In the recent year with Covid-19 and with entertainment culture naturally evolving, movie releases have almost primarily moved away from theaters, and successfully into streaming services.

For example, HBO’s Zack Snyder Justice League cut was not only a fix-up to a pretty terrible movie from 2017, but it also presented a new way of releasing special movies to audiences outside of movie theaters. Zack Snyder’s Justice League is an almost four and a half hour long epic film, over twice the length of the original Justice league movie from 2017. The Snyder cut wouldn’t have done well in theaters due to its extremely long run-time because the theater would have to limit its showings to only twice or three times a day, so HBO Max having the movie on their service allowed anyone to watch it at any time they wanted.

By extension, this could give filmmakers inspiration to create extremely long films and sell them to a streaming service, then still be able to have an audience. The success of Zack Snyder’s Justice League now lives as proof that people are willing to see movies of incredible length, and if the movie is compelling enough, they’ll watch it.

The advantages of streaming services don’t only extend to filmmakers, but to the audience as well. The price of a single ticket to a theater is almost as much as one month of Netflix, so of course a streaming option for new movies would be infinitely more palatable. Driving to theaters takes gas too, and with prices of gas constantly being on the rise, people would also rather preserve gas and only use it when necessary.

Marvel has moved a lot of people away from theaters as well with their new approach to releasing content. Since the release of Avengers Endgame, Marvel has entirely moved their releases to Disney+, and has seen great success.

Only time can tell if streaming will eventually kill theaters, but with Covid dying down and theaters reopening, theaters may make a comeback.