Three weeks ago, Carnival cruise ship, the Zaandam, left Buenos Aires. The passengers on board didn’t realize that they would be on the ship for much longer than they planned. In the midst of the current pandemic, most countries have closed their ports, forcing the ship to sail country to country searching for a place to land. There have been 4 deaths on board, two have been confirmed to be coronavirus-related, nine more passengers have tested positive and over one hundred others are experiencing flu-like symptoms. They are currently en route to Ft Lauderdale, Florida, where they hope to finally land and disembark.
In the context of the dramatic societal changes, illness and loss of life that has accompanied Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), film releases are minor considerations moved well into the background. Still, studios are forced to take radical steps to account for the sheer inability of moviegoers to leave their homes to go to the theater. The immediacy of streaming directly to the home, the phone and device has been rapidly coming for years. Now, through a global pandemic, it’s a necessity rather than a choice.
Theatergoers who enjoy watching films on the big screen will always be willing to do so, especially with IMAX and 3D currently not an option at home. However, that too will eventually change as technology advances as it always does with people able to watch films at home with most of the amenities they can get in a theater. They will also be blessed with the ability to turn around and tell a fellow viewer who can’t stop talking to shut up with a lesser likelihood of getting stabbed than there is when doing so with a fellow theatergoer who cannot shut his or her cellphone off or won’t stop yapping in a theater. It will be less expensive too.
Now though, the film industry from top to bottom has been thrown into suspended animation due to COVID-19. The impact will depend on a myriad of factors. To continue providing content that was scheduled to be in theaters and get some return on investment, streaming services like Amazon, YouTube and Google Play are making films available far earlier than normal. That does not mean studios are panicking and releasing all films this way. It is noteworthy and illuminating to see which films have been moved, which are being released to account for the lock-down, and how it can impact the entire industry sooner than expected.
Films like The Invisible Man, Birds of Prey, Bloodshot and Emma are all available now. The cost to rent them is high at $20, but if it is a replacement for people who would otherwise have gone to see these films in the movies, it isn’t costlier. In fact, if there were several people going to see it and a family, streaming it is cost-effective despite the diminished experience from not seeing it at the movies.
The studios have clearly analyzed the films, the star power involved, how much it cost to make and what the expected gross would be and decided whether it was worth it to stream movies that were set to be released during quarantine and if releasing them or moving them was the better strategy. Like Vin Diesel’s Riddick obsession, Bloodshot is another vehicle that might or might not have caught hold. This is a drastic difference between his role in The Fast and the Furious series. The latest planned installment, F9, was moved to 2021. While the series elicits eye rolls from non-fans due to its preposterousness, it has its built-in audience that will go and see whatever they put out if there’s lots of speed, explosions, an over the top villainy and hand-to-hand combat.
This illustrates the “they’ll go see it anyway” theory to which too many filmmakers have adhered. The Terminator series is a prime example of what happens when a previously successful concept meets disputes over film rights, different incarnations and a final desperate attempt to “return” to the original for a dwindling audience of people who remember that original in the first place. The last film, Terminator: Dark Fate was a bomb. The return of Linda Hamilton to a film that was supposedly the linear connection to the original two films The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The problem was that there were multiple films, television shows and more related to the story with some being quite entertaining. Hamilton’s return as Sarah Connor might have been welcomed even as recently as 2005 or so, but the actress was semi-retired and needed to be coaxed back into the role with a chunk of the intended audience saying, “Who?” or shrugging off her return.
Would it have been as big a bomb had it been available for immediate viewing at home? The profit would be less were that the case, but the “bomb factor” could have been mitigated. People had either grown tired of the convoluted and ever-changing storylines or simply no longer cared enough to spend the money to go see it. Filmmakers will need to look at their project objectively and not adhere to the views of sycophants when determining what steps to take.
Films that are essentially guaranteed winners like the latest James Bond installment No Time to Die, Black Widow, Wonder Woman 1984, and Peter Rabbit 2 were all moved so they could be released to theaters. Doing so was a safe bet.
