A Tour I wish I'd never taken

When I rented Trolls World Tour for the princely sum of $19.99 three weekends ago, I merely thought I was providing something my six-year-old wanted during times of pandemic deprivation. I didn't realize I was also casting a vote on the future of film distribution.

But that appears to be what happened, as I contributed to the $95 million Universal has made by releasing the movie on VOD instead of theaters, which is obviously not an option right now. Instead of waiting until it is an option, like most studios are doing with most of their films, Universal decided to roll the dice on a rental release with a premium price associated with it.

And in doing so, seriously angered one of America's biggest theater chains.

AMC initially did not raise a fuss over the decision, which is similar to decisions being made by Disney in its release of Artemis Fowl and Warner Brothers in its release of Scoob!, given their recognition of the unprecedented situation and the creative solutions it is engendering. But it was the crowing over the success of Trolls World Tour, and Universal's announcement that it would consider both theatrical and VOD release platforms in the future regardless of the presence or absence of a pandemic, that spurred AMC into action.

Now, AMC has written a letter to Universal, advising them that AMC will no longer host any Universal film releases in any of its theaters.

AMC specifically cited Universal's lack of any "good faith negotiations" in terms of how the company might go forward to explore its greatest avenues to profitability. Citing the companies' years of partnership, AMC CEO Adam Aron says they were left out in the cold on Universal's decision to pursue the strategy it announced this week. The suggestion is that Universal should have given AMC the chance to counterpropose, but instead, they were treated like a red-headed stepchild, irrelevant to the company's fortunes.

Okay, so now they will show just how relevant they are to the success of Universal.

Or maybe they won't, which is the biggest gamble in this whole thing.

On the one hand, I am heartened that AMC feels confident enough in its standing that it can issue threats to one of the world's largest film companies. Maybe that means they are less likely to file for bankruptcy than has recently been rumored.

Or, maybe it means they are closer to bankruptcy, more desperate, and more rash. And maybe that's a bad thing for movie theaters on the whole.

See, this may just be the first salvo in a war that could eventually be won by studios. If audiences -- myself included, unfortunately -- tell the studios with their hard-earned dollars that they are just as happy to watch Trolls World Tour on the increasingly larger screens in their living rooms, it will embolden the studios to continue leaving theaters out of the loop. Those theaters are already running on fumes, and this could be the end of them.

And I could have played a small but meaningful role -- just as small but just as meaningful as the role played by any other single audient.

I hope I can sleep tonight.

The optimist in me never could have imagined that we might be near the beginning of the end. Sure, that optimist had seen the increasingly smaller numbers of people going to the movies. That optimist had noticed that being the only person in the audience was once an anomaly worth writing about, but had now become more commonplace. That optimist had heard that this year's box office was worse than the one before, which was worse than the one before that, which was worse than the one before that.

But that optimist also felt that going to the movies was such a bedrock part of our culture, of our very psyches, that it would never truly go away altogether. And that is, on some level, probably true.

But it's now clear that we are getting to the point where a moviehouse could become more of a novelty, the way the grand old single-screen theaters are a novelty to us now. A multiplex could be that kind of novelty, rather than one of the tentpole businesses in your local shopping mall.

And Trolls World Tour could have started it all.

Oh, if only my six-year-old son hadn't seen it being advertised on the screen while iTunes was up on my laptop, maybe none of this would have ever happened.