Do you want to be a Hollywood gamer? Covid and streaming have changed all the rules

Streaming hit Hollywood quickly. In its wake, the industry is rushing to find a new way of doing business, to rethink who is responsible, how contracts are put in place and how stars are paid.

Studios are shaking up their executive ranks, empowering executives with backgrounds in business development, technology, and strategy. Producers, filmmakers and actors such as Will Smith and Tom Hanks are trying to protect their interests in new deals that aren’t built around selling tickets in theaters.

With most theaters in the United States closed and studios sitting on billions of dollars in unreleased movies, parent companies see streaming as their best opportunity for growth. Domestic box office revenue last year was just $ 2.28 billion, up from $ 11.4 billion in 2019, according to Comscore.

Now, the downtown discussions about how many Disney +, HBO Max, and Peacock subscriptions have compared to Netflix. Executives ask how much tech companies like Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. spend on movies and shows, and how long films are expected to appear exclusively in theaters, if at all.

A sign of how change is reshaping Hollywood, Warner Bros., owned by AT&T Inc.’s WarnerMedia, for the first time in nearly 100 years of history, does not have a single executive whose only job is to oversee the production and distribution of films for the big screen.