The films that will be most impacted are the period pieces, potential surprise hits, independent films and the lower-tier concepts that are a labor of love with few expectations and sometimes end up finding an audience. With the home viewership, they might rise to the top and it could end up being easier than to try to get that same result from a theater.
The reaction to the theaters being shut down and the need for studios to put into action backup plans that may previously have been limited to “eventually” has sparked this debate. “Eventually” is here. Even in this content-rich world, people are locked in their homes with limited alternatives to stay engaged and entertained without repetition. The Corona-inspired lockdown has sped the concept of “going to the movies at home” and kicked open a door that was incrementally opening anyway. It could be the saving grace for many films that might otherwise have been swallowed up without a viewership they deserved.
Sunday, March 29th, a US representative confirmed that there was an ongoing situation at Ghweranprison in Syria. Prisoners were chanting loudly and rioting. This prison, run by Kurdish Syrians, houses several ISIS members. During the riot on Sunday, the men ripped doors off of walls during the altercation and the four escaped. All four were recaptured on Monday morning and escorted back to the prison. This escape attempt comes in the wake of European forces withdrawing money and personnel, allegedly due to concerns of coronavirus and their economic stability.
An employee of the Washington National Cathedral remembered something important. During the H5N1 virus, the avian flu, the cathedral purchased 5000 N95 masks in order to maintain pastoral care without endangering the clergy. The avian flu turned out not to need such drastic measures, so the masks were packed away into a crypt. The masks were from 2006, so as soon as they were discovered Cathedral staff contacted the CDC to determine their efficacy and shelf life. The masks are perfectly usable, so 2000 were donated to the National Children’s Hospital, 3000 to Georgetown Hospital, and the remainder was retained for clerical use.
After days of back and forth, the $2 trillion stimulus package was approved, including individual checks for Americans. There are a few caveats to receiving the money, or course. An adult will receive $1200, and each child will receive $500. There is no stated cap on the number of children as far as we know. To qualify for the full amount a single adult must make less than $75,000 per year, or a couple must make less than $150,000 annually. If you make more than this you will still get a partial payout. There are caps, if a single person makes more than $100,000 or a couple makes more than $200,000 they do not qualify. You do not need to file anything extra. As long as you have filed for taxes in the 2018 or 2019 the IRS already has the information they need.
A doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC has sent out the call to all currently healthy, recent coronavirus patients. He wants to try using their blood plasma, plasma that is full of antibodies against the disease, to help their sickest patients. State health officials are in the process of injecting sick patients with antibody rich plasma in order to stimulate their immune system. Labs are also doing trials for testing kits that screen for antibodies. If this is successful, then labs could easily screen thousands of people a day. This is all occurring in New York, but if successful could be applied to all forms of COVID-19 treatment.
The Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) is certainly no joking matter. Still, there are moments of levity to be had in the way people are reacting to what is about as close as society has come to a genuine zombie apocalypse so far.
With the popularity of zombie films and television shows that speculate on the societal breakdown amid the rise of the undead and vicious, virus-infected humans for whom any semblance of reason and rationality has been extinguished, comparing these characterizations may yield some interesting facts of fiction vs. reality.
Note: World War Z is not mentioned because it was little more than a capitalizing on the popularity of the genre and was a Brad Pitt vehicle that none other than Pitt himself thought was barely mediocre after it had substantial changes due to its previous terribleness.
The Walking Dead
The first few seasons of The Walking Dead were willfully dedicated to the zombies themselves and how the survivors navigated the new world while seeking to regain some sense of normalcy and basic rules of decorum. As time passed, the zombies receded into the background as scenery while humans retreated to their baser instincts and fought each other with personal beliefs and ethical, moral quandaries moving to the forefront.
As the Coronavirus spreads across the globe and the woefully unprepared authorities try to enforce curfews, lockdown orders and various mandates to try and prevent people from making it worse, this is the initial stage of “What’s happening here?” and “Wow, this is real, what do we do?”
