Hollywood How To

Themes And Laughs From The Andy Griffith Show [1961] - Andy Griffith

2019-07-09T12:52:00.001-04:00

“It’s A Wonderful Life” and Jimmy Stewart

2018-12-25T12:02:00.007-05:00

Special thanks to Amanda K Schalau for sharing this article!
Color Photos by Raymond Tharaldson Vice President / Booyah Productions
Just months after winning his 1941 Academy Award for best actor in “The Philadelphia Story,” Jimmy Stewart, one of the best-known actors of the day, left Hollywood and joined the US Army. He was the first big-name movie star to enlist in World War II.

An accomplished private pilot, the 33-year-old Hollywood icon became a US Army Air Force aviator, earning his 2nd Lieutenant commission in early 1942. With his celebrity status and huge popularity with the American public, he was assigned to starring in recruiting films, attending rallies, and training younger pilots.

Stewart, however, wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to fly combat missions in Europe, not spend time in a stateside training command. By 1944, frustrated and feeling the war was passing him by, he asked his commanding officer to transfer him to a unit deploying to Europe. His request was reluctantly granted.

Stewart, now a Captain, was sent to England, where he spent the next 18 months flying B-24 Liberator bombers over Germany. Throughout his time overseas, the US Army Air Corps' top brass had tried to keep the popular movie star from flying over enemy territory. But Stewart would hear nothing of it.

Determined to lead by example, he bucked the system, assigning himself to every combat mission he could. By the end of the war he was one of the most respected and decorated pilots in his unit.

But his wartime service came at a high personal price.

In the final months of WWII he was grounded for being “flak happy,” today called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

When he returned to the US in August 1945, Stewart was a changed man. He had lost so much weight that he looked sickly. He rarely slept, and when he did he had nightmares of planes exploding and men falling through the air screaming (in one mission alone his unit had lost 13 planes and 130 men, most of whom he knew personally).

He was depressed, couldn’t focus, and refused to talk to anyone about his war experiences. His acting career was all but over.

As one of Stewart's biographers put it, "Every decision he made [during the war] was going to preserve life or cost lives. He took back to Hollywood all the stress that he had built up.”

In 1946 he got his break. He took the role of George Bailey, the suicidal father in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The rest is history.

Actors and crew of the set realized that in many of the disturbing scenes of George Bailey unraveling in front of his family, Stewart wasn’t acting. His PTSD was being captured on filmed for potentially millions to see.

But despite Stewart's inner turmoil, making the movie was therapeutic for the combat veteran. He would go on to become one of the most accomplished and loved actors in American history.

When asked in 1941 why he wanted to leave his acting career to fly combat missions over Nazi Germany, he said, "This country's conscience is bigger than all the studios in Hollywood put together, and the time will come when we'll have to fight.”

This weekend, as many of us watch the classic Christmas film, “It’s A Wonderful Life,” it’s also a fitting time to remember the sacrifices of Jimmy Stewart and all the men who gave up so much to serve their country during wartime. We will always remember you!

Postscript:
While fighting in Europe, Stewart's Oscar statue was proudly displayed in his father’s Pennsylvania hardware store. Throughout his life, the beloved actor always said his father, a World War I veteran, was the person who had made the biggest impact on him.

Jimmy Stewart was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985 and died in 1997 at the age of 89.

Color Photos by Raymond Tharaldson - Have a Wonderful Christmas!
Special thanks to Amanda K Schalau for sharing this article!

American News Broadcasting: Farewell President George H. Bush!

2018-12-05T14:39:00.001-05:00

American News Broadcasting: Farewell President George H. Bush!: George H.W. Bush was a patriot who loved his country and served it throughout his life. He showed grace and compassion and now will shin...

Rupert Murdoch could buy Fox regional sports networks back from Disney at a discount of billions

2018-10-27T14:08:00.002-04:00

by Alex Sherman

The front-runner to buy 22 regional sports TV networks from Disney is the same company that sold them in the first place.

