Josh Hendrickson
Theaters everywhere are closed right now, which puts a crimp on summer blockbuster plans. While Marvel movies simply moved back their release date, NBCUniversal’s Trolls World Tour took a different tact. It went straight to video-on-demand, allowing you to rent it from home for $20. That went over so well, NBCUniversal might make moves from home the new norm.
For some perspective, in its entire five-month theatrical run, the original Trolls movie grossed about $157 million. In just three weeks, Trolls World Tour grossed nearly $100 million from video-on-demand rentals. And according to SFGate, NBCUniversal gets a larger slice of the video-on-demand pie than it does from a theater run.
All around, those are the kind of numbers that makes a film studio happy. And so it shouldn’t be too surprising that the company’s CEO, Jeff Shell, said going forward it NBCUniversal would release movies on both formats (theaters and movies-on-demand).
At $20 a viewing, video-on-demand is a win for families who can easily spend more at a theater. For its part, AMC isn’t happy with the situation. It announced that because of NBCUniversal’s plans to continue to offer its films through video-on-demand it would ban all Universal movies from its theaters. Only time will tell how that works out for the theater company.
