Widescreen: Home release of 'Mulan' is a necessary gamble for Disney
In 2015, this column asked if you would pay $100 to watch "Avengers: Age of Ultron" at home the same weekend it opened in theaters. That question was inspired by a Saturday morning trip to a movie theater that ended 20 minutes after the movie began thanks to multiple projection problems.
Five years and one pandemic later, we will get the chance to see a blue-chip blockbuster at home on Sept. 4 when Disney puts the new live-action version of "Mulan" on its streaming service the same day it premieres theatrically in places where movie theaters are actually operating. The price: $29.99, plus your $6.99 monthly Disney+ subscription.
The average price of a movie ticket at the end of last year was $9.37, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners, which means the price of watching the historical epic at home is about the same as taking a family of four to the theater. And at home, you won't be spending another $40 on popcorn and drinks, or dealing with (someone else's) screaming children.
Certainly, our current global predicament is the perfect time for an experiment like this. If just 10% of Disney+'s 60.5 million subscribers pay up for the tale of a Chinese girl who poses as man to join the military, "Mulan" will have grossed $181.4 million. I'm guessing more than 10% will take the plunge, and that the subscriber base will be even bigger a month from now.
No, Disney is not the first studio to release a big-name movie at home during the pandemic, but "Trolls: World Tour" is not "Mulan" - and Universal is not Disney, the studio whose movies grossed an unimaginable $13 billion in 2019. If "Mulan" crosses the billion-dollar mark between Disney+ and the international box office, an industry that has already changed may be downright unrecognizable a year from now. Will Universal take the plunge and release "Fast & Furious 9," first slated for May of this year, at home? Will Marvel's "Black Widow" go to Disney+? Will Warner Bros. officials finally abandon their dreams of making Christopher Nolan's "Tenet" the first post-COVID-19 blockbuster?
Or will Disney decline to divulge the at-home gross of "Mulan" in the interest of keeping the theatrical dream alive? That's probably the smartest move for all of Hollywood, assuming people will still want to go to movie theaters, masked or not.
Either way, the "Mulan" home release is the kind of bold move the company needed to make after losing $4.7 billion in the third quarter of the financial year. Now if they could just find a way to put the theme parks in our living rooms ...
• Sean Stangland is an assistant news editor who would absolutely pay $100 to watch the next "Avengers" movie at home.