“New Fox,” the company that will remain after Rupert Murdoch sells $71.3 billion worth of 21st Century Fox assets to Disney, is the leading contender to buy back the RSNs it “sold” to Disney as part of the larger transaction, according to people familiar with the matter. Those networks broadcast the games of 44 professional teams from Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League

Formal offers haven’t come in yet. As Sports Business Daily reported, Disney only recently sent out its bid book to prospective buyers. News that Fox was considering buying back the channels was previously reported by The Information.

But people familiar with the process, who asked not to be named because the negotiations are private, say New Fox is the most serious buyer for all the networks. That’s a cleaner outcome for Disney than selling the networks piecemeal, which would bring in smaller buyers and private equity firms.

Premium: Bob Iger Rupert Murdoch split

Getty Images

Disney is a motivated seller because it can’t get its larger deal for Fox done without divesting the networks. The Department of Justice forced Disney, which owns ESPN, to sell the networks to alleviate concerns about too much sports programming power in the hands of one company. In fact, the networks might never even change hands, depending on when Disney’s larger deal of Fox closes.

Winning back the sports networks would be a coup for Rupert Murdoch, who could get the RSNs at a lower price than the value at which he sold them to Disney — a price that was driven up nearly $20 billion by Comcast’s rival bid for the bundle of Fox assets. There may also be beneficial tax benefits to Murdoch, related to tax-deductible amortization, one of the people said.

A declining asset that’s worth more to Fox than anyone else.

There are several ironies here.

First, while the DOJ forced Disney to sell the RSNs to get the larger deal done, the networks were never a crown jewel asset for Fox, Disney or Comcast. Fox was willing to sell them (and did). Disney took them because it wanted other assets from Fox (its studio, its stake in Hulu, Star India).

Meanwhile, Comcast saw the RSNs as an albatross and was equally willing to divest them, according to people familiar with the companies’ thinking.

Regional sports networks used to be huge value-adds for the cable industry. They carry exclusive broadcasting rights to local games, which come with devoted fan bases. About a decade ago, the networks began to hike carriage fees, knowing cable providers would agree to the higher prices rather than risk alienating customers by blacking out the networks. That led to a steady rise in the cost of cable for consumers. Residents of markets like New York or Los Angeles, which have multiple teams and a handful of RSNs, were paying fees up to $10 a month (baked into their monthly cable bill) whether or not they were watching the games.

In recent years, pay-TV providers, which have seen millions of customers cut the cord, have started to see RSNs differently. Providers have pushed to tier them onto packages that appeal just to sports fans while keeping costs lower for everyone else. This has decreased the value of the networks, which are no longer automatically part of everyone’s basic cable packages.

Several pay-TV providers have dropped regional sports networks, refusing to pay their high programming fees. For instance, SportsNet LA, which broadcasts L.A. Dodgers games, which hasn’t been carried by DirecTV for five straight years.

If Fox ends up with the sports networks again, part of the reason will be that no other large pay-TV distributor -- Charter, AT&T, Comcast or Dish -- saw value in owning the networks. While Sinclair Broadcast Group CEO Chris Ripley has discussed making an offer for the networks with private equity support, it would need quite a bit of help. Sinclair’s market capitalization is just $2.8 billion. The regional sports networks were valued at more than $20 billion, according to a Guggenheim Securities analysis.

It’s still unclear how much New Fox is willing to spend on the networks — or what Disney values them at. What is clear is that Disney needs to sell them.

Disney to divest regional sports networks post-deal.

The second irony is Murdoch can once thank rival Comcast for making him money if he ends up with the networks.

When Comcast and Disney were jockeying to buy Fox assets earlier this year, one thing was never in doubt -- Murdoch wanted to sell to Disney. Several times, Murdoch aligned himself with Disney’s bids against Comcast.

Yet, the competitive Comcast bids let Murdoch net $19 billion more for his bundle of assets.
Now, Comcast’s participation could help him get the sports networks at a bargain.

Disney originally agreed to buy the Fox assets for $52 billion. Comcast’s rival bids for Fox pushed the price up to $71.3 billion. In that process, it pushed valuation of the RSNs higher, as it did for all of the assets (including 39 percent of British TV provider Sky, which Comcast later agreed to buy).

