Summer is always important for the movie business, and this past one was the second-biggest ever for ticket sales.Studios succeeded by doing what they do best: recombinant franchise films featuring superheroes and beasts. Jurassic World helped Universal dominate box office totals, gobbling up US$1.65 billion worldwide. Meanwhile, the latest Marvel installments, Avengers and Ant Man, together reaped around $2 billion.Get used to this model. Universal will drop the next Jurassic installment in 2018, while Disney, which controls the Marvel cinematic universe, will hatch around a dozen synergistic superhero flicks over the next five years.Yet the biggest industry news of the summer didn’t emerge from the chain megaplexes and their monster grosses.Director Cary Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation opened to rave reviews at the Venice and Toronto film festivals. But more than the film’s style or premise, it’s the business model that has raised eyebrows around Hollywood.Rather than have a limited theatrical release, the low-budget film will be mostly skipping theaters altogether, and will instead stream directly to Netflix subscribers.Could it be a game-changer? Might it threaten the oligopolistic model through which the big studios and megaplex theater chains–AMC, Regal, Cinemark and Carmike (all boycotting Beasts)–have come to dominate the industry?
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