The Walking Dead had a leadership void where some mostly well-meaning people took charge in certain instances with Shane Walsh and Rick Grimes generally – generally– thinking about others even if it was in the context of their own interests. Of course, self-interested dictators took charge in other areas framed under the guise of “evil” with The Governor and Negan. The Governor was simply sociopathic and brutal; Negan at least had some sense of order. Rick eventually degenerated closer to their level than they elevated to his.
The pandemic has not reached the point of a leadership void where elected officials are concerned about their own future any more than they usually are, and law enforcement has not abandoned its post in the flight stage of fight or flight.
There will inevitably be the rise of cult leaders and demagogues such as there are now in worldwide governments and hucksters trying to get money from desperate people in a more egregious way than they do during “normal” times.
The generally useless Fear the Walking Dead gave a strangely better version of how people ignore what is happening around them as they seek to maintain their mundane routines with basketball games ongoing as zombies with blood dripping down their chins are walking toward them. This dovetails with a significant amount of disbelief that it was really happening until the lights went out and the TV and internet no longer worked. Coronavirus has not gotten to that point…yet.
Night of the Living Dead is about as close to being the biological parent to The Walking Dead as anything in the genre, so its somewhat condensed version of a zombie apocalypse applies despite differences in how it happened.
28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later
Yes, the 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later infected were more rabid human than zombie. That aside, the way in which the rage virus started, was passed on from one human to another, and how fast England devolved into chaos was a well-researched and inherently realistic narrative of how humans behave when the constraints of consequences are removed and the survival instinct takes hold. This is applicable for any fast-spreading virus that eliminates a person’s ability to reason and turns them into bloodthirsty entities for whom scratching and biting is their prime directive.
The virus started, predictably, with scientists infecting monkeys with the “rage” virus in the guise of research. Animal activists sought to free the monkeys and unwittingly unleashed the virus on the human population. This could be equated with the perceived start of Coronavirus in which someone allegedly decided it was a good idea to eat exotic animals – urban legend says it was a bat – in Wuhan.
With the rage virus, it happened so quickly and infected people indiscriminately with a 15-to-30-second incubation period that society took no time to gradually break down – it simply collapsed.
If the spread of Coronavirus occurred with such wanton rapidity, the downfall would likely mirror what happened with the rage virus. Every person for him or herself; endless destruction; other countries willing to help but focusing on their own interests and safety; and a blockade, especially if the country of origin was an island like Britain.
Whereas 28 Days Later first centered around fighting off the infected, then spun into a human vs. human fight for survival and ended on a hopeful note, 28 Weeks Later indulged in no such ambiguity.
Once the infection was supposedly eradicated and people were repatriating to Britain, the outlier of a person who was immune to the virus but could carry it led to the country being re-infected and a clear scenario of how military order and decision-making results in the need to serve the needs of the many over the needs of the few through extermination as a means of containment.
A decision on the part of the helicopter pilot at the film’s conclusion in taking a child who, like his mother, was immune to the virus but was a carrier is the exact type of selfless and stupid act of kindness that gets exponential people killed.
People who are getting on airplanes now knowing they have either been exposed to or outright have the Coronavirus just so they can “get home” is tantamount to slipping through the cracks of an overwhelmed security system and lack of checks and balances to prevent it from spreading.
That helicopter pilot wittingly violated protocol because there was no one left to answer to and unwittingly allowed the virus to reach France and mainland Europe, dooming the entire continent. That could easily happen with the Coronavirus when people are largely left to their own judgment and that judgment is rarely based on fact, but on emotion.
The Night Eats the World
A lesser known zombie film that was not overtly meant to capitalize on the popularity of zombie horror, but focuses on the aftermath rather than the evolution, The Night Eats the World is probably as close to viable in the zombie context as was 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later.
How does a human survivor move forward knowing that civilization no longer exists? How long can one maintain sanity?
The Night Eats the World asks and answers the question of what happens after the catastrophe has already done most of the damage it could do and people have come to grips with the new world realizing they can no longer fantasize about a return to “before.”
