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From New Yorker

From Vox

Jared Leto, Florence Andrews, Adam Driver, Lady Gaga, and Al Pacino in House of Gucci.

And at the center of it all is Gaga’s Patrizia, who Maurizio declares is a dead ringer for Elizabeth Taylor. (You can kind of see his point.) She schemes, she cries, she makes decisions Maurizio’s too spineless to make himself. She calls a psychic on TV and becomes her best friend. She strokes Paolo’s ego and stabs him in the back. Gaga climbs inside the skin of — if not the real Patrizia — a fantastical approximation who smokes like a chimney, narrows her eyes till you expect lasers to shoot out, and turns every single scene she appears in into a grand, glorious showcase. Her hand gestures alone are worthy of close reading. She’s Lady Macbeth as diva, darling, and dancing queen.

So if the story never lands — why should I care about the Guccis? why doesn’t Ridley Scott appear to care at all about fashion, even a little? — it basically doesn’t matter because each new scene is a fresh chance to watch some performers cram ham into a camp sandwich and then have another espresso.

It’s become fashionable for critics and the ill-informed alike to declare that they don’t make movies like this anymore. I rarely buy it; usually, if you’re saying it, you simply aren’t looking hard enough.

But in this case, okay, I buy it. It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Ridley Scott managing to get the budget, cast, and runtime to make a three-ring circus like House of Gucci for the big screen, a drama for adults that doesn’t lean on IP with a built-in fan base or effects-laden spectacle to suck audiences in. When he’s gone, hopefully at a time in the very distant future, I am worried this kind of movie will go with him.

For now, though, at least we have House of Gucci, the kind of movie where a woman can tell her husband “it’s time to take out the trash” and mean his family, a movie with multiple candlelit bathtub scenes, a film in which an entire scene is set to the sounds of “I’m a Believer” in Italian, where the imperfect is elevated to perfection. I left my screening elated and wanted to rewatch it immediately. Several times. Long live cinema.

House of Gucci opens in theaters on November 24.

“Vinyl’s been surging, or resurging, from the dark ages since probably 2007, 2008. It just did so under the radar,” said Brandon Seavers, co-founder and CEO of Memphis Records, a vinyl manufacturer. “The pandemic hit, and everything exploded.”

Adele isn’t at fault for the vinyl supply chain’s problems. She, like all artists, wants to sell a lot of records, and even without her, the industry has been facing delays and setbacks and struggling to keep up with skyrocketing demand for quite some time. As Shamir, one Philadelphia musician, put it in an interview with NPR, “Adele is not the culprit” but also “is not helping.”

Adele has expressed annoyance at the lead time for the album, in an interview with BBC Radio noting that 30’s release date had to be set six months in advance to get CDs and vinyl made. “So many CD factories and vinyl factories, they bloody closed down even before Covid because no one bloody prints them anymore,” she said. And those that are printing them are having a hard time keeping up.

Vinyl records are no longer just for your dad

Vinyl was supposed to be killed off for good by CDs after the 1970s and 1980s. It turns out the format had some staying power, or rather, some resurgence power that emerged in the 21st century.

Vinyl sales started to pick up in the mid-aughts, and they got a significant boost when big-box stores, such as Walmart and Target, jumped on board and started ordering records. According to Billboard, the mass merchant sector now accounts for about 13 percent of vinyl sales, up from 4 percent in 2018. The pandemic pushed the vinyl revival into high gear.

“People were stuck in their homes, and so they looked for things to do. And they cooked and they baked sourdough and they planted gardens and they bought a Peloton. And apparently they also listened to vinyl records,” Seavers said. “The other factual thing that happened is that vinyl really caught the eye of big-box retail. Amazon was already a really strong supporter of the format, and Walmart and Target had been kind of dipping their toes into the water. In 2020, they dove in head-first.”

Like with lumber or computer chips, supply just hasn’t been able to keep up with demand. Earlier this year, one unnamed executive told Billboard that vinyl pressing plants globally have the capacity to make about 160 million albums this year. He estimated the demand for vinyl was somewhere around 320 million to 400 million units.

