Overview:
In the second step of our project, we want to answer the question: why is the movie theater industry struggling to recover post COVID? The following data visualizations and analyses examine preferences and spending habits that changes during COVID, specifically regarding streaming services. This insights help to explain why movie theaters are still struggling today.
At home or In Theaters?
The double bar graph above shows the percentage of surveyed adults in the United States who would rather watch movies at home versus in theaters. In 2018 before COVID, the differences was minimal, with watching movies at home being only slightly above watching movies in theaters. But in 2022, watching movies at home was the preference of 18% more of the surveryed adults, growing significantly since 2018. This simple visualization begins our dive into understanding why movie theaters are struggling as we look into why consumers have a greater preference for watching movies at home post COVID.
Reasoning Against Theaters
The horizontal bar chart above shows popular reasons given by surveyed adults in 2021 on their reasons to not return to movie theaters, or their reasoning to go less frequently. They were also asked their likelihood of going to theaters again, which can be seen in the color differentiation and legend. This visualization makes it clear that the presence of streaming services is the number one reason why consumers are not enthusiastic about returning to theaters in 2021, when the country was beginning to transition back into normalcy. Other popular reasons are shown, including regards about price and how interest in theaters was declining before COVID. These final reason each demonstrate one insight: people do not feel that they are getting enough value out of their movie ticket. For the same price, they can watch the movie from home. And it's not necessarily about not having enough money, which is the lowest frequest for reasoning, but more that the movie experience in theaters is the same as the movie experience at home, so why not just conveniently stay home? This data set makes it clear that movie theaters need to reclaim the luxurious experience they once had, innovating to meet the current interests of consumers searching for worth-while experiences.
The Rise of Streaming
The visualization to the right is the result of 2,100+ adults in the US surveyed about their use of subscription video-on-demand services in 2023. This bar chart shows an increase of over 10 percentage points in five years, confirming the numerical legitimacy of the reasonings previously explored.
Streaming Compared to Other Digital Home Entertainment
The image above is beneficial to visualize how streaming has risen in comparison to other forms of digital home entertainment, such as electronic sell-thru and video-on-demand. The values represent consumer spending in billion USD. Sharp increases in spending on suscription streaming services are seen in recent years, during COVID and post COVID. This visualization makes it clear that the streaming frenzy is not going away anytime soon. If streaming is the main cause for movie theater struggle, then movie theaters need to innovate in order to 1) stay relevant and 2) differentiate themselves from streaming a movie at home.
Release Strategies
This final visualization above shows the release strategy preferences of over 2,200+ surveyed adults. Preferences varies slightly for drastically different genres, such as action versus indie. But overall, the primary takeaway from this data set is that there is still an interest for movies to be released in theaters. The least favored release strategy is exclusively on streaming services, showing that people still want watch movies in theaters, and consumers believe that theaters and streaming services can coexist. It is the responsibility of the movie theater industry to understand what makes today's consumer interested in going to theaters in order to reclaim its role in the entertainment industry.
In this step, we have explored how the rise of streaming services during the pandemic has deterred consumers from movie theaters. In the next step, we pull from data sets to make suggestions to the movie theater industry on ways that they can innovate and reclaim their place in the entertainment industry.