Once upon a time, Hollywood folks hated the idea of trading box office dollars for digital pennies.
Theatrical was where your film could make real money—let’s say, $50 to $100 million for a medium-budgeted picture; $200-$300 million for a blockbuster; and half-a-billion or more for a real hit—before hitting each progressively poorer stop on the revenue waterfall (physical media, then VOD, then streaming/cable) to earn back whatever was spent on production and marketing.
Again: theatrical dollars, digital pennies.
Netflix turned that whole model on its head. Netflix makes digital dollars, and lots of them: last year, the global revenue figure was about $30 billion, which is a hair under three times the total domestic box office for 2019 ($11.3 billion), the last year...