5 minutes

Cinema is the invention of the 20th century.

The news of the lawsuit against the American movie star, Scarlett Johansson, topped the Disney studios, cinema news, last week.

Johansson accuses Disney of breaching contract terms when the company showed Black Widow on Disney Plus, an online streaming platform, in conjunction with the movie show.

Coming back to the topic of "Streaming Wars", which we wrote about here a month ago, "Disney" may be the most powerful movie company in the world, how can it not be that it made history by reducing the number of studios from six to five by buying 20th Century Fox.

What Disney is doing is adopting Warner Bros. Studios' bold double roll model, the rift between the star and the studio is that it wants to be paid out of the box office.

When Disney released the film on its Internet service, it breached the contract, deprived the star of her due wages and reduced the value of her stardom, according to Johansson's press release, and directly profited.

Johansson is not mistaken, but we live in a changing world, she speaks the language of the pre-Covid world, and today everything is changing, and the term remote work associated with the closures of cities around the world, today has become a competitive advantage among companies.

Disney should have changed the contracts to include a payment clause for the stars from the revenue from streaming applications, which has become a fait accompli that cannot be changed.

The application market is growing exponentially in the United States and the world and the competition is fierce.

Disney cannot undo the double subtraction, and if it does, it will lose audiences to Warner, which has clearly announced that the double or hybrid offering will remain, and there is no return to the previous exclusive cinema system except for some films.

Even the excluded films will not get more than 45 days of exclusive cinema release, and this is half of the previous period, which in the past was up to 90 days.

This disagreement is quite normal, in a changing world, between the supporters of the old and the new order.

Studios have the right to take care of their interests, and the apps serve any studio directly and they don't have to pay rates to theater owners.

Netflix, on the other hand, has set the rules for the new world and is now attracting Steven Spielberg, a hardened old guard, who realized that he would lose the war if he insisted on the exclusivity of the silver screen, and acquiesced and signed an agreement with the company to produce films for its benefit.

Netflix also approached Christopher Nolan, a supporter of the old regime, after his harsh criticism of Warner, and spoke with him about moving into its application space.

position

I had lunch with an American journalist at the Lyon Film Festival, three years ago, and he told me that the future is not in the interest of cinema, but in the interest of anything on the Internet. The 21st century will be electronic, whether it is dominated by entertainment content applications or video games.

I asked him how to tell?

He said with complete confidence as he savored his bite as if he was looking at this time: “Because cinema is the invention of the 20th century,” his words rang in my head at the time, and I remembered them when “Covid” changed the world, and I remember them whenever I read about a new round in the Streming wars!

Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com

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