Disney almost certainly won’t find a buyer that will pay that inflated valuation for just the networks. New Fox’s most likely competitor (barring a competitive bid from a company like John Malone’s Liberty Media) is a private equity firm -- and there’s little chance a leveraged buyout firm could win a bidding war for the RSNs and satisfy its limited partners that it would make a future return on the assets.

(Disney, by the way, will end up getting $15 billion back for selling its 39 percent stake in Sky and possibly about $20 billion for the RSNs, making that $71.3 billion Fox deal look more like $36 billion.)

It’s possible Google, Amazon or another technology company would eventually be interested in the networks for the sports rights. But that seems unlikely. The regional sports networks are tied to a legacy cable system that tech companies typically view as anathema. If Amazon or Google wants regional sports rights, they can just wait until current contracts expire and bid on them then.

The final irony is Fox’s decision to sell the RSNs to Disney may have actually convinced Murdoch that it was better off keeping them. In the months following Fox’s decision to sell, New Fox has clarified its focus, centering itself around news and sports. Netflix publicly praised the company for that decision last week.

It’s possible Fox has come to the conclusion owning the RSNs makes more sense than selling them, even if it didn’t think so 10 months ago.

Disclosure: Comcast is the owner of NBCUniversal, parent company of CNBC and CNBC.com

Final Cut Pro X: Library management and organization

2018-10-05T11:17:00.001-04:00

How To Photograph And Composite A Commercial Beverage Image In Photoshop.

2018-10-05T10:18:00.001-04:00

WHAT IT TAKES To Edit Big TV Shows

2018-10-05T10:17:00.001-04:00

13 Disney Park Secrets

2018-09-28T09:16:00.001-04:00

5 Stories of Abandoned Movie Sets and Filming Locations

2018-09-28T09:10:00.001-04:00

Kodak Presents Disneyland '59 - DisneyAvenue.com

2018-09-28T09:04:00.001-04:00

15 Years Ago Today We Lost This Mega Star!

2018-09-12T10:42:00.005-04:00

Raymond Tharaldson

15 years ago today Johnny Cash left his home here on earth to join June in their new home on the other side. I had the honor of meeting him and his amazing family on several occasions. His concerts felt more like a family jam session than the over produced flash and bang of today's music events. His persona was overwhelming and yet you felt like part of an extended family in his presence. I took this image at the end of his concert. It was the last frame of film I had left on the roll. Long live Johnny Cash!
https://www.facebook.com/JohnnyCashIsAlive/…

Canon Camera on RC Car (Traxxas Summit)

2018-09-04T12:41:00.001-04:00

RC Camera Platform - Eclipse Rover

2018-09-04T12:13:00.001-04:00

Hollywood How To: 21st Century Fox Agrees to Higher Offer From Disne...

2018-06-20T23:08:00.001-04:00

Hollywood How To: 21st Century Fox Agrees to Higher Offer From Disne...: Disney CEO Bob Iger with Fox’s Rupert Murdoch in a picture distributed by Disney in December, around the time a deal between the ...

21st Century Fox Agrees to Higher Offer From Disney

2018-06-20T19:43:00.002-04:00

Disney CEO Bob Iger with Fox’s Rupert Murdoch in a picture distributed by Disney in December, around the time a deal between the two companies was first announced. Photo: Disney

Disney to pay more and add a cash component; Fox calls pact superior to Comcast’s bid

by Keach Hagey and Erich Schwartzel

Walt Disney Co. DIS 0.99% raised its offer to purchase most of 21st Century Fox FOX 7.25% to more than $71.3 billion in cash and stock, topping an unsolicited offer from rival Comcast Corp. CMCSA 1.77% and escalating the bidding war for the coveted media properties.

Disney’s new offer is far higher than its original deal, $52.4 billion in stock, and surpasses Comcast’s all-cash offer of roughly $65 billion. In addition to having the higher offer, Disney said it also has the regulatory advantage over Comcast in winning a company to help it fight back against new-media competitors like Netflix Inc.