Vinyl pressing machines are old and clunky, and they’re hard to fix in normal times, let alone with the current delays that are affecting so many industries. Quinn said one plant he deals with had two of its six machines break recently. Parts that would normally take five to six days to replace took two months. The industry has faced labor shortages, too.

Getting raw materials is taking manufacturers much longer than normal, including the vinyl pellets that are melted down to be pressed into records. Most are produced overseas and shipped over, and therefore face steep delays. Color pellets, which artists and retailers often go for to produce limited-edition or exclusive versions, are proving specifically challenging.

“With the amount of exclusive variants we press on one record, I wonder if I’m making Beanie Babies sometimes,” Sean Rutkowski, vice president at Independent Record Pressing, told Variety.

Adele isn’t really the problem here

Adele’s 30 has generated some headlines and speculation about whether she’s making vinyl delays worse. Five hundred thousand records is a lot of records, but in the grand scheme of things when 160 million records are being made, it’s not really the end all, be all. None of this is to say Adele isn’t a huge deal. Her 25 in 2015 sold more than 3 million copies in the US in a week; her recent Oprah special averaged 9.92 million viewers, beating all programming except the NFL in primetime. Her 30 is something people want to hear, including on vinyl.

But again, the vinyl delays aren’t really her fault. The problem is more that production is at capacity already, and artists new and old, big and small, are all in line.

The vinyl industry has for a long time been driven by the classics — the Beatles and Eagles and Fleetwood Macs of the world. Now, newer artists are getting in on the vinyl game, too, such as Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Billie Eilish, and, yes, Adele.

“You have to do it like really upfront — and Adele had basically booked out all the vinyl factories, so we had to get a slot and get our album in there. It was like me, Coldplay, Adele, Taylor, Abba, Elton (John), all of us were trying to get our vinyls printed at the same time,” Sheeran, who put out a new album in October, told an Australian radio show, according to Variety.

There are rumors that some of the bigger names may be able to cut in line or make attractive offers to vinyl pressers to secure space for themselves, potentially crowding smaller names out. Still, a lot of the issue really just seems to be that of capacity. Independent artists are trying to compete for the same machines as the big guys, and everybody’s just waiting around. Presumably, Adele had to wait to get her records pressed, too

“In the industry, we’ve all been making these classics in higher and higher and higher numbers over the years, so those numbers were already in the system,” Seavers said. “You have new artists come along, and they want an incredible amount of new vinyl to meet the demand for their release date.”

By Billboard’s tracking, the list of the top 15 most-selling vinyl LPs year-to-date in 2021 includes albums from Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and Harry Styles — as well as Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, and Queen’s greatest hits.

The situation is bad for everyone, though for independent artists who are already at a disadvantage in so many ways across the music industry, it hurts more. “It’s a little more insult to injury for these indies because it’s the hard-earned money in their pockets, and it’s their tours that are suffering,” Seavers said.

Quinn said that ATO, as a mid-sized label, is better positioned than some smaller labels because they have longstanding relationships with pressing plants and agreements for a certain number of records a month. It’s still not as much as they need.

The vinyl boom isn’t the worst problem for the music industry — or Adele — to have

What no one wants is for an artist to have to go out on tour before their records can go out. Sometimes it happens, especially in the current climate, and when it does, it’s not great. Overall for the industry, though, the surge in demand for vinyl records isn’t a terrible problem to have.

“It sucks if you don’t have LPs to sell on tour or you sell out of your first pressing and you can’t get it made for another six, seven, eight months,” Quinn said. But ultimately, he said, this is a “very good problem.”

The internet and streaming have put a squeeze on music artists and made it harder to make money. They’ve changed a lot about what an artist has to do to actually survive, meaning they have to tour heavier and harder, produce more merchandise, and look for things they can have physical control of. Streaming revenue grew by 13.4 percent to $10.1 billion in 2022, according to RIAA, but it takes a lot of streams to make what you would off of the sale of a single LP. For artists big and small, a vinyl record, if you can sell it, is real money. And if Adele gets someone to buy their first vinyl record and they start buying others, that’s good.

The thing is, it takes time for supply chain issues to work themselves out. The vinyl industry is working to up capacity to the extent that it can. Seavers’s Memphis Records will press about 7 million records this year and is aiming to quadruple its output by 2023; it’s a change that won’t happen overnight.

