Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 75 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘A Woman Escapes’ Review: Screen Sharing

      by

      In this moody epistolary film, a woman in Paris works through a close friend’s death with the help of video correspondences.The title of “A Woman Escapes” references Robert Bresson’s 1956 classic “A Man Escaped” about a French Resistance fighter in a Nazi prison in Lyon. This intimate yet sometimes reserved epistolary film centers on a more contemporary moment in Paris as a woman named Audrey processes the death of a close friend. During what feels like a pandemic, she takes up correspondences that become lifelines out of the grief and creative block she’s feeling.Her video and audio exchanges were made by the film’s co-directors, a supergroup of experimental filmmakers: Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Cevik and Blake Williams. The medium is partly the message here too, as the visual textures vary according to the directors’ predilections — 16-millimeter film, high-definition video, even 3-D.The result joins a long lineage of personal-correspondence films, this one tinged with the “stuck” feeling of the isolating, screen-heavy stretches of the pandemic. Audrey (Deragh Campbell) putters about the apartment and pecks at work on her laptop, but the video letters can fling us outside — into the environs of Istanbul, for example, through Cevik’s missives — and include Williams’s exploration of Audrey’s neighborhood on Google Maps.Campbell, unforgettable in the Canadian indie “Anne at 13,000 Ft.,” gives a more interior performance that evokes the thoughtful focus she brings to her collaborations with Bohdanowicz (“MS Slavic 7”), but tempered here by a stay-in-bed mood of withdrawal. Her Audrey does nothing less than enact a kind of communion through voice and image.A Woman EscapesNot rated. In English and Turkish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Barry Newman, Star of the Cult Film ‘Vanishing Point,’ Dies at 92

      by

      Panned when it was released in 1971, the movie gained acclaim decades later. Mr. Newman also starred on TV in the legal drama “Petrocelli.”Barry Newman, whose terse integrity and understated rebelliousness made the 1971 movie “Vanishing Point” an enduring hit in the annals of American cinema about the open road, died on May 11 in Manhattan. He was 92.The death, in a hospital, which was not widely reported until this week, was confirmed by his wife, Angela Newman. While seeking treatment for back pain, she said, he came down with a lung infection that spread to his spine and heart.Mr. Newman was briefly a leading man in movies and television in the 1970s. He starred as a Harvard-educated defense attorney who moved to a small Southwestern town to work criminal cases in the 1970 feature film “The Lawyer,” and he reprised the character, Tony Petrocelli, in an NBC legal drama, “Petrocelli,” which ran from 1974 to 1976.Two decades later, he returned to prominence as a character actor, with small roles in memorable movies like Steven Soderbergh’s “The Limey” (1999); “Bowfinger,” also in 1999, alongside Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy; and “40 Days and 40 Nights” (2002), a romantic comedy starring Josh Hartnett.But Mr. Newman’s most notable performance was undoubtedly in “Vanishing Point.”In that film, he played Kowalski, a one-named car-delivery driver who makes a bet with his drug dealer while buying Benzedrine: If he can make it from where they are in Denver to San Francisco in about 15 hours, then Kowalski gets the amphetamines for free.“Vanishing Point” then becomes one long psychedelic car chase. Kowalski skillfully evades highway cops, nonchalantly accepts his deification by a rhapsodic radio D.J. named Super Soul (played by Cleavon Little), and befriends a succession of slender hippie-ish blondes. From conversations among police officers and Kowalski’s own flashbacks, we learn about his past as a decorated Vietnam War veteran, frustrated police officer and demolition derby racer.The bulk of the movie replaces dialogue with the sounds of a revving car engine, a police siren and a shredding electric guitar. The camera is often trained on Mr. Newman’s face — its shaggy hair, stubble, righteous sideburns, sharp jawline and watery blue eyes — as he stares ahead resolutely but wearily at desert highways that never seem to end.The other star of the movie is Kowalski’s car, a souped-up white 1970 Dodge Challenger that can go up to 160 miles per hour. It remains fairly pristine even as it kicks up enough dust to confound the highway patrols of several Western states.With characters making druggy proclamations about “the last American hero to whom speed means freedom of the soul,” the movie did not initially attract critical praise. Roger Greenspun, reviewing it for The New York Times, called it “a dumb movie that is nothing but an automobile chase,” and added, “I suspect that Barry Newman really can act, though in ‘Vanishing Point’ all he needs is a driver’s license.”Yet it is now regularly featured on lists of the best American road movies, car movies and action movies. Bruce Springsteen and Steven Spielberg have both ranked “Vanishing Point” among their favorite films.“It became a cult film without me even realizing it,” Mr. Newman told the movie journalist Paul Rowlands in 2019. “To this day, I’m always being asked to talk about it somewhere.”Barry Foster Newman was born on Nov. 7, 1930, in Boston, where he grew up. His father, Carl, managed the Latin Quarter nightclub. Barry visited on Sundays and saw performances by Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Milton Berle and others. His mother, Sarah (Ostrovsky) Newman, worked a variety of jobs, including saleswoman at Filene’s Basement and ticket seller at a movie theater.Mr. Newman earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Brandeis University in 1952. He then served in the Army until 1954, playing saxophone and clarinet in a military band.Several years later, while studying for a master’s degree in anthropology at Columbia University, Mr. Newman tagged along with a friend to an acting class being taught by Lee Strasberg. He was “mesmerized,” he told Mr. Rowlands, and soon began pursuing a career as an actor.He married Angela Spilker in 1994. They divorced in 2007 but got back together and remarried in 2018. She is his only immediate survivor.Mr. Newman lived in the same apartment in Midtown Manhattan from 1962 until his death.In portraying both the quick-witted lawyer Petrocelli and the stoic hot-rodder Kowalski, Mr. Newman became known for characters with opposing types of masculinity. That paradox, he told Mr. Rowlands, inspired him to take on the part of Kowalski in the first place.“I had just done ‘The Lawyer,’ where I was speaking nonstop for 90-odd minutes, and I got the script for ‘Vanishing Point,’” he said. “I wasn’t even thinking of the idea of the film or the existentialism of the character — I just thought it would be interesting to do a part where I am playing the antithesis of the character I had just played.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Brooklyn 45’ Review: A Little Something to Lift Their Spirits