Fox, in a news release, said the new Disney deal “is superior to the proposal” made by Comcast earlier this month. A Comcast spokeswoman had no immediate comment
Disney and Comcast are battling for prized media assets including the Twentieth Century Fox film and TV studio; U.S. cable networks FX and regional sports channels; international assets such as Sky PLC and Star India; and Fox’s one-third stake in the streaming service Hulu.

Fox and Disney were negotiating terms of an amended agreement over the weekend and had the outlines of a deal by Tuesday, though they were nailing down details like the mix of cash and stock, a person close to the situation said.

Disney submitted its bid Wednesday ahead of a Fox board meeting in London, another person familiar with the situation said. Fox Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch and Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger met to discuss the new pact.

Disney agreed to pay Fox shareholders roughly 50% in cash and 50% in stock. If the current deal closes, Fox shareholders would own 19% of the combined company, compared with 25% under the old deal.

Some observers have said it might make sense for Disney and Comcast to divide the Fox assets among them, but Mr. Iger said that idea is a nonstarter. “We have an agreement in place with [Fox] that precludes that,” he said on a conference call Wednesday.

Disney also has time on its side, Mr. Iger said, because the company’s deal with Fox has undergone several months of regulatory review. “We believe that we have a much better opportunity, both in terms of approval and the timing of that approval, than Comcast does,” he said.

The CEO also highlighted how Fox’s programming would boost his company’s efforts to launch a Disney-branded streaming service next year and directly compete with Netflix. “Direct-to-consumer distribution has become an even more compelling proposition in the six months since we announced the deal. The consumer is voting—loudly,” he said.

Content Creation

As tech firms have increasingly plowed money into original content, Hollywood has been scrambling to keep up

*Compound annual growth rate †Assumes 60% of FOX’s TV and cable content spending in the pro-forma Disney company, as well as 100% of 20th Century Fox and 100% of Hulu. Note: Production and programming costs are estimated based on company documents, reported operating expenses associated with marketing and overhead and proxy-based calculations.

Source: RBC Capital Markets; Graphic by Hanna Sender / The Wall Street Journal.

The fight for Fox is part of a scramble by media, telecom and cable companies to get bigger as the superpowers of the technology industry have disrupted old ways of doing business.

Neither proposed deal includes Fox News, Fox Sports 1, the Fox broadcast network or its television stations. In either scenario, those assets would be spun off into a new company, for the moment dubbed “New Fox.”

On a per-share basis, the new Disney deal values the Fox assets being acquired at $38 a share, compared with Comcast’s offer of $35 and Disney’s original offer of $29.54, based on the last trading day before it was announced.

The fight for Fox is part of a scramble by media, telecom and cable companies to get bigger as the superpowers of the technology industry have disrupted old ways of doing business.

Neither proposed deal includes Fox News, Fox Sports 1, the Fox broadcast network or its television stations. In either scenario, those assets would be spun off into a new company, for the moment dubbed “New Fox.”

On a per-share basis, the new Disney deal values the Fox assets being acquired at $38 a share, compared with Comcast’s offer of $35 and Disney’s original offer of $29.54, based on the last trading day before it was announced.

On Wednesday, Fox’s class A shares rose 7.5% to $48.08, and Comcast shares added 1.8% to $33.39.

Disney shareholders didn’t appear to mind stomaching the higher price as the stock rose 1% to $107.15, but some analysts said the move was foolish. “We didn’t like the deal at the prior price, and we like it substantially less now,” said Doug Creutz of Cowen & Co. The analyst said a Disney-Fox tie-up isn’t the way to win the direct-to-consumer fight.

A continuing bidding war between Disney and Comcast could be a strain on both companies’ balance sheets. Disney Chief Financial Officer Christine McCarthy said the company no longer expects to complete a $20 billion share repurchase announced with the initial deal in December.

Fox’s board and shareholders have had to weigh a number of factors as they measure the offers, including their structure. More stock in the deal has tax advantages for shareholders.