Across the industry, it’s not clear how long the vinyl boom will last. Manufacturers and retailers and labels don’t want warehouses of LPs sitting around if the market cools off. It’s a tough balancing act to figure out whether the current demand surge will stick, or if it will surge even more. When My Morning Jacket, a band under ATO, was set to go with a new album this spring, Walmart and Target came in with buys doubling the number of vinyl records that they had initially planned to make, Quinn said. Still, he’s not sure how long this will go on. “That wasn’t there a year ago,” he said. “I don’t know how long Walmart and Target will be in the vinyl game for.”

In the meantime, everyone is sort of along for the ride — including Adele and her reported 500,000 LPs, (maybe) on shelves now.

  1. Yet despite its hugeness, Red Notice seems to barely exist on the cultural radar. While the Netflix streaming numbers are striking — the film racked up an impressive 148 million viewing hours in its first week, according to Netflix’s newly released top 10 metrics — and there was some buzz on social media, Red Notice looks and feels like the kind of movie that would be subject to a balls-to-the-wall marketing campaign and widespread distribution in US movie theaters. Why is the kind of cheesy, big-budget fun that would make a perfect summer blockbuster debuting on Netflix in November?

    It’s the kind of thing that feels like an anomaly but probably shouldn’t. With Covid-19 changing the way we experience the movies, and Netflix still disrupting the industry, the trajectory of Red Notice provides us with interesting insight into the direction “big” movies are headed: to a small screen near you.

    Red Notice seems like it should be a big-screen summer blockbuster, not a pre-holiday streaming aperitif

Hear me out: Yes, it’s become routine for films to either premiere exclusively on streaming platforms or to debut on streaming simultaneously or shortly after an in-theater run. The pandemic, obviously, has made staying indoors and streaming films preferable to braving long lines at the movieplex. Even before the pandemic, there was a reason “Netflix and chill” became the new euphemism for staying indoors and relaxing for the night.

Additionally, streaming companies often negotiate partnerships with major studios, like the surprising “same day-and-date release” contract that HBO Max and Warner Bros. briefly tried out for this year (though Warner Bros. quickly pivoted to an exclusive in-theater window only for 2022).

So, yes, movies are streaming now. That’s not the weird part about Red Notice.

What does feel weird is that Red Notice, panned by critics and beloved by audiences, seems like a film that’s designed to pack ’em in movie houses — and in another age, it would have. Red Notice is one of those films that seem destined to play to fans of niche geekery as well as fans of high camp. Reviewers dinged it for having terrible writing, an absurd plot, and a cast whose cardboard chemistry made the aforementioned terrible writing excruciating. All of this is profoundly true, and yet I, a plebeian, howled with laughter the whole time I watched it. I actually went and microwaved popcorn, because it felt like such an enjoyably popcorn-y movie.

The plot of Red Notice, such as it is, involves a deeply earnest search for “Cleopatra’s third egg,” a deeply ridiculous jeweled MacGuffin. Ryan Reynolds even refers to it as a MacGuffin, shortly after whistling the Raiders of the Lost Arc theme song, which tells you the no-fucks-given meta ambiance we’re dealing with. There’s also a deeply unsexy, hilariously flat tango between The Rock and Wonder Woman, and a splashy Ed Sheeran cameo. That’s everything you need to know.

In short, it’s the kind of frothy, superfluous glossy action comedy you want to watch on a big screen. Too bad that’s probably not going to happen, unless you live near a small town with a relatively large independent movie theater.

Originally, Red Notice was meant to be a big hit for Universal, which acquired the rights based on Thurber’s idea for a Dwayne Johnson star vehicle. (Thurber had previously directed The Rock in Central Intelligence and Skyscraper, which both had significant global box office returns despite flopping domestically.) After Universal got cold feet due to a flagging production schedule, however, a bidding war ensued and Netflix snapped up the film and committed to a hefty budget, reportedly between $130 million and $200 million.

From there, Red Notice’s fate shifted significantly. Netflix taking on the film meant a trade-off: The platform was able to commit to the blockbuster-size budget and hefty star salaries, and the massive size of Netflix’s subscriber base — now 214 million worldwide — guaranteed that a huge number of people would be directly introduced to the film when they logged on to their Netflix account.

