The home video market gets a reboot

The Future. Since movies are mostly migrating right from theaters to streaming (if they even go to theaters), Hollywood may be leaving billions of dollars on the table by skipping out on the home video market. That’s bad news for both studios and creatives. During a time when Hollywood seems to be strapped for cash, finding a way to capitalize on every film release could be a winning formula to maximize profit for companies, put more cash in the hands of filmmakers, and give audiences some consistency.

The return of the rental
The DVD is on the hunt for its rightful place in the new age of streaming.

• The home video market (which includes digital sales and rentals, and physical media) brought in $6.3 billion in revenue last year, according to DEG.
• That may be a decline from 2021 (15% drop for rental, 8% for physical and digital sales), but that’s because streaming revenue hit a record $30.3 billion.

But there’s a problem: the streaming economy has proven to not be great for Hollywood, delivering less returns on a bigger content spend for a fixed monthly price. And when that applies to a studio movie going straight from theaters to streaming, the lifecycle of that movie making money is kind of over.

Money waterfall
Bill Rouhana, CEO of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment (owner of Redbox), says he’s had constructive conversations with studios about the streaming-economy dilemma and is hoping to normalize a four-to-six-week home video window before movies show up on SVOD.

The argument is that, when in doubt, some people just want to quickly find what they want to watch and pay the price, says a distribution exec to Deadline. No scrolling, no headaches… and no harm to streaming.

All anyone has to do is look at The Woman King as an example. After Sony released it wide in theaters, it became a top-two rental on Redbox and then a top-three on Netflix in the US. That’s a win-win-win.

The Oscars get back to blockbusters

The Future. A handful of the biggest hit movies of the year (and an indie sensation) are vying for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture. That is likely a huge sigh of relief for The Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences (AMPAS), which has been desperate to get mainstream movies back in the awards conversation. The 2023 awards could demonstrate either a renewed interest in awards shows among Americans due to popular movie nominations or the decline in cultural significance of such shows.

That summer feeling
Some of this year’s Best Picture nominees have the unique distinction of actually making some serious money.

• Top Gun: Maverick roared into the theaters last Memorial Day weekend and racked up $1.49 billion at the box office, prompting many “movies are back, baby!” think pieces.

• Elvis showed that The King is still the king with a box office haul of $287 million and a star-making turn for Austin Butler.

• Everything Everywhere All at Once came out back in March but built momentum to score $100 million worldwide (now A24’s highest-grossing film).

• Avatar: The Way of Water demonstrated yet again that James Cameron’s only competition is himself, scoring $2.27 billion — making it the third-highest-grossing movie ever.

While the past couple of decades of Best Picture nominees has been pretty blockbuster-lite, 2019’s batch did include Black Panther, Bohemian Rhapsody, and A Star Is Born… and then the pandemic hit.

Audience reboot
Why does it matter if Best Picture nominees also had big box-office grosses? Well, popular films may have a direct correlation to how many people actually watch the Oscars.

• Viewership has been almost consistently declining for several years, with only 15.36 million Americans watching the show last year.

• For context, 43.7 million watched the awards in 2014.

The Academy knows that spells trouble for the organization, which relies heavily on ad revenue from the show (airing this Sunday on ABC) for most of its revenue. Heck, it even tried to introduce an “Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film” award in 2018 before it was lambasted out of existence.

Hopefully, this year’s awards will turn things around.

Edutainment makes learning bite-sized

The Future. Between popular education-focused TikTok and YouTube accounts and a raft of educational tech startups, a new movement to mix education with short-form entertainment is taking off… and people are showing up for class. The trend can make learning more dynamic, responsive, and fun… as long as rampant misinformation can be avoided.

Bill Nye the TikTok guy
Teaching is tough when attention spans are short. But Forbes reports that a short-form “edutainment” movement is proving popular.

• Bill Nye the Science Guy, the OG edutainment pioneer, has 9.2 million followers on TikTok watching his science-based videos — most 13 to 90 seconds long. (Even in the 90s, he had a rule that bits shouldn’t be longer than a minute and 49 seconds).

• Hank Green, a science communicator and entrepreneur (and brother of The Fault in Our Stars author John Green), answers random questions like “Why is space, which is full of stars, so dark?” and “How do induction cooktops work?” to his 7.4 million TikTok followers.

• Sal Khan, the founder of online education non-profit Khan Academy (which has 147 million registered users), built his following by posting math-explainer videos to YouTube. Most of those videos now run two to six minutes.

Not wanting to be left out, even textbook giant McGraw Hill launched a TikTok-like study app called Sharpen.

Bachelors in Edutainment
Where there is an audience, there is VC money ready to capitalize…

• GSV Holdings founder Michael Moe calls this TikTok over textbooks trend the “Hollywood meets Harvard” model and “Invisible Learning.” His firm has made investments in 16 of these kinds of companies.

• Avalanche VC’s Katelyn Donnelly calls the movement “efficacious edutainment.” Avalanche has made seven investments in the space.

And there are plenty of startups to pour money into, including Edgi Learning (which runs an education-focused AI chatbot called “edgi bot), Zigazoo (which makes videos and gamified learning experiences for kids), and Revyze (which makes educational videos focused on teens).

Looks like education is getting an update.