These tax advantages might be particularly large for Fox shareholders, such as the Murdoch family, who have held Fox’s stock for a long time and thus face a potentially large capital gain to pay taxes on if it is sold for cash. Rupert Murdoch and his family have a 17% economic interest in 21st Century Fox. 21st Century Fox and Wall Street Journal-parent News Corp share common ownership.

Disney said the stock part of the deal is expected to be tax-free to 21st Century Fox shareholders.

Other shareholders, particularly the large institutional shareholders that are Fox’s biggest investors, may care less about taxes.

People close to Fox have said that the Murdochs are looking for the best financial deal and are working in the best interests of all shareholders.

As a result of the new Disney offer, Fox postponed the special meeting of shareholders it had originally scheduled on July 10 to “a future date.”

Disney’s offer puts a “collar” on the stock portion, saying Fox shareholders would receive Disney shares equal to the $38 price so long as Disney’s stock price is between $93.53 and $114.32.

Regulatory hurdles have been a consideration. The Justice Department would have to sign off on either deal, and Fox cited regulatory concerns among its reasons for rebuffing Comcast’s initial approach.

However, last week, a judge struck down the Justice Department’s attempt to block AT&T ’s acquisition of Time Warner Inc. Comcast believes the court’s approval of a “vertical” merger between a distributor and a content company should nullify Fox’s regulatory concerns, since a Comcast-Fox tie-up would have similar characteristics, people close to the cable giant say.

Mr. Iger said Wednesday that he still believed a “vertical” merger of the kind Comcast proposed for the Fox assets faced regulatory headwinds.

—Austen Hufford and Dana Mattioli contributed to this article.

Booyah Productions: Motivational Speaker TShane Johnson Pitch Video fo...

2018-05-16T18:55:00.001-04:00

Booyah Productions: Motivational Speaker TShane Johnson Pitch Video fo...: PRESS RELEASE: Motivational Speaker TShane Johnson was asked to provide a pitch video for the legendary long running game show Match Gam...

Interview with Alice Cooper on late musician Glen Campbell

2018-05-09T23:05:00.001-04:00

GIRAFFE ATTACKS award-winning movie director while shooting film in South Africa

2018-05-05T18:56:00.005-04:00

The last photograph of Carlos Carvalho, who was killed by a giraffe

by Mike Behr

Carlos Carvalho was taken to hospital but died from head injuries after shooting scenes with a giraffe called Gerald, with witnesses saying the killer blow came without warning

A SOUTH African movie director was killed after being hit by a giraffe while shooting close-ups of the wild animal at a South African game farm.

Carlos Carvalho, 47, was shooting scenes at a British expat's game farm when the giraffe, called Gerald, swung its neck - hitting him on his head and sending him flying.

The last photograph taken of the award-winning South African director has since been shared, with witnesses recounting the devastating tragedy that unfolded on Wednesday.

Focus puller Drikus van der Merwe said: "I was standing right next to Carlos when the giraffe suddenly swung its neck and hit him on his head above his ear and sent him flying about four or five metres through the air."

He said that the animal had initially seemed to be "inquisitive", with the crew shooting close ups of its body and feet.

He added: "Then while Carlos was looking through the camera eyepiece Gerald swung his neck and hit him against his head.

"It came out of nowhere and Carlos didn’t even see it coming. He wasn’t aware of the danger.”

Mike Behr

The giraffe, called Gerald, was being filmed when he hit the film director

Mike Behr

Carlos was an award-winning South African movie director

A stunned Van der Merwe said he unwittingly captured the last photos of Carvalho alive, taking a photograph for the 47-year-old's family.

He said: "About five minutes before he got hit Carlos gave me his phone and asked me to take some photos of him on the rig for his kids.

"He was talking so highly of them and his wife. I feel so sorry for them."

The film crew had been at Glen Afric, a North West Province game farm where tourists can view and pet wild animals, to capture footage for a German movie Premium Nanny 2.

Mike Behr

A Christmas card previously sent out by the South African game farm, showing Gerald the giraffe

Mike Behr

The film director had been at the farm

Carlos, who has won a number of awards including a Silver Lion at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003 for a public service announcement for Childline and a 2014 African Movie Academy Cinematography Award, was airlifted to Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg, but died about 9pm on Wednesday.

