After ‘Everything Everywhere’ Success, What’s Next For Smaller Movies?

The little movie that could, Everything Everywhere All At Once, won pretty much every Oscar it was nominated for Sunday night, losing only to itself when Jamie Lee Curtis beat out Stephanie Hsu for best supporting actress.

Along the way, EEAAO also bagged nearly $107 million in worldwide box office receipts for distributor A24 before heading to streaming on what’s left of the Paramount Global’s Showtime service, now folded into Paramount Plus. Not bad, especially for a film that cost in the vicinity of $20 million to make (A24 spent millions more marketing the film, especially as it surprisingly blossomed into an Oscar contender in the fall).

For the beleaguered indie film business, EEAAO’s success was a heartwarming story about possibilities after three pandemic-cursed years of shuttered arthouse theaters, mothballed festivals, stay-at-home audiences, and an explosion of new streaming services featuring deep libraries and some shiny new shows.

So, are we finally past that awful period in the film business. Is everything everywhere all right now? What next for smaller movies? Can/should would-be successors replicate EEAAO’s unusually early theater-only release, long perch on the big screen before finally coming to home entertainment, and slow-burn rise to outsized success?

The industry sure hopes so, if a recent Financial Times piece (”Hollywood Strikes Back Against Streaming”) is suggestive of anything.

Yes, media companies are shifting to more nuanced release strategies that, going forward, will routinely include a theatrical run first, rather than rely solely on the still-nascent streaming services to pay for everything and reach the largest audience most efficiently.

That doesn’t mean that lots of mid-sized projects are getting made by Hollywood media companies, however.

They’re still focused on big-dollar sequels and spinoffs from safe, popular franchises, as Disney demonstrated last year with Avatar: The Way of Water and Paramount did with Top Gun: Maverick. Each grossed well north of $1.5 billion worldwide, between 15X and 23X what EEAAO brought in.

That those blockbusters also received Best Picture nominations was perhaps as much about their outsized impact on the tattered theatrical exhibition business as about their own charms as artistic expressions. Regardless, both stayed in theaters for months, rather than exiting to streaming within a few weeks.

And the lockdown-era experiments in streaming-only releases of many other projects appear mostly done now too.

IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond declared that “a theatrical run improves the streaming run. The programmers were naive when they thought people would sit on their couches and watch every piece of content. The market has corrected itself.”

Well, maybe. Certainly, debt-swamped Warner Bros. Discovery has scotched plans for pretty much all of the streaming-only originals coming to HBO Max, most notoriously a nearly-finished $90 million Batgirl feature shelved in August to claim a tax write-off.

Executives said WBD will make more franchise-based big swings, particularly from the Harry Potter universe, and a revamped DC universe under a new creative team headed by Guardians of the Galaxy writer/director James Gunn and Peter Safran.

Over at Disney, recently returned CEO Bob Iger is “aggressively curating” the “general entertainment” programming on Disney Plus and Hulu. That translates to a de-emphasis on smaller projects such as rom coms, family dramas, thrillers, horror (especially at Disney), and the like.

Of course, when your media company owns Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar, you’ll happily sing the praises of brand-name franchises, and focus hard on them to drive revenues.

It’s possible Iger was doing a bit of public jawboning, talking down the content on Hulu so his company won’t have to spend as much to buy out Comcast’sCMCSA
minority stake in Hulu. Regardless, his comments don’t suggest much corporate enthusiasm for smaller projects, many of which found a streaming-first/-only home during the pandemic. Will those projects head to theaters first now, like their blockbuster brethren?

After all, the Top Gun and Avatar sequels proved people would go out to theaters again. Big still works, even if domestic box office in 2022 was still only two-thirds of pre-pandemic highs, and only about half as many films were released, according to figures from the National Association of Theater Owners.

Some fans of smaller projects, such as Sony Pictures Chairman Tom Rothman, say small works too. He pointed to modestly budgeted projects such as Sony’s A Man Called Otto, starring Tom Hanks as a grumpy old man. The English-language remake of a Scandinavian film has brought in $108 million, almost exactly as much as EEAAO, according to Boxofficemojo.com.

Elizabeth Banks had a kitschy hit (and a goofy Oscar ceremony shtick highlighting the value of visual effects) with the comedy-horror Cocaine Bear. Her studio, Universal, also had M3gan, which proved to have surprisingly sturdy legs for a film about a murderously overprotective doll. M3gan also sparked a lot of cultural conversation, unusual for a genre film.

“There are actually a lot of original medium-budget movies that have been extremely successful even in the last six months,” Rothman told the FT. “It’s not true that audiences only want sequels and superheroes.”

That may be true. Hollywood has been bemoaning the decline of the mid-sized movie for decades. The economics for such projects haven’t been great for a long time. EEAAO gives optimists hope, but it doesn’t definitively signal a new era of Kramer vs. Kramer adult dramas and Sleepless in Seattle rom-coms coming to a theater near you.

The biggest problem: the audiences that are coming to theaters. If you’re under 35, chances are you’re more likely to be playing video games, watching TikTok or Instagram Reels, or, yes, streaming those mid-budget rom-coms and dramas on Netflix and its struggling competitors, than going to a movie theater to see a smaller film.

EEAAO proved that an original script with a wildly over-the-top energy, cloaking a fairly traditional story of a complicated mother-daughter relationship, can eventually attract a crowd, profits and awards.

The next question is whether Hollywood can make more films like EEAAO, without just copying EEAAO. And that happy ending hasn’t been written yet.