The running zombies are attracted to sound. The protagonist basically accepts the turn of events and tries to create a sense of normalcy with music and staying occupied with rudimentary forms of time-killing entertainment. The basic needs of water and heat are solved relatively obviously with rainwater and building a fireplace. He becomes delusional like someone trapped in a desert without water and loses interest with an increasingly self-destructive “I don’t care anymore” attitude. Life becomes little more than a moment to moment enterprise with nothing to do other than live as an end unto itself.
People being forced to remain indoors during Coronavirus leaves them with little alternative but to interact in close quarters with their housemates whether that is blood relatives, spouses and children, or roommates. Even those who live alone must learn to accept a certain level of isolation. Contrary to the zombie apocalypse, there are outlets for human contact with the internet and telephones, so there will not be a person who is simply trapped in his or her own head. Eventually though, tensions will rise to the surface whether they were previously present or not.
Retreating to the primordial instinct for survival, the “new world problem” of awareness and memory sabotages an attempt to move forward for the more cerebral people. Survivalists or people who are accustomed to fending for themselves will have a better time of it, at least from the outset.
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From The Simpsons‘ Treehouse of Horror III, there’s also a likelihood that people would use the opportunity to take lawlessness and an absence of consequences to carry out personal vendettas with slightly better nuance than Homer Simpson did below.
The key point is that in zombie movies, there seems to be a greater acceptance of the new daily life, sooner. With Corona, people are still clustering in groups, going to beaches, going to parks, waiting for their food order and disbelieving the repeated reports of the potential severity of the outbreak.
Part of that is the ineffectual response of those in power. People are advised to stay in their homes and go out only when they need medicine, groceries or other basics…and they can also go out to exercise. During a deadly pandemic, outdoor exercise is not a priority. This is a concession to “people are gonna do it anyway,” but many laws are in place to prevent “people from doing it anyway.”
The preposterousness of fist-fighting over toilet paper and hand sanitizer might make a viral video that is undeniably funny, but it is also a sign of what will be prioritized. Water, canned goods and first-aid supplies come before toilet paper.
These priorities and that people react better in fictionalized versions of a global meltdown is somewhat terrifying. With the current pandemic, the virus itself started out as the enemy that some took seriously and warned about while others cavalierly dismissed. There is still a long-range and selfish tilt to how supposed leaders and agenda-based political commentators and reporters are treating it with partisanship taking precedence over safety. Perhaps it takes the finality and unambiguous nature of a zombie apocalypse to change that. The sense, however, is that people would still be standing in line at Starbucks and be thrilled when the person in front of them is bitten by a zombie or a virus-infected human just so they don’t need to wait as long for their Caffè Americano.
One year ago, March 2019, a man carried out a massacre in two New Zealand mosques. The attack killed 51 worshipers, injuring even more. The man arrested, Brenton Tarrant, has been maintaining a not-guilty plea since his arrest, but has changed his mind and has now plead guilty. He was scheduled to be tried in June but, due to the plea change, has been convicted on all counts instead. It is unclear as to the reasoning behind this plea change. The news broke at the same time that New Zealand began a nation wide lock-down to prevent spread of the coronavirus.
This week, on March 26th, the United States Space Force will launch a satellite. It is the 6th, and final, next-generation Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite to be launched. It will be attached to a United Launch Alliance Atlas V Rocket and will lift off between 3 and 5 PM from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force station. These satellites circle the earth in a geostationary orbit 22,200 miles above the planet and, per the missions statement, will “provide vastly improved global, survivable, protected communications capabilities for strategic command and tactical warfighters operating on ground, sea and air platforms.”
In 2005 the Real ID was passed as a way to make state IDs more secure. Per the act, all US residents needed to have a Real ID, marked by a star on the front of the card, by October 2020 in order to board commercial flights and visit federal buildings. This October deadline has now been pushed back indefinitely. In a statement made on the 23rd of March, President Trump explained that “at a time when we’re asking Americans to maintain social distancing, we do not want to require people to go to their local DMV.” The new, and extended, deadline will be announced later this week.