The South African game farm he was at is located in Broederstroom, 64km from Johannesburg.

Better known in the movie business as Brookers Farm, it has also been a popular filming location for hundreds of international movie and TV shoots for the last 40 years.

It is best known in the UK as the location for the ITV series Wild At Heart.
The show ran for seven series from January 2006 to December 2012.

Mike Behr

The giraffe will not be put down, owners of the park said

Glen Afric spokesperson Jenny said that Carvalho had ignored safety instructions not to approach the animal, saying: "He was unauthorised to film. He went off on his own.

"He wanted to get some shots to prove a point. He was trying to excel.

"Gerald was not to blame and would not be put down, said Brooker.

“We are not going to shoot Gerald. He was not in the wrong. I don’t consider him to be a dangerous animal.”

She said unlike Shamba the lion who was shot on another South African game farm after mauling his British owner Mike Hodge on Monday, Gerald the giraffe showed “no animosity, no malicious intent".

She said: "He’s just a huge wild animal and the guy disobeyed safety regulations. I’m very sad for his family. But I’m not one of those people who blames the animals."

Open Mind Film Screening, "I'll Be Me"

2018-04-22T09:55:00.001-04:00

DP/30: Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me, James Keach

2018-04-22T09:09:00.001-04:00

Disneyflix Is Coming. And Netflix Should Be Scared.

2018-04-15T19:22:00.001-04:00

Will Disney destroy the movie theater?

by Derek Thompsom

No company has been more responsible for shaping the modern entertainment landscape than Walt Disney. In 1937, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, its first feature film, Disney invented the family blockbuster. In 1954, with Disneyland, an anthology series hosted by Walt Disney himself, it became the first movie studio to strike out for the wild west of television. Since then, Disney’s dominance has only grown. Of the dozen films with the largest worldwide box-office take since 2010, Disney released eight.

Those successes, however, belie real danger on the horizon for Disney. In recent years, many of the company’s traditional strengths have slowly turned into weaknesses—like a fairy-tale castle gradually flooded by its own moat.

Take television. Disney has long prospered thanks to the cable bundle, which, like a private-sector tax system, levies a large annual fee on the vast majority of U.S. households. Disney’s most valuable network, the sports juggernaut ESPN, collects approximately $8 per cable-package subscriber a month. No other basic-cable channel makes more than $2.

But the cable business is floundering. Nearly half of adults ages 22 to 45 didn’t watch any broadcast or cable TV in 2017, according to a study by the marketing agency Hearts & Science, and the number of so-called cord cutters abandoning cable is growing by the year. This is troubling news for ESPN, whose daily viewership has declined more than 10 percent since 2011. It’s nearly as troubling for Disney, which makes more money from television than from its movies or amusement parks.

The U.S. film business, meanwhile, has arguably been in slow-motion decline since Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. The typical American bought more than 20 movie tickets a year in the early 1940s, a period in which Disney pumped out Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi in three consecutive years. But ticket sales plunged after the rise of television in the ’50s, and they’re still falling: The typical American bought fewer movie tickets in 2017 than in any year during the previous two decades. Among the key demographic of 18-to-24-year-olds, North American movie-theater attendance has declined 17 percent since 2012, a sign of more bad news to come for Disney.

That is, if it sticks to its traditional ways of making money. Americans aren’t watching less video entertainment each year. They’re actually watching much, much more—on their smartphones, laptops, and internet-connected TVs—thanks to the rise of streaming, where Netflix, not Disney, reigns supreme. It might seem confounding that Netflix’s market value is about 90 percent of Disney’s, considering that Disney does many things profitably while Netflix has one specialty, internet video, and hardly makes a dime on it. But investors and young people agree: The future of entertainment will be streamed. And that means Netflix, with its nearly 120 million global video subscribers, has an early lead in the race to become the next generation’s showbiz colossus.

