangers to bask in celluloid and it’ll be a greyer world without it.
Strange times indeed.