      by

      A group of World War II veterans unwisely perform a séance in this ambitious yet airless supernatural thriller.“Brooklyn 45,” a claustrophobic mystery with horror-movie flourishes, plays out on a December night in 1945 in a Brooklyn brownstone crammed with military memorabilia. The home belongs to Clive (Larry Fessenden), whose wife died some weeks earlier and who has invited a few of his closest World War II comrades for what they believe will be a cheering-up session. But when the well-oiled Clive insists on performing a séance to contact his late wife, the group grasps this isn’t the sort of spirit-raising it had in mind.Less whodunit than who-done-what, the plot (by the director, Ted Geoghegan) unfurls in morality-play monologues that expose the characters’ biases and bigotries. Everyone has a story, and a transformative arc: Marla (Anne Ramsay), a bombing survivor with fearsome interrogation skills; her partner, Bob (Ron E. Rains), a deceptively meek Pentagon clerk; Archie (Jeremy Holm), a closeted war hero and possibly a criminal; and the bloodthirsty Paul (Ezra Buzzington), a uniformed xenophobe still running on battlefield fumes.As the séance progresses, Geoghegan uses the paranormal puffery (self-lighting candles, gooey ectoplasm, and worse) to drag the invisible wounds of war into the light. Imprisoned by a locked room and the deceased’s paranoid demands — expressed through her increasingly deranged former husband — the alarmed friends spiral into confessions and accusations. The demons within them are more destructive than any the séance might have unleashed.An ambitious period piece given an appropriately vintage look by the cinematographer Robert Patrick Stern, “Brooklyn 45” is overlong, repetitive and at times wearyingly stagy. The actors, though, can’t be faulted, convincingly turning unappetizing characters into broken people trying to move on from a war that keeps pulling them back in.Brooklyn 45Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Aloners’ Review: Plugged In but Shut Off

      by

      The director Hong Sung-eun’s debut feature is a quietly tragic tale of alienation and the ennui of modern life.Jina (Gong Seung-yeon), the reclusive figure at the center of “Aloners,” is lonely but never alone. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. She isolates herself at every point of her day — when she eats, when she works, when she smokes — turning to screens for companionship. She is always on her phone, scrolling even while talking to customers at the call center where she works. At night, she falls asleep with the TV on.Yet it’s clear in the director Hong Sung-eun’s quietly tragic tale of alienation, Jina is really just numb. Her mother has recently died, and she is estranged from her father. But at the call center, an eager new hire (Jung Da-eun) begins to push up against Jina’s walled-off existence.Hong’s greatest strength is restraint. At every moment in which she could turn the film into an easier, feel-good story about a woman being taught how to wake up to life, she pulls back. Life is not so simple, and healing is hard. As much as “Aloners” is about grief, it’s also a portrait of the ennui of modern life, how easily people can shut themselves off and fall into the void — and how mundane that withering away looks. Yet you can spot, in the superb, subtle performances from Gong and Jung, the pain and desperation under the surface. The only way out is if Jina might see the same in someone else and reach out.AlonersNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Flamin’ Hot’ Review: Neon Dust, Hollywood Corn

