This summer’s movie season kicked off with a dramatic 
prediction from Steven Spielberg, who lambasted Hollywood for its over-reliance on its “tentpole” business model supported by superheroes, gunfights, and special effects: “There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe a half-dozen mega budget movies are going to go crashing into the ground.”
In other words, Hollywood is exhibiting a classic case of The Innovator’s Dilemma–the tendency for dominant players to improve their products along traditional dimensions. The big six studios are extending a proven business model, targeting mainstream customers with blockbuster experiences of the type they already consume. The summer of 2013 may go down as the apex of that approach. More than 20 movies with production budgets over $100 million have or will be released between Memorial and Labor Day, making it the most mega-budget-filled summer in history.
But just as Spielberg predicted, a row of big budget spectacles have now been categorized as “failures,” meaning they did not recoup at least half their production budget during opening weekend. Those flops include Turbo, After Earth, White House Down, Pacific Rim, The Lone Ranger, and this past weekend’s Elysium. The summer’s biggest flop, R.I.P.D., was produced for $130 million and has so far earned only about $30 million domestically.
Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds star in R.I.P.D., one of the summer’s big flops
Film critic Wesley Morris explained the poor turnout for these movies: “We are finally getting fat on these high-calorie, high-cholesterol summer movies.” But while the failure rate may have increased for now, mega-flops are nothing new in Hollywood, and many of those flicks will go on to recoup much of their costs via international distribution.
The real threat to Hollywood’s tentpole strategy comes from a more subtle shift in what’s now playing in the one theater that will matter most to the industry’s profits in the future: the home theater.
After all, Hollywood only makes approximately 29 percent of its revenue from theatrical distribution. With U.S. ticket sales running flat for the past 10 years, the industry has relied on higher ticket prices for growth in box office revenue, a dangerous strategy. Meanwhile, the biggest slice of the pie comes from home video and streaming, with a 36 percent share. (About 28 more comes from TV licensing, while about 6 percent comes from merchandise and other spin-off products.) But the mass movement from DVD sales and rentals to online streaming has not only depressed home viewing revenue but resulted in a major change in consumption patterns.
With online streaming, viewers are showing that they are open to a much wider range of fare—especially smaller, independent movies, TV series produced for cable, and documentaries. That gives Netflix (NFLX) and Amazon (AMZN) much greater negotiating power to simply refuse to pay big fees for what the studios consider must-see blockbusters. “There is so much to watch that even the highest-demand titles don’t materially swing viewing,” Netflix wrote in a letter to shareholders earlier this year.
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Acosta Patel is a summer associate at the innovation strategy consulting firm Innosight.