ReBooting the ReRelease

 It's somewhat wild to think about how much re-releases just... aren't a thing anymore. They were of course the main thing that a movie would do to make money for most of the existence of movies. They come back every X years and make a little bit more money over time. Something like "The Exorcist" gets released in a few theaters in 1973, weaves its way in and out of theaters over a year because wide releases weren't invented yet, comes back into some theaters every few years for week-long residencies, and then gets an earnest wide release in the 21st century with a bit of new stuff, becoming a genuine hit. A 40 year old horror movie made more money in the year 2000 than Adam Sandler pic "Little Nicky" or Cameron Crowe's masterpiece "Almost Famous". Since the DVD era around the turn of the century, it's generally been true that a theatrical re-release needed some kind of additional content to get butts in seats: 2001's biggest re-release was the "Apocalypse Now" director's cut, 2002's was the controversial special edit of "E.T.", etc. "E.T." was interesting because of how genuine a release it was. Universal popped that movie into over 3000 theaters against big opener "Blade 2" and the second week of competing PG film "Ice Age", and it opened to a very impressive $14 mil weekend. That is, unadjusted for the time value of money, more than recent films like "Death on the Nile" or "West Side Story". People were happy to see these films like they were brand new!

 For whatever reason (I assume the reason is DVDs gained wider adoption with the general public and home viewing options hit a saturation point), these re-releases basically stopped in the mid 2000s. It was probably the first time in the history of movies that nobody was screening old movies as a profitable blockbuster. Then "Avatar" made 3D cool again, and re-releases were all the way back in. If you weren't there it might be hard to comprehend exactly how big these 3D rereleases were. The 2011 re-release of "The Lion King" made over $94 mil, good for the 33rd best gross of the year, and was the #1 movie in America for 2 weeks, beating out "Drive" and "Moneyball". The box office breakdown here is interesting to me, in that an opening around $30 mil is very impressive, and then making about 3x that for the full run is the longevity you would expect from a brand new movie. And of course it's much more profitable than a normal movie. The "production" expense that goes into a 3D conversion of an already animated film is, I would imagine, rather cheap. And the studio is able to skimp out on marketing because everyone already knows and loves the movie. You hardly need a TV campaign to sell it. 2012 saw a whopping five different old movies getting 3D re-releases in over 2000 theaters. None of these were nearly as successful as "The Lion King", but "Titanic" had about equal longevity and stayed in theaters for a month, and "Monsters Inc" managed to play in over 2000 theaters in the very busy Christmas window. "Titanic", for its part, was the rare non-Disney release of this fad. 2013 saw more decent returns for "Jurassic Park" and, in a purposely limited capacity, "The Wizard of Oz". The next year, Sony tried a 2D release with "Ghostbusters", which made a very poor $2.3 mil in 784 theaters over the slow Labor Day Weekend (that purposely small "Wizard of Oz" release had gotten over the $3 mil mark in just 318 theaters, and the other recent precedents had all cleared $5 mil at the very least). Between moviegoers voting with their wallet that you needed to at least pretend to add something new to the movie, and the massive jump in how many movies were getting released (2015 saw 104 movies released from the major 6 studios, a stark jump from 78 in 2012), it seems like there was no market for re-releases, even if on average they were more profitable than sending a low budget drama or bad horror movie to die in a dumping ground release slot. 

 A $2.2 mil Labor Day Weekend for Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in 2017 was the only vaguely serious attempt from a major studio to re-release a movie nationwide in the second half of the decade. It looked like, one again, a new home viewing technology (streaming movies) had totally killed off the concept of paying to watch an old movie in the cinema. Then a global pandemic shut down the movie-making supply line, and most of the theaters that would show movies. Movies got re-released in 2020. An awful lot of movies, from a variety of different studios. The dollar amounts are unimpressive on their face, but in the context of the times they seem enormous. Per Box Office Mojo, 7 different re-releases made the top 100 in box office grosses in calendar year 2020, released by 3 different studios: Disney, Universal, and Warner. It was also a fascinating reversal of previous patterns, because animated movies were bringing up the rear. In the 3D re-release era, Disney animated films were king. In the pandemic era, "Toy Story" and "Monsters Inc" were flying under a million dollars in over a thousand theaters, while re-releases of "Jaws" and "Christmas Vacation" made more with less. And that trend of filling gaps in the new movie supply with re-releases has basically continued to present day. No, they're not making nearly the money they were ten years ago (none of 2021's re-releases made even a tenth of "Titanic 3D"), but they were getting play in mainstream multiplexes and not one-off appearances in art theaters.

 Note: To be fully accurate, art house theaters are constantly playing old movies. Limited events, like the release of the "Three Colors" trilogy that happened over the summer in art theaters in major cities, have never gone out of style. But these tend to be distributed by indie labels like Criterion or Janus. They never report box office totals, or even how many theaters the movies play in, but I have to imagine it's a two digit number - maybe 10 theaters between NYC and LA, and then 1 or 2 theaters each for the next 20 or 30 biggest cities in the country. These are generally the kinds of movies that would make absolutely no money even if they did get a showing at the local mall AMC. Covering all bases, the air quotes "re-release" of a very recent movie is also a pretty common phenomenon. It happens all the time that a very successful film from half a year ago finds itself in 1000 theaters because it was a slow weekend for new releases. The biggest culprit is, what else, Labor Day. In 2019 theaters got major re-releases from that year's "Spider-Man", "Toy Story 4", and "Midsommar". Same pattern the year before: summer's biggest blockbuster ("Jurassic World"), Pixar ("Incredibles 2"), and a half-hearted re-expansion of a popular indie hit ("Sorry To Bother You"). 

 Enter September 2022, a month where it feels like the supply chain of newly shot movies should be more or less fixed, but evidently that's not the case. "Jaws" and "Spider-Man: No Way Home" will both get new releases over our good friend Labor Day Weekend. Jaws promises new 3D, and Spider-Man offering some deleted scenes. "Avatar" will get a brand new wide release later in the month. "E.T." got yet another re-release in August, in Imax theaters but offering nothing new, and managed to clear a million dollars in just 389 buildings. It's a better dollar-per-theater average than expensive new movie "3000 Years of Longing". It's clear that these movies aren't actually making much money anymore, but they also don't cost anyone anything either. Nobody's losing out by putting old blockbusters back in theaters, except for the theoretical opportunity cost of not giving those screens to a new movie, but that opportunity cost isn't real because the number of major studio movies being put into theaters is still way less than it was before covid. Something called "Gigi and Nate" got a wide release this weekend, so it's not as though this is keeping smaller studios out of multiplexes either. If re-releases are here to stay again as streaming services gobble up more of the newly released films, it seems to be a good enough system to keep the cinemas afloat and the studio accountants employed.