Yes, I remember Disney trying to reassure us that 'No, really! Dick Tracy finally made $100m!...It's okay, now!"
But that was 1990, before the overbuilt explosion of corporate shopping-mall cineplexes, which went from local three-screens to double-digit leviathans, literally tripling the number of screens a "Wide release" could make on opening from 1600 to 4500.
Which also meant that by the 00's, a normally six-week hit now spent itself out in one-third the time for everyone in the country to see it once (and then decide whether to buy the disc), and by the 10's, a "hit" movie was lucky to get a two-week lifespan, and a runaway Pixar phenomenon, three.
It now became ALL OR NOTHING for studios to sell their race for financial bragging rights as a three/four-day rock-concert "event", until the idea that you could go to a movie on, say, Wednesday if you felt like getting out of the house, almost literally vanished from our culture. We were no longer audiences being entertained, we were statistic-cattle being harvested for corporate games...Moo.
That's one thing I'm enjoying about seeing studios panic over the fact that the pandemic seems to be lasting a lot longer than their original six-month-delay estimates, and watching all their "corporate franchise" strategies of '19 slashed by the grim scythe of the Pestilence horseman.
We have SO much opportunity to rebuild that more sane moviegoing model we had in the 80's and 90's, by examining just what the heck we want out of movies, where and why, we'd be literally killing the industry not to take it.
