Mulan Promotional Standee Destroyed by Theater Operator Over Disney+ Premiere Announcement
Courtesy of movieweb.com:
A French movie theater operator took out his frustrations on a Mulan promotional standee after it was announced that the movie was hitting Disney+ instead of theaters. Disney announced earlier this week that the long-delayed movie will be available to stream for a premium price next month, leaving theaters out in the cold. While theater owners are not happy about the decision, it did boost Disney’s stock, which was badly needed after they reported losses of nearly $5 billion last quarter alone. In a new video, French independent theater owner Gerard Lemoine can be seen brutally destroying a Mulan promotional standee with a bat.
La réaction d’un exploitant suite à la décision de Disney… #Mulanpic.twitter.com/I2uWICofve
— Destination Ciné (@destinationcine) August 6, 2020
“It’s really a huge effort to stay open right now for most of us… By losing Mulan, we lost the possibility of offering our audiences a long-awaited film that would have helped us after these past hard weeks,” Lemoine says.
Movie theaters all over the world are currently struggling to figure out a way to safely open their doors. For the most part, everything has been shut down since the middle of March, and there doesn’t really seem to be any relief in sight.
The movie theater industry stands to lose nearly $31 billion this year, so they’re looking for any possibility of making some type of money. Mulan, along with Christopher Nolan’s Tenet were set to be the movies that helped theaters open their doors again this summer, but everything kept getting pushed back. The public health crisis continues to rage in North America, so most theaters won’t be opening at all for a long time. However, some spots in Europe are able to provide services to the public, which Tenet will take advantage of later this month.
As for other Disney movies opening on streaming services, Mulan appears to be a one-off. The highly-anticipated Black Widow movie is still on track to open in theaters at the end of this year, though anything could change between now and then. Disney is still intent on giving the Marvel Cinematic Universe movie the big screen experience, so it could be a lot longer before we end up getting to see it, especially if things keep going how they’re currently going. As for Tenet, it will open in select European theaters first.
Bill & Ted Face the Music is taking a different approach. It will open in theaters and on demand starting August 28th. The release date was moved up one week earlier this morning, which is good news for fans who have been waiting nearly 30 years for a sequel. Disney’s decision to experiment with the streaming of Mulan will be interesting to see. So far, it seems that a lot of people are willing to pay an additional $30 to see the long-awaited movie, which may turn the tide for Disney’s upcoming releases. For now, we’ll just have to wait and see. You can watch Gerard Lemoine destroy the Mulan promotional standee above, thanks to the Destination Cine Twitter account.
