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March 29, 2024

When Ben Affleck slipped into a darkened theater in September, AMC’s Town Center in Las Vegas was packed. He wanted to see how his new film, “Air,” would play out with a test audience, some of whom might just show up to escape the sweltering heat outside.

To his amazement, audiences went wild for the film, about Nike’s efforts to lure a young Michael Jordan to its struggling basketball brand in the 1980s. The audience applauded when Chris Tucker appeared on screen, and they cheered for Viola Davis.

“People were cheering before their lines were spoken,” Mr. Affleck said in an interview.

This made him feel quite discouraged. He walked out of the theater and called his longtime collaborator and new business partner, Matt Damon.

“Gosh, man, this is so tragic,” Mr. Affleck recalled saying to Mr. Damon. “I haven’t seen a movie in a theater like this in years. And it’s streaming.”

He added, “I feel like I’m playing football like Charlie Brown.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to Amazon’s Prime Video service, which financed the $130 million film. After a similarly raucous showing in Los Angeles, Amazon has decided to bring the film to theaters first — on 3,500 screens in the U.S. this week and in more than 70 other markets around the world. It will run for at least a month, marking the company’s biggest theatrical release since it began producing films in 2015.

“Originally we thought, okay, our customers are on Prime, so that’s where we need to deliver movies, but we’re now thinking about a larger audience and assuming most Americans are Prime members anyway,” Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon and MGM Studios, said in an interview. “Then why don’t you show those movies in theaters and take people back to that experience and go straight to Prime?”

She added, “This is just the beginning for us.”

Amazon now says its ultimate goal is to release 10 to 12 movies a year in theaters. Not all of them will be on as many screens or play for as long as “Air.” Instead, every theatrical strategy will be based on perceived box office potential. Other movies will still premiere on Prime Video.

The news is a huge win for the struggling theatrical exhibition business, with ticket sales so far this year down 25% from pre-pandemic levels.

“It’s not just about playing ‘Air,'” said Greg Marcus, chief executive of Marcus Corporation, a Milwaukee-based movie entertainment and lodging company. “The bigger, more important story is its commitment to making theatrical films so that some of them work and others don’t. Success should be judged against the entire roster, including all revenue generated throughout the roster’s lifetime.”

Between the advent of streaming and changes in consumer habits brought on by the pandemic, Hollywood has been constantly reevaluating how it thinks about movie theaters. The prevailing wisdom over the past year has been that superhero movies still attract audiences (even if numbers are dwindling), as do movies with wild spectacle (“Everything at the Same Time”) or established characters (“Creed III”).

Less sure are the movies Mr. Affleck prefers to trade, especially when he’s behind the camera: adult dramas with comedic undertones and genuine feel-good tendencies, like his Oscar-winning “Argo.” Recent Oscar contenders, like Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” have disappointed at the box office.

But the strong performance of “Air” may show the industry that adult films are still viable in theaters. Apple, which had previously avoided theaters, already plans to release Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” in theaters this year.

That could encourage other distributors to release more movies in theaters, and filmmakers eager to make money from streaming but still eager to see their work on the big screen may have their sights set on Amazon. (“Air” took in $3.2 million on Wednesday, and Amazon expects $16 million for the weekend.)

“I think there’s a legitimate case to be made that some movies are better experienced in a theater with a group,” Mr Affleck said. “If they can deliver a strong theatrical release when the movie is well-supported, then it will push Amazon into the lead.”

When Ms. Salke, a veteran TV executive, took over Amazon’s studios in 2018, her knowledge of the film business was sketchy at best. She spent years overseeing television programming at NBC, producing hits like This Is Us. At the beginning of her tenure, she put nearly $50 million into five films at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Films including “Late Night” and “Brittany Runs a Marathon” underperformed.

Suddenly, Amazon, which had become friends in the theater business with films such as Manchester by the Sea and The Serious Sick, was no longer interested in the cutthroat world of box office receipts, and the industry knew whether a film was a success on a Saturday morning in its opening weekend. Still fail.

“It’s like, if it’s going to tear down the movie and require us to double the marketing investment to get to Prime to turn the story around, why are we putting ourselves through that?” she said.

When Amazon buys Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 2021, there are fears that the historic label will be reduced to a tile on the Prime site. MGM recently revived with the help of Michael DeLuca and Pamela Abdi, and struck deals with filmmakers including Mr. Scott, Paul Thomas Anderson and Sarah Polley. Theatrical cooperation agreement.

Instead, Ms. Salke appears to have been influenced by MGM executives. She’s also seen how movies acquired by Amazon during the pandemic — like “America Is Coming 2” and “Tomorrow’s War” — have become streaming movies.

“The performance of these films on the service has made us feel like we want to be bigger in films,” she said. “Then we’ll buy MGM and close the deal. We’ve got more movies.”

When Mr. DeLuca and Ms. Abdy left for a job running Warner Bros., the MGM executives who stayed behind showed Amazon what a successful theatrical strategy should look like. It peaked in early March with “Tenet III,” which grossed nearly $150 million in North America and outperformed its predecessor.

Meanwhile, Ms Salke has consolidated her power. The studio’s new film chief, Courtenay Valenti, who will oversee Amazon and MGM after a long stint at Warner Bros., will report to her, rather than to Ms. Salke’s boss, Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Amazon Prime Video, reports to Work Studios and MGM. Ms. Salke said she won’t waver from her theatrical strategy no matter how “Air” performs.

“We promise,” she said.

There’s no guarantee Amazon’s “Air” strategy will be successful. With many moviegoers needing to see a spectacle before buying a ticket, a movie that was shot mostly in an office building and never actually showed the face of the actor playing Michael Jordan could be a hard sell.

The studio’s new head of marketing, Sue Kroll, believes that despite the film’s setting and talkative nature, “Air” has an audience-pleasing quality.

“It does take you to another place,” she said of the film, in which Mr. Damon plays Sonny Vaccaro, a down-and-out basketball scout looking for up-and-coming basketball stars to endorse Nike shoes.

“It’s emotional. It’s funny. It has a lot of heart,” Ms. Kroll added. “I think it could pave the way for a lot of other great movies that should be in theaters.”

The company hopes so. At the end of April, it will open Guy Ritchie’s “The Covenant,” an MGM film starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a man ambushed in Afghanistan. Army Sergeant. On Sept. 15, it will open “The Challenger,” an MGM film starring Zendaya as a tennis player-turned-coach. “Saltburn,” the “Promising Young Woman” director Emerald Fennell’s film Amazon acquired from Cannes last year, is due in fall.

Ms. Valenti, who started work last month, is still sorting out her full schedule. “There’s amazing development here, but movies don’t grow on trees,” she said, before adding that she thinks her job will get easier because Amazon is committed to marketing its movies wherever they go.

“The only way to attract the best talent, the best filmmakers, the best storytellers to come here and make their legendary films,” Ms. Valenti continued, “is because they have to know that their films will not Perish in the quicksands of service.”



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