      by

      The actor Eva Longoria’s feature directing debut is a fictionalized account of the birth of a spicy, profitable snack.“Do I have initiative?” Richard Montañez (played by Jesse Garcia) asks his wife, Judy (Annie Gonzalez), in the dramatic comedy “Flamin’ Hot,” directed with affectionate brio by the actor Eva Longoria. Montañez, on whose memoir this fictionalized story is based, is eyeing an application for a job at the Frito-Lay facility in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. While he’s stumped about that word — “initiative” — soon enough he’ll embody it, as he goes from being a janitor to becoming a family man behind a Cheetos flavor that extended the snack maker’s reach, launching Montañez’s marketing career.Garcia and Gonzalez possess poignant chemistry as the economically struggling couple. They first meet as children. He, a child of farm workers, is being bullied in the lunchroom and at home; she has a bruise that suggests they might have more in common than simply being the brown kids at a predominately white elementary school. Montañez’s youth is recounted in a sometimes boastful, sometimes self-deprecating, always upbeat voice-over that softens the edges of his childhood, which include routine bigotry and outright racism, but also brutality and judgment from his father, Vacho (Emilio Rivera).Montañez came of age in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the pride and resistance of the Chicano Movement, while adjacent, were not central to his upbringing. Instead, as he tells us in an account that swings from the present to the past, from the biographical to the fantastical, he found friends in a gang. It wasn’t until Judy got pregnant that the pair agreed that things had to change.From the moment he enters the Frito-Lay facility, Montañez is a dogged learner, asking questions about chemical processes, wondering about an extruder, even celebrating an industrial power washer. His curiosity aggravates his supervisor (Matt Walsh), worries the friend who helped him get the gig (Bobby Soto) and breaks down the defenses of an engineer (Dennis Haysbert) who knows the facility inside out, and who becomes Montañez’s initially suspicious mentor.The titular flavor, it seems, didn’t happen overnight. Montañez’s stint begins in the mid-70s and takes off in the early ’90s, when the facility faces hard times. An executive, Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub), coaches the beleaguered work force to “think like a CEO.” And the ensuing scenes — of Rich landing his hot idea, inspired by the Mexican street corn elote — charm as intended. “It burns good,” the wee-est of the Montañezes (Brice Gonzalez) proclaims as the family samples seasonings.Longoria, working from a screenplay by Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez, sprinkles lessons in self-esteem throughout. (The movie is Longoria’s feature directing debut.) And the women here — including Montañez’s mother and Judy — are more than run-of-the-mill catalysts. Still, should it come as a surprise that a movie this puffed up has a dusting of flavors that might not be real? If you read too deeply about the ingredients that went into “Flamin’ Hot,” you might find enough confusion over whether Montañez actually invented the flavor (as claimed) to make your conscience mildly cramp.Flamin’ HotRated PG-13 for some strong language, and drug talk. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Disney+ and Hulu. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      How ‘The Blackening’ Turns Horror Film Stereotypes Upside Down