Economic history holds a rich archive of once-thriving firms that were overtaken by technological change. Far shorter is the list of companies that forestalled their demise by nimbly adapting to defeat new competition. It’s much too early, however, to count Disney out. The company is mobilizing, in two major ways, to outrun Netflix and remain the dominant player in American entertainment.

First, Disney has announced that it plans to acquire most of the assets of 21st Century Fox. If the Justice Department approves the $52 billion deal, Disney would gain possession of the 20th Century Fox film studio, including Fox Searchlight (which has produced Best Picture Oscar winners such as Slumdog Millionaire, Birdman, 12 Years a Slave, and The Shape of Water), the X-Men franchise, the FX and National Geographic cable channels, several regional sports networks, and the television production company that makes Modern Family and The Simpsons. The resulting conglomerate would own as much as 40 percent of the U.S. movie and television industries.

Second, and more important, Disney is building a streaming product to deliver its content, old and newly acquired, directly to consumers—let’s call it Disneyflix. When it launches, in 2019, it will include several exclusive series and every film in the Star Wars, Marvel Entertainment, Pixar Animation Studios, and Disney Animation universes.

Disney, in other words, is constructing what looks to be a worthy rival to Netflix. Will this be enough to inaugurate another century of dominance? Based on its public statements and on private conversations I’ve had with Disney executives, the company’s most likely path forward is to nurture Disneyflix gradually, in an effort to ease the decline of pay-TV and film—the equivalent of saving its flooding fortress by plugging each new leak as it springs. That may be a prudent way to maintain the status quo for a few more years. To save the kingdom, however, Disney may have to blow up the castle.

Black Panther, Disney’s latest box-office megahit, offers a perfect lens through which to see both the benefits of Disney’s traditional model and the virtues of a new path. The acclaimed film grossed more than $575 million at the domestic box office in its first month, showcasing Disney’s unique ability to create broadly appealing entertainment in a culture that often feels like an agglomeration of cult interests and niche tastes. But in film, as in television, Disney relies on middlemen to deliver its content—and middlemen always take a cut. To buy a ticket to see a Disney film in theaters, you pay an exhibitor that keeps about 40 percent of the ticket price.

What if Disney bypassed the middlemen and put a highly anticipated film like Black Panther on its streaming service the same day it opened in theaters—or made the film exclusive to subscribers? In the short term, sacrificing all those onetime ticket buyers might seem financially ruinous. But the lifetime value of subscriptions—which renew automatically until actively canceled—quickly becomes profound. If the film’s debut encouraged just over 4 million people to sign up for an annual subscription to a $10-a-month Disneyflix product—about the same number of subscribers that Netflix added the quarter it debuted its original series House of Cards—Disney would earn a net revenue of nearly $500 million in just the first year. Black Panther was a massive hit as a theatrical release; it could have been even bigger had it been used to transform onetime moviegoers into multiyear Disneyflix subscribers.

“If I were sitting in [Disney CEO] Bob Iger’s shoes, I would realize that the most important thing I can do is create original exclusive content for my streaming product that is unencumbered by any other platform,” Rich Greenfield, a media and technology analyst at the investment bank BTIG, told me recently. (One week later, he made the case explicit in a research report, one section of which was titled “Why Releasing All Disney Movies on Streaming Is Not Crazy.”) Among other benefits, he said, Disney would get valuable personal data on its biggest fans, which it could use to customize its video service and offer special discounts for merchandise and theme-park tickets.

The math might make this seem like an easy call for Disney, but let’s not underplay how radical this move would be, and how seismic the effects on the existing entertainment industry. In recent years, the theatrical-release business has been carried by blockbusters—and Disney has been perhaps the most reliable producer of those. From 2010 to 2017, films earning more than $100 million have grown from 48 percent to 64 percent of the domestic box office, according to the research firm MoffettNathanson—and Disney has made the year’s top-grossing film in six of the past seven years.

If Disney moves its films, en masse, to a proprietary streaming platform, it would smash movie theaters’ precious window of exclusivity and leach away crucial revenue. Exhibitors such as AMC and Regal may find themselves on an accelerated path to bankruptcy or desperate consolidation.