But the Netflix acquisition also meant a much shorter run in movie theaters and a very nontraditional marketing rollout. That’s because Netflix films, in general, tend to have a hard time getting play in mainstream cinemas. And that’s because, as independent movie theater owner Jay Levin told me, cinema franchises were never going to release these films in traditional movie houses.

“The big boys — AMC and all — they’re not playing games with Netflix,” he told me. “They have enough films. … They’re not going to just bow to Netflix and just get a two-week [distribution window]. It’s not worth it to them.” The terms under which Netflix and other streaming platforms work with movie studios and distributors can vary widely and be subject to change. In other words, which films actually make it to theaters and how successful they’ll be alongside a streaming release is something of “a crapshoot,” Levin said.

“I only do it because they’re very reasonable in their terms,” he added. “And I [have] seven screens — I certainly wouldn’t do it if I had less.”

Levin runs the Bellmore Playhouse, an independent theater on Long Island. Red Notice played there, but just for a few days. The movie, he said, “is really what they call a filler” — but the prospect of a seat filler doesn’t appeal to major movie distribution franchises. A movie theater franchise like AMC, he told me, would “rather hold something from a major [film] company rather than go to Netflix.”

While other major streaming platforms like HBO Max and Disney+ also release their films in theaters, most of them have much longer windows for theaters to show the films in. Disney, for example, is giving all of its upcoming films an exclusive 45-day theatrical release before releasing them on Disney+. But because Netflix is solely a streaming company rather than a movie studio like Disney or a cable network like HBO, its ultimate goal is to drive subscribers. Therefore, it has less incentive to push for a longer in-theater release.

The difference makes itself felt at the box office: Red Notice star Gal Gadot’s 2020 hit Wonder Woman: 1984 premiered the same day on HBO Max and in theaters; but with a much longer release window, it went on to gross over $166 million worldwide. Compare that to Red Notice’s estimated opening weekend take of barely $1 million.

The short distribution window, combined with Netflix’s upstart role in the industry, means that a lack of a traditional movie run for these big-budget movies may be inevitable — at least as things currently stand. For Red Notice, the move to Netflix meant that not only did its time in movie theaters shrink, but the number of theaters showing it became minuscule. In the region around New York City, for example, Red Notice in its opening week primarily played a handful of independent theaters in small towns in New Jersey.

Granted, it wasn’t all bad; the movie chain Cinemark, which reportedly showed Red Notice in 750 theaters around the country, proudly declared in a November 12 press release that Red Notice was its best- performing Netflix film to date. But neither Netflix nor Cinemark has actually disclosed Red Notice’s box office performance — an omission that highlights just how nontraditional Netflix movies are.

So even though Red Notice is a blockbuster-size movie, we have to adjust our expectations for what its success looks like.

Netflix has started to swing toward big-budget movies with limited theatrical releases

This minuscule theater run is part of an increasingly typical pattern for Netflix, in which the company has focused on producing and distributing high-budget genre movies with big rollouts straight to the platform. In lieu of a traditional theater release, the buzzy 2020 Netflix action flick Old Guard still gave the platform the ability to boast about its high streaming numbers — even if the movie quickly vanished from the Netflix Top 10.

In February 2021, Netflix pushed the Korean sci-fi flick Space Sweepers, whose $22 million budget was atypically large for Korean cinema, to a receptive global audience of geeks, and that film, too, hit No. 1 on its opening day on the platform. Then came Zack Snyder’s May horror movie Army of the Dead, a major summer release with ongoing buzz — but one that, again, opened directly on Netflix. Though Army of the Dead did get a run in a few hundred Cinemark theaters, it was only a week-long deal, and the film grossed less than $800,000 in its opening weekend at the box office.

Levin pointed out that AMC recently negotiated a 45-day theatrical release window for Warner Bros. films, superseding the previous day-and-date release deal Warner Bros. had with HBO Max. That deal had been controversial, and seemed to produce disappointing returns for Warner Bros. — perhaps, as Levin noted, because the lack of an exclusive distribution time in theaters meant that audiences, conditioned to stay home due to the pandemic, were more likely to choose to watch the film on the streaming platform. (Vox has reached out to AMC for comment.)

