Orson Welles arrives at the RKO Palace in Times Square for CITIZEN KANE’s 1941 New York & World Premiere

Even after 81 years, it’s still amazing that CITIZEN KANE, which premiered in New York on May 1, 1941, managed to get shown in movie theatres.

The problem was that Orson Welles’ story of newspaper mogul/politician Charles Foster Kane was modeled — in very large part, some said — after real-life newspaper mogul/politician William Randolph Hearst. Concerns over how closely the RKO film, written by Herman J. Mankiewicz & Welles, depicted Hearst and his longtime mistress, movie star Marion Davies, resulted in strenuous efforts to keep KANE out of cinemas.

The lengths to which MGM, in particular, went to kill KANE, are themselves a good thriller. As Welles was shooting in 1940, word spread that Kane was Hearst and no-talent singer/actress Susan Alexander Kane was the very talented & successful actress Davies. Welles told RKO president George Schaefer that Kane was a composite character & Alexander definitely wasn’t Davies, but Schaefer sensed serious trouble ahead. Hearst was the day’s most powerful media mogul with newspapers, magazines, a newsreel, a wire service & radio stations — clearly, a formidable enemy.

A possible way out came in a call to Schaefer, prior to KANE’s release, from Nicholas Schenck, chairman of Loew’s, Inc., the NY theatre chain that owned MGM. Schenck asked Schaefer to see him in NY, which he did since that was, in effect, a command. MGM president Louis B. Mayer was a longtime friend of Hearst, whose Cosmopolitan Pictures was based for years at MGM. Face to face, Schenck revealed Mayer would repay RKO the $800,000 it spent to produce KANE if Schaefer would have KANE’s negative & all its prints destroyed.

That put Schaefer in a decidedly difficult spot. He’d crossed swords before with Mayer and wasn’t going to give in to him now. Schaefer felt RKO’s board would say take the money, so he didn’t put this in front of them. He greenlighted KANE’s release, himself, after running it past RKO lawyers who, reportedly, altered only one line. But he couldn’t get the film played anywhere but in RKO’s own small theatre circuit.

NY’s Radio City Music Hall, which like RKO was backed by Rockefeller money & the Chase Bank, wouldn’t play the critically acclaimed movie because Hearst’s Hollywood columnist, Louella Parsons, said it shouldn’t be shown. Schaefer finally pressured the big Warner Bros. theatre circuit to book KANE, threatening a lawsuit for conspiracy with MGM if it refused. Once WB agreed to play it, KANE was on the road to its now-legendary success.

“I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life” – Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane

Exhibitors, studios, and Hollywood stars teamed up to deliver a unified message at last week’s CinemaCon conference: the biggest films are back on the big screen.

In his state of the union speech, NATO President & CEO John Fithian declared that the experiment with day & date release has ended.  At key moments during the pandemic, studios decided to shift major titles to streaming, in some cases releasing films to theatres and streaming simultaneously and in others bypassing theatres entirely.

Movies such as BLACK WIDOW, DUNE, SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY, PAW PATROL: THE MOVIE had originally been developed with plans to become major theatrical releases.  However, while the pandemic was limiting moviegoing, studios justified the change of plans by saying that they were giving audiences choices.  They were also pushing hard to lure new subscribers to the in-house streaming services.

Fithian pointed out that day & date releasing also resulted in a dramatic increase in piracy because it serves up pristine versions of major new releases to the bootleggers. This undercuts the studios’ interests since these increases in piracy wind up decreasing revenues from the box office and streaming subscriptions.  Fithian went further to connect the outcomes from day & date releasing to “illegal activities like gambling, money laundering, tax evasion, drugs, grand theft auto, and prostitution.”

At the conference, studios including Paramount, Warner Bros, Universal, and Disney all committed to supporting an exclusive theatrical window for the most widely anticipated summer movies which include TOP GUN: MAVERICK, BULLET TRAIN, ELVIS, LIGHTYEAR, and NOPE.  Unlike last year’s CinemaCon in August which was still heavily marked by the pandemic, attendees at this year’s conference remarked on how “normal” the event felt, and expressed optimism over the upcoming summer slate of films.

This week’s split-screen between exhibitors celebrating at their annual CinemaCon conference in Las Vegas and Netflix squirming under the bright lights of a tough quarterly report has dispelled the notion that streaming has eclipsed theatres as the engine of growth for the movie business.

In a timely piece, Los Angeles Times columnist Ryan Faughnder looks at the recent series of successes for exhibition.  From blockbusters SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME and THE BATMAN, family films including SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2 and THE BAD GUYS, horror flicks SCREAM and A QUIET PLACE PART 2, and even romantic comedies such as THE LOST CITY have proven the enduring appeal of a traditional theatrical release.

He goes on to highlight the breakout success of the indie release EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, which has grossed over $35M in an expanding release that began in March.  Some have claimed that an original, independent film could no longer be successful in theatres, having any recognizable star and not being connected to an existing franchise or having established characters.  In fact, the success of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE would not have been possible without the buzz created by a theatrical run.

On the one hand, it is true that fewer films are going to theatres and the exclusive window for theatres has been compressed.  On the other hand, it’s becoming abundantly clear that day & date releasing does not work well for big studio titles and that Hollywood’s infatuation with streaming has suddenly come up against its own set of challenges.  The past few weeks have demonstrated that the exhibition maintains an enduring role in the industry, with a unique financial and cultural impact.

The topsy-turvy world of streaming is making more headlines than it wants to.

Netflix was knocked for a loop by Wall Street after losing 200,000 subscribers in Q1 & predicting a 2M subs drop in Q2. Now Netflix is talking about adding new revenue with an ad-supported tier. Media buyers will likely seize the opportunity to reach Netflix’s 222M global subs, including some 75M domestic.

What doesn’t make sense is Netflix also wants to crack down on password sharing with new fees. That’s a recipe to lose more subs as people fight inflation by shedding the easiest costs to cut. If you want to monetize subscribers, why do anything to lose some?

Netflix’s $54B in wiped out market capital dwarfs Amazon’s $8.45B acquisition of MGM. Amazon’s not keeping MGM Motion Picture Group chairman Michael De Luca & president Pam Abdy, whose leadership helped make the studio worth that price. Amazon‘s streamers will be taking over. Yes, there’s a great library of IP to turn into series, sequels, reboots & reimaginations, which Amazon values at $3.4B. De Luca & Abdy know how to make the kind of movies people will pay to see in theatres — but, apparently, Amazon doesn’t value that.

Meanwhile, news streamer CNN+ is dead just 3 weeks post-launch. Clearly, not a vote of confidence in streaming by the new Warner Discovery team.