• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 21, 2023

The largest streaming service in the world will hold its very first Upfront presentation in the smallest venue on the Upfront Week schedule.

The presenter is Netflix, and the venue is the one it operates in New York City -- the Paris Theater, seating capacity: 571, according to its website.

The theater (pictured above) is likely the smallest venue for an Upfront staged during Upfront Week in the modern history of the Upfronts.

No other event space or theater reserved for the Upfront Week presentations next month accommodates less than 2,000 attendees.

Indeed, the largest venue of Upfront Week looks to be Radio City Music Hall, which claims a seating capacity of 6,013.

It is where NBCUniversal has held its annual Upfront for years, just steps away from its 30 Rock headquarters in the heart of midtown Manhattan.

As in past years, NBCU's 2023 Upfront at Radio City will be the first of Upfront Week on Monday morning (May 15).

Disney has chosen a large and flexible venue for its Upfront on Tuesday afternoon, May 16 -- the event space known as North Javits, the northernmost section of New York's sprawling Javits Center.

Located on the Hudson River in the West 30s, North Javits is not a theater, but a raw event space that the Javits website says can accommodate 5,000 seats.

Last spring, Disney used a similar venue for its Upfront called Pier 36 on the other side of town, not far from the South Street Seaport alongside the East River.

For this year's Upfronts, Disney seems to have traded places with TelevisaUnivision, which is scheduled to hold its Upfront at Pier 36 on Tuesday morning, May 16. TelevisaUnivision used North Javits last year.

When TelevisaUnivision announced the venue change last winter, the reason given for the switch in published reports was the company’s desire to find a bigger space than North Javits.

But online, event-space directories peg Pier 36’s capacity as the same as North Javits, 5,000.

On this subject, a disclaimer: Online searches for venue seating capacities cough up conflicting figures for some of the event facilities -- especially the kinds of raw, flexible spaces represented by North Javits and Pier 36.

Theater capacities seem more accurate on the Internet. That is not surprising because theater seats are more easily counted, or so it would seem.

Warner Bros. Discovery's Upfront is slated for Wednesday morning, May 17, at the Theater At Madison Square Garden, which for years was the traditional Upfront venue for the Turner Networks, now part of the huge WBD.

Seating capacity for the WBD Upfront will certainly exceed 2,000. But apparently, seating arrangements in this theater, which is part of the Madison Square Garden complex at Penn Station, are also “flexible” -- anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000, according to multiple sources.

Presumably, this has to do with the way seating is expanded for different events. Whatever the capacity, the Theater at MSG has always been a great Upfront venue.

This year's Fox Upfront on Monday afternoon, May 15, represents the company's return to an historic theater after holding last year's at the decidedly modern venue called Skylight in Battery Park City on the far lower west side of Manhattan.

This year's Fox presentation will be at the 2,200-seat Hammerstein Ballroom on West 34th Street.

The Hammerstein opened in 1906. For many years, the Fox Upfront was held at the flamboyant, 1929 Beacon Theatre on Manhattan's upper west side -- capacity 2,600.

As for Netflix, the Paris Theater's small size seems counter-intuitive. In Upfronts such as the ones mentioned above, great stages such as Radio City's present opportunities for dazzling entertainment.

The Paris stage, if any, is likely minuscule compared to the rest. The theater was built as a movie house, not a venue for live entertainment.

Throughout its history, it has been primarily a destination for foreign films, independent films and what used to be known as “art” films.

What the Paris lacks in capacity, it makes up for in elegance. It is a jewel box of a theater that stands next to the north façade of Bergdorf Goodman on 58th Street just west of Fifth Avenue and catty-corner to the famed Plaza Hotel.

The Paris is Manhattan's last single-screen cinema and was threatened with extinction until Netflix took over operations in 2019 and then embarked on a two-year renovation.

Now the Paris is a showcase for Netflix movies and next month, the streaming giant's first Upfront.

As such, the Netflix Upfront figures to be a hot ticket.