• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, October 3, 2014

Netflix’s distribution deal with The Weinstein Company for a “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” sequel on both big IMAX screens and digital streaming is making theater owners squirm in their seats -- perhaps the seats that they need “butts” to sit in.

Like broadcast network affiliates, these theater owners are looking for some positive news about the future. 

Content owners want to get their product into consumers’ hands as quickly as possible -- on any screen and at the lowest cost. How will they save money? Well, connect the dots.

For affiliate TV stations, this increasingly means giving up a larger percentage of retransmission fees to their networks. And when it suits a network to move to a better local outlet, it’ll do so easily and quickly -- as Fox recently told Tribune, which owns KCPQ Seattle.

Rich Greenfield, media analyst at BTIG Research, toldBroadcasting & Cable: “Affiliates are helpless, left to settle for whatever economics their broadcast parents are willing to allow them to have (for now).”

Big movie studios no longer own theaters as they did a generation ago. Still, with new entertainment economics, can you predict where the studio/theater relationship is heading? Much has been made about ever-bigger in-home, higher- quality TV screens making inroads on still-big movie theater screens, and it’s possible other personal screens are now also making inroads.

Entertainment middlemen – whether network affiliates or theater owners -- need to adjust.  We’ve been down this road before, of course.  After all, how many record/music stores do you see around these days?