Shares of the American cinema chain rose sharply yesterday after Bloomberg reported that Amazon plans to invest $1 billion each year in films slated for theatrical release.
According to Bloomberg, the company will eventually make between 12 and 14 films for theaters each year, but will start with a smaller number next year as it ramps up production.
Such an investment would be the largest commitment to date by an Internet company in films intended for theatrical release and would put Amazon on a par with major studios.
Amazon acquired US studio MGM earlier this year for $8.45 billion, the online retailer’s second-biggest acquisition ever, giving it the rights to more than 4,000 film titles, including Licorice Pizza and Robocop, as well as over 17,000 TV episodes of shows such as Fargo, vikings and The Handmaid’s Tale.
Although Amazon provided few details at the time about its plans for the studio, it said it would not make all of the studio’s content available through its streaming services and would also support releases. in theaters for movies.
Amazon spent US$13 billion on content for its combined video and music streaming services last year, an increase of $2 billion from the 2020 figure.
The company has experimented with theatrical releases of the first two episodes of the recent hit the Lord of the Rings (which he also claimed as his most successful streaming launch) and comedy The big sick but focused on distributing content through the Amazon Prime Video streaming service.
Rival Netflix has been particularly reluctant to give the films it produces a wide theatrical release before they appear on the streaming service. He recently published Glass onion: a mystery at loggerheads in a limited number of screens in the United States, but the scale of this release was much smaller than the industry had previously anticipated.
Funded by Netflix Mathilde the musical will meanwhile receive a wider theatrical release in the UK and Ireland under a unique deal with Sony Pictures before it hits Netflix in those territories next year.