It’s also arguable that Netflix doesn’t really need to offer a longer distribution window. The October prequel to Army of the Dead, for example, Army of Thieves, didn’t get the same in-theater treatment but was still a major success for the platform. If Netflix’s ultimate goal is generating new subscribers, then overall optics — like its newly public top 10 lists — are more important than the success of an individual film or series.

Netflix increasingly uses nontraditional marketing for its most traditional movies

Still, it certainly seems like Red Notice, which potentially offers the kind of silly, fun moviegoing experience that was routine before the pandemic, should be a film that plays on a big screen. Levin told me it did well for his movie house, pulling in about $1,500 for its one-screen, one-week run, but added that this was unsurprising, given its stars.

Levin observed that even though critics hated the film, it had the right ingredients to have done well at the cineplex with a traditional rollout. “It had Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds. … If they had done the right advertising, it should have been a picture that probably would have grossed $30 million, even with the bad reviews, because they’re very likable guys, you know?”

Levin pointed out that Red Notice also didn’t get a traditional marketing campaign — you won’t see many ads for it on television, for example — but this is arguably by design. Reached for contact, a Netflix spokesperson pointed out that the company did a widespread global ad campaign for the movie, including targeted advertising on television shows and sporting events. The trio of stars did the typical talk show circuit, but also dabbled in more unconventional forms of marketing like Ryan Reynolds’s Antiques Roadshow drop-in, as well as a major — and, honestly, deeply weird — TikTok trailer campaign.

@therock

You want a BAD ASS TRAILER for #RedNotice @Netflix? How about @Julianne and I create the FIRST EVER TIK TOK TRAILER? In theaters now and on #netflix THIS FRIDAY! #rocktok

♬ original sound - The Rock

Cringe though the TikTok marketing may be, it’s effective. The TikTok trailers have racked up more than 180 million views overall, and indicate that traditional, pre-Covid movie marketing may be neither as effective nor as necessary in 2021. And Netflix, perhaps more than any other streaming platform, has always had the added advantage of access on its side: As Ted Sarandos, then the company’s chief content officer and now its co-CEO, said in a 2015 interview, Netflix can forgo typical marketing campaigns because all it needs to do is serve content directly to viewers.

“A lot of the heavy lifting of getting audiences to the show is done with the user interface,” he noted. “We can launch a lot of these shows without spending any marketing. … The actual viewing of shows, the user interface is driving almost all of that.”

The company’s size and aims have obviously ballooned in the six years since that interview. Red Notice was part of a half-billion-dollar push to bring big-budget films to the platform; the runaway hit Squid Game was part of a half-billion-dollar investment in Korean entertainment and part of an even larger campaign to generate Asian subscribers. But the company’s approach to marketing seems largely unchanged: Awkward TikTok campaigns notwithstanding, the platform’s main marketing tool seems to be itself.

That said, Netflix has always been aware of the power an in-theater run holds for its prestige films — its Oscar- nominated titles like Mank and The Irishman have all had theater runs, if only to satisfy the Academy’s eligibility requirements. Its current crop of fall prestige films have each been given one- to two-week limited theater runs. And recent reports indicate the company is interested in expanding its in-theater window for films in order to make a bigger cultural impact.

It’s pretty hard to envision Netflix’s cultural impact becoming any bigger, but it’s true that individual Netflix films lack the cultural staying power of its major series. Arguably no Netflix movie has had the cultural cachet of Stranger Things or Orange Is the New Black, for example. Could a movie like Red Notice, despite the critical pans, wedge its way into the zeitgeist with a little more exposure?

There’s only one way to find out. But even if Netflix commits to a longer theatrical release window, there’s one unpredictable factor that no industry change can control.

“I don’t think we will ever see the [audience] numbers that we saw pre-Covid,” Levin observed, assessing the state of pandemic moviegoing. “The [studios] see now that the theaters can give relatively big grosses, still, on the big pictures. The little pictures still have trouble. And the arthouses are a disaster.”

Will they come back eventually? “I don’t know,” he said. “You just never know what’s going to happen next.” But whatever fate befalls movie theaters and their audiences, one thing seems abundantly clear: Netflix wins in the end, whether audiences stay home or not.

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