"I felt like Charlie Brown with a football," Ben Affleck said of the thought that the movie "Air," which he directed and stars in, would not be playing in theaters.
It was a packed house at the AMC Town Center in Las Vegas in September when Ben Affleck slipped into the darkened theater. He wanted to see how his new film, "Air," would play with a test audience, some members of which might have turned up just to escape the scorching heat outside.
To his surprise, the crowd went wild for the film, about Nike's efforts in the 1980s to lure a young Michael Jordan to its struggling basketball brand. The audience applauded when Chris Tucker appeared on screen and shouted for Viola Davis.
“People were cheering before he said a line,” Mr. Affleck said in an interview.
And that made him feel rather deflated. He left the theater and called Matt Damon, his longtime partner and new business partner.
“God, man, this is tragic,” Mr. Affleck recalled telling Mr. Damon. “I haven't played a movie in a theater like this in years. And it's coming out on a streamer."
He added: "I felt like Charlie Brown with football."
But a funny thing happened on the way to Amazon's Prime Video service, which financed the $130 million film. After similarly raucous screenings in Los Angeles, Amazon has decided that the film will go theatrical first – opening on 3,500 screens in the United States this week and in more than 70 other markets worldwide. It will run for at least a month and is the company's biggest release in cinemas since it started making films in 2015.
"Originally we thought our customers are on Prime, so that's where we should deliver our movies, but now we're thinking about the larger audience and assuming most of the United States are Prime members anyway," Jennifer Salke. the head of Amazon and MGM Studios said in an interview. "So why not offer these movies theatrically and allow people to come back to that experience and then move directly to Prime?"
Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, is a veteran television executive and was initially wary of releasing movies theatrically.
Amazon now says its ultimate goal is to release 10 to 12 movies a year in theaters. Not all of them will be on as many screens as "Air" or play for as long. Instead, any theatrical strategy will be based on perceived box office potential. And other movies will continue to debut on Prime Video.
The news is a huge win for the beleaguered theater business, with year-to-date ticket sales down 25 percent from before the pandemic.
"It's really not just about playing 'Air,'" said Greg Marcus, CEO of the Marcus Corporation, a movie entertainment and lodging business in Milwaukee. “The bigger, more important story is her commitment to making a play, so some of it works and some of it doesn't. Success should be judged on an entire shale and include all revenue generated over the life of the shale.”
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