As we’ve seen over and over again in the last year, a great box office performance can be an ideal primer for streaming success. It seems Universal is demonstrating this yet again as Wicked shifts to PVOD viewing. Blake & Wang P.A. entertainment lawyer Los Angeles, Brandon Blake, takes a closer look.
Fantastic First Week
In its first week on PVOD, Wicked has added a further $70M to its takings, bringing in $26M of that on its very first release day. This has propelled it to the highest Day 1 and first week on record for a premium-released theatrical title from Universal. In fact, it has almost doubled its previous record for the Super Mario Bros Movie, which launched at $44M.
The title will remain in an exclusive PVOD streaming window for another 2.5 months until shifting to NBCUniversal’s Peacock service for general streaming. This comes after its 40-day exclusive theatrical window.
A Slight Strategy Change
Interestingly, Wicked saw a small shift in Universal’s typical strategy, which has been to shift movies to PVOD after their fifth weekend in-theater. Instead, they chose to leave Wicked in theaters an extra week to capitalize on New Year’s Eve moviegoers and net some extra publicity along the way, including a Rose Parade float for the movie.
Although, as we would expect, its PVOD release has impacted the film’s box office takings, it is currently sitting at $453M domestic and $686M globally and added just short of $10M over the past weekend.
Notably, the Universal Group has been one of the few studios to formalize its offerings into set “PVOD windows” in this way, with that exclusive streaming release window now being an integral part of their release strategy. It is estimated to have generated around $1.5B in extra revenue from them. Will we see other studios and distributors look to a similar strategy as we go forward into the streaming era? It will certainly be interesting to watch.
Film and Television 