Broken windows

31 March 2017 By Jennifer Saba Follow @jennifersaba

Movie-ticket sales barely budged last year, at $39 bln globally. Sony Entertainment and Viacom’s Paramount Pictures are changing bosses amid serious challenges. Netflix is forcing studios to make films available on demand sooner. Tinseltown may want to recast its formula.

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Viacom on March 27 named Jim Gianopulos chairman and CEO of its movie studio Paramount Pictures. Gianopulos previously was chairman and CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment.

U.S. film studios including Time Warner’s Warner Bros, Comcast’s Universal and Rupert Murdoch’s Twentieth Century Fox are considering releasing movies less than 45 days after they debut on theater screens, according to a March 26 report in the Wall Street Journal citing people familiar with the matter. Films could be available on demand in a few weeks for a price of $30 to $50 per movie.

Typically, movies are not made available on DVDs or video on demand until 90 days after they opened in cinemas.

The Motion Picture Association of America said that global box-office ticket sales totaled $38.6 billion in 2016, a 1 percent increase from 2015. In the United States and Canada box-office sales rose 2 percent year-over-year to $11.4 billion while international sales were flat, totaling $27.2 billion.

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