“Project Hail Mary” and its $525 million dollar global box office haul was not a fluke, Amazon MGM Studios swore on a stack of James Bond novels in Las Vegas on Wednesday night.
The tech monolith’s film arm took the main stage at CinemaCon — the annual gathering of movie theater owners — to present its upcoming film slate, and to say definitively that the company is dead serious about its planned $1 billion annual spend on movies for theaters.
As opposed to who, you ask? That would be Apple, and perhaps Netflix, who got a thinly-veiled swipe from Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios head Mike Hopkins at the top of the panel.
“While some of our competitors have dipped their toes in and out of the theatrical waters, for us, this isn’t a test or an experiment. Our commitment to release at least 15 films every year into your theaters is on schedule,” Hopkins told the exhibitors. They responded in kind, awarding Hopkins with thunderous applause.
Apple has never had a consistent annual film mandate, nor a film release cadence. As eagerly as they trumpeted hits like “F1” and their best picture Oscar winner “CODA,” they’ve had years devoid of a wide theatrical release in their nearly 10 years of uneven operation. And Netflix? That’s a whole other thing.
But, much to the delight of the crowd, Hopkins and his executive team said they mean business. To prove it, they trotted out the creative team behind “Project Hail Mary.” Producer-star Ryan Gosling and filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller (understandably) got a bigger reception than Hopkins.
Gosling came with a card and a bouquet of flowers as a thank you to the thousands of exhibitors, asking one lucky female audience member to take the card and blooms and pass them around the entire audience so everyone could enjoy.
Amazon’s love affair with theaters didn’t stop with Hopkins.
“We are building films that give audiences a reason to leave the house. Films with scale. Ambition. Something to say,” said head of domestic theatrical distribution Kevin Wilson, standing beside “Masters of the Universe” stars Nicholas Galitzine and Camila Mendes.
