CinemaCon 2025 - Amazon MGM Studios

The tech company affirmed their implicit promise to (metaphorically) replace 20th Century Fox, but the fear is that they are merely replacing STX Entertainment.

Amazon made its first “trip” to CinemaCon on Wednesday night and reaffirmed its commitment/promise to deliver around a dozen theatrical releases. And, amid a well-paced presentation that offered up sneak peeks and sizzle reels, the films previewed looked, on the whole, entirely intriguing. The implied hope was that Amazon MGM Studios would, via a regular slate of diversified (in terms of budgets and genre) mainstream theatrical offerings, supplement or outright “replace” what the multiplex ecosystem has badly lacked since 20th Century Fox was swallowed up by the Disney empire.

As noted many times, much of the “pre-COVID versus COVID-era” box office difference comes down to fewer studios releasing fewer movies compared to the 2010s. A considerable part of that vacuum was Fox, which previously dropped 15-25 movies a year, becoming 20th Century Studios, which offered up a handful of primarily IP-specific titles. The films on display were what we’ve allegedly craved, so the question is whether Amazon and friends can get audiences to show up for the very kind of films that they’ve regularly ignored since 2016.

The presentation began with a proverbial bang, namely the trailer for the Ryan Gosling-starring sci-fi melodrama Project Hail Mary. The flick, produced by Amy Pascal and directed by Chris Lord and Phil Miller (their first feature directorial effort since 22 Jump Street in 2014), concerns a hapless science teacher chosen for a likely suicide mission to save the galaxy. Having not read Andy Weir’s 2021 novel, it looks offhand like (not a criticism) a hybrid of The Martian and China’s (very good) Moon Man.

However, judging by the extended trailer, it also looks like (potentially a criticism) one of those seemingly “big” streaming-era movies that eventually become an isolated tale of one man stuck in a singular locale for most of the film. We know Ryan Gosling isn’t an opener, and I’ve long argued that the core myth of the streaming era was that the tech companies could develop original or existing IP better than legacy studios. If I seem pessimistic, it’s because the Project Hail Mary trailer reminded me of The Space Between Us.

I vividly recall sitting in the STX offices in early 2016 and watching their “The Gift wasn’t a fluke, dammit!” sizzle reel. I was newly horrified that the future of Hollywood would surely become “every franchise gets Force Awakens-ed.” As such, the early looks at Space Between Us, Edge of Seventeen, Desierto and Free State of Jones (okay, that one looked DOA, but I digress) offered hope that programmers could exist alongside nostalgia-skewing franchise revivals.

I was months away from realizing how wrong I was, as the general audience had already begun gravitating to streaming or VOD for their casual entertainment consumption. Those variables, affordable home theater set-ups, less reliable and fewer multiplexes, and those complicated shrinking windows, have only gotten “worse.” So, not even noting what looks to be an upcoming self-imposed economic recession, will the Amazon MGM of 2025 and 2026 be a return to 2011-2016 20th Century Fox or a repeat of STX Entertainment of 2016 and 2017?