Can binge-releasing franchise movies a month apart work at the box office?

In the past decade or so, TV has turned into the primary threat lurking around cinema’s back stair. Studio executive fingernails have been chewed to nubs as viewers migrate by the thousands to the promised land of streaming, where they can access just about anything at any time without the surmounting the obstacle of leaving the couch. Hollywood seems to contract a bit with every passing year, making more of its money off a smaller handful of tentpole projects.

Naturally, key decision-makers in the film industry have attempted to adapt by reshaping their business model to more closely resemble that of television. Critics have already noted (often in a disparaging tone) the habit of delivering new blockbusters like pilots, working from scripts more concerned with cuing up the next story than telling their own. The Marvel Cinematic Universe grew into a money factory and inspired envy all throughout the biz, and major studios scrambled to ape their mandated-serialization format. Warner Bros. managed to leech some of Marvel’s magic with their DC Extended Universe, tapping into the same coveted market of superhero devotees. Universal has not had as much luck with their “Dark Universe” of interconnected monster movies, with the recent remounting of The Mummy underperforming and casting a grim shadow over the future of the franchise. And that’s where the trouble begins.

Universal went all-in on their Dark Universe gambit, setting track for nine more films piggybacking off the presumed box-office domination of The Mummy, and the lackluster receipts are now starting to make that look like an unsound investment. Even as the fate of the studio’s big ploy remains cloudy, the industry has continued to follow the dangerous principle behind it. A whopping four sequels have been slated for James Cameron’s Avatar, a megahit at the time of is release, but existing presently as an eight-year-old film with a minimal cultural footprint. And now Fox has fallen in line, recently inking a deal for three adaptations of Goosebumps creator RL Stine’s young-adult horror chapter book series Fear Street. What’s more, they’re doubling down on the buy-in-bulk ethos by releasing them in three consecutive months in what the studio has branded a “movie binge”.

As recently as five years ago, the precariousness of this strategy would have been apparent, but TV’s growth into a dominant industry (at least in terms of social impact, if not hard dollars and cents) and Marvel’s runaway success have clouded matters. The dependable Hollywood wisdom that audiences will return for a similar version of something they liked the first time has been misconstrued and irresponsibly repurposed, and now the major studios may have to learn the hard way that there are limits to the extent that movies can be made and sold like TV.

The fundamental natures of cinema and TV are different, as are the way the public engages with both mediums, meaning what may sound like a foolproof decision in theory is quite the opposite in practice. Studio heads most likely believe they’re playing it safe by funneling money into brand-name franchises that they can sell again and again, but a pair of faulty assumptions are liable to undermine these best-laid plans.

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For one, studios have taken unproven franchises’ baseline viability for granted when it’s anything but. The Marvel empire was only able to rise and mount its most lucrative crossovers after the likes of Thor, Iron Man and Captain America have earned America’s adoration. In assembling expensive creative teams prior to the release of The Mummy, Universal banked on a full embrace of their Dark Universe that never truly came to pass. But by the time the flaws in this idea revealed themselves, it was too late. And now Fox’s Fear Street announcement has split the difference between the two classic imprudent-planning metaphors: building a skyscraper on unstable foundation, and putting the horse before the cart.

The second assumption is that diminishing returns won’t be a problem for series being mounted across a span of five years or longer. Buying a season’s worth of TV at a time makes perfect sense, considering the modest costs of producing the episodes in comparison to the titanic budgets commanded by studio pictures. Buying a season’s worth of films, however, runs a much higher financial risk. The protracted schedule of producing films v TV means that public tastes have much more time to change between installments; Avatar 2 will be released into a different world than the one that Avatar knew, and executives can’t promise that audiences will still be interested however-many-years down the line. Fox, to their credit, has moved to circumvent this issue by releasing their three Fear Street films in such close proximity to one another. But simply using the buzzy word “binge” does not guarantee a hit. Fox’s language is clearly playing to the viewership who gladly gobble up a whole season of Netflix’s latest offering over the course of a single weekend, even though crucial differences separate the two experiences. A “binge” become far less “binge-able” when spread across months, each necessitating its own trip to the multiplex.

Nobody can fault the major film houses for thinking outside the box; in 2017, as the “death of cinema” thinkpieces continue to persist, a serious shake-up may be called for. But this cannot possibly be it. The film industry is not impervious to the perils of bubble economics, and pouring capital into untested enterprises is still poor business sense. There’s no such thing as “too big to fail”, not in Hollywood.