Zohar Lazar

This is a future, in other words, where the movie industry as we know it ceases to exist. “We’re entering a world where theatrical movie openings will be optional,” says Ben Fritz, an entertainment reporter at The Wall Street Journal and the author of a new book, The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies. “Fierce competition in streaming will put more pressure on Disney to put its best content first on [Disneyflix].” Diehards might still fork over $20 to see the new Star Wars film on a big screen surrounded by thunderous sound effects and fellow fans dressed up as Kylo Ren. But many families would begin to regard movie tickets the way today’s cable-TV subscribers regard tickets to a baseball game: an expensive way to communally experience an event already available at home at no additional cost.

The collateral damage to the TV business would be no less significant, and might give Disney executives even more pause. The House of Mouse faces converse challenges in film and television.

Disney has an incentive to leverage its studio-film business to grow its streaming service. But the success of Disney’s streaming service could also cannibalize its lucrative TV enterprise.

Nobody benefits more from the modern cable-TV industry than Disney—or has more to lose from its erosion. In its latest fiscal year, Disney made about 40 percent of its total revenue, or about $24 billion, from its television networks, including ESPN, the Disney Channel, and ABC. But since 2010, viewership for traditional television has fallen 51 percent among Americans ages 12 to 24, according to Nielsen. This decay will accelerate as Disney’s streaming service gets off the ground and fewer people feel the need to pay for cable when they can subscribe instead to Netflix and Disneyflix (and Amazon Prime Video, and HBO Go). For young people in particular, a cable subscription may soon seem as antique as going to the opera.

Will Disney have the audacity to plunge headlong into streaming? The head of Disney’s direct-to-consumer business, Kevin Mayer, has said that the company is “all in” on its streaming business. For the moment, at least, a more accurate description might be all over the place. With its pending purchase of 20th Century Fox, the company seems to be betting equally on its future and its past—adding a formidable library of content from Fox for Disneyflix, but also buying regional sports networks for the cable bundle.

The sports bet could be a particularly shortsighted one. If Disneyflix accelerates the demise of cable, ESPN and other sports networks will feel the decline especially strongly. These channels remain profitable for the moment, but they carry burdensome contracts—ESPN pays nearly $2 billion a year for its NFL rights, for example—that will become crippling if millions more viewers cut the cord. This year, Disney is launching a new ESPN subscription sports-streaming service, but for now it’s considered a supplement to cable, without marquee games, and not a true hedge against further declines in cable viewership.

Caution is a predictable strategy for any publicly traded company, perhaps even more so at Disney.

Bob Iger has enjoyed a celebrated run at the helm of the company, but many of his seemingly bold moves have actually been safe ones. He’s pleased shareholders by counting on the public’s bottomless appetite for nostalgia and lightly refurbished classics. He acquired Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm—each already successful—and amped up their revenues through expanded TV and film franchises.

Streaming presents a different challenge than figuring out the latest excuse for heroes to team up. For inspiration, the company might look to its founder. In the 1950s, when Walt Disney launched Disneyland on TV and opened his eponymous theme park in Anaheim, California, he envisioned his business as an infinity loop of merchandising, in which filmed entertainment sold toys, toys sold filmed entertainment, and both sold park tickets. It’s not hard to imagine how a Disney streaming product could work the same way. Disneyflix wouldn’t carry advertisements for other brands, but it could function as a nonstop advertisement for Disney itself. With individual data on millions of viewers, Disney could customize coupons for toys and Disney-branded experiences for its biggest fans. Subscribers at premium membership levels could get special offers for Disney cruises and line-skipping passes at Disneyland and Disney World.

In this vision, Disneyflix wouldn’t just be Netflix with Star Wars movies—it would be Amazon for Star Wars pillowcases and Groupon for rides on Star Wars roller coasters and Kayak for the Star Wars suite at Disney hotels. That’s a product that could rival Netflix and create the kind of profits Disney has enjoyed during its unprecedented century of dominance. The company just has to destroy its own businesses—and the U.S. entertainment landscape—to build it.

This article appears in the May 2018 print edition with the headline “Will Disney Kill Off the Movie Theater?”

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