      by

      This comedy turns horror film stereotypes upside down. A look behind the scenes.What began as a smirking punchline traded in the clandestine realms of kitchens and living rooms has long since penetrated the mainstream. Now everyone knows: In the American horror film, you can expect the Black character to die first.That joke forms the foundation of the new horror comedy “The Blackening” (in theaters June 16), which arrives with the tagline, “We can’t all die first.” A Juneteenth weekend away in a remote, cavernous cabin turns deadly for a group of friends when they discover a board game in the basement. A Sambo figurehead occupies the center of the board and tests them on various touchstones of Black culture: What is the second verse of the Black national anthem? How many Black actors have guest starred on the television show “Friends”? A masked figure emerges from the shadows to exact the lethal consequences for wrong answers.“The Blackening” is based on a Comedy Central sketch of the same name originally developed by the comedian Dewayne Perkins, who co-stars in the film and wrote the script with Tracy Oliver (a writer of “Girls Trip”). In a video interview, Perkins said the concept came about during his time on the Chicago comedy circuit.“All of the Black people that have been in sketch were like, ‘Oh yeah, we always feel like individually we’re the most expendable within a lot of the institutions that we’re a part of,’” he said. “So that was kind of the impetus. If we put all the Black people together in horror movies, then they’d have to have a system as to who’s going to die first.”Yvonne Orji and Jay Pharaoh in the film.Glen Wilson/LionsgateIn the short, a group of Black friends confronted by a killer must decide who is “the Blackest” — and therefore liable to be killed first. Of course, the comedy lies in what naturally ensues: Everyone gathered tries to prove they are the least Black. One character retches through repeated attempts at insisting that “All lives matter,” the invalidating response to Black Lives Matter. After seeing the sketch, Oliver tracked down Perkins to adapt the piece into a feature. (“The Blackening” recreates the short in one of its funniest scenes.) Initially attached as a producer, Tim Story, best known for “Barbershop” (2002), fell in love with the script and additionally opted to direct. “It’s something that I really wanted to get to the screen,” Story said.The comedian and actress Yvonne Orji, who plays Morgan, was also drawn to the subversive script. “We’re turning the stereotype on its head and I love whenever stereotypes are tipped over,” she said.Foregrounding Black characters in the horror genre upends a fraught legacy that has often deployed them as comic relief or unceremoniously dispensed with them; Perkins explained that it was a purposeful decision to play with these archetypes so that the film is in constant conversation with this history. “My character is a Gay Best Friend, which is a trope. All of these characters, at the beginning, their origin is a trope,” he said. “Then we use the movie to constantly feed that character. And allowing the trope to become a fully realized character was the goal.”Although “The Blackening” functions principally as a comedy, the film also delivers dynamic moments of suspense and chilling scares, a result of Perkins and Oliver’s enduring admiration of horror cinema. “That was my favorite genre coming up,” Perkins said. ”I think that’s why the movie is so embedded with references.”The film’s director, Tim Story, right, on set with Byers, second from right, and other crew. “It’s something that I really wanted to get to the screen,” Story said of falling in love with the script.Glen Wilson/LionsgateAnd there are references aplenty. An incomplete list includes “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974), “The Hills Have Eyes” (1977), “Friday the 13th” (1980), “The Evil Dead” (1981), “A Nightmare On Elm Street” (1984), “The People Under the Stairs” (1991), “Jumanji” (1995), “Scream” (1996), and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” (1997). “The Blackening” revved up audiences last fall when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. And ahead of its release, it will screen as part of the Tribeca Festival, including a screening on June 13 at the Apollo Theater.Story brought his experience directing comedies to the funnier elements of the film, but he saw a challenge in tackling its scarier moments. “The cool thing about just being a movie lover is you actually end up studying all types of these genres,” he said. “I always wanted to mess with horror, but I had to find something that was still in my world.”The film’s title recalls an idea mentioned in a recently published book, “The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema From Fodder to Oscar,” by Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris. The authors describe the increase in Black cinema representation of the late 1960s — or the “Blackening.” Both writers are particularly united in their love of George Romero’s “The Night of the Living Dead” (1968), in which the Black guy famously dies last, if doubly tragically: He manages to survive a zombie apocalypse only to be killed by a vigilante mob. Harris credited the film with inspiring what he called in an interview his “love for horror.” Coleman and Harris chronicle these cycles of diversity — which inevitably meet an abrupt end — in their book, from the Blaxploitation era to the urban horror of the ’90s and now this latest, respectable generation of transparently politicized horror.Robertson and Walls in a scene from the film.Glen Wilson/LionsgateAlthough she accounted for the rise and fall of these past movements, Coleman said, “We’re moving away from what I conceptualize as Blacks in Horror to Black Horror, which really is a reflection of Black life and culture, experience.” Coleman, a scholar who also wrote “Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films From the 1890s to Present,” praised the innovation in recent horror films, citing Nia DaCosta’s “Candyman” (2021). “There’s art, there’s music, the vernacular, all of that is there.”In a testament to the sudden streamlining of the genre, at least two of the actors in “The Blackening” can already count prominent features from this wave of social-justice horror among their work. Sinqua Walls, who plays Nnamdi, recently appeared in the Sundance Grand Jury prizewinning film “The Nanny” (2022), and the “Saturday Night Live” veteran Jay Pharoah, who plays Morgan’s boyfriend, Shawn, was in the horror-comedy “Bad Hair” (2020). Pharoah said that he was happy to be in these genre films because of their distinct popularity.“It’s going to be some niche of people or this cult fan base that you have no idea about, that has watched your stuff over and over again,” he said. “They can quote everything and they know how you die. It’s just a cool thing to be a part of.”For Story, filming “The Blackening” was joyous.“What was great about making this movie,” he said, “it was dipped in celebration. I mean, that’s what’s so much fun about it. We are giving the foundation for a lot of great conversations. We want it to represent us and the many facets of us; and also invite others to make their version.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Dalíland’ Review: Ben Kingsley as Salvador Dalí, Man and Myth

      by

      Ben Kingsley plays Salvador Dalí, the man and the mustachioed myth, as he contends with his demanding wife and the far more voracious art world.One of the best things about “Dalíland,” Mary Harron’s amused and amusing fictional look at the singular Salvador Dalí, is that it isn’t a cradle-to-grave exhumation. Instead, the movie focuses on a period in Dalí’s later years when he was widely, wrongly and seemingly permanently eclipsed both by the commercial profile of his art and by the flamboyant scandal he had made of his life. Harron’s result is less a consummate portrait and more a distillation of a sensibility, as if she had dropped Dalí in an alcohol still to extract his very essence.The man, the myth and the mustache are all here, albeit modestly. Harron’s path into Dalí’s world is through an invented character, James (the newcomer Christopher Briney), who’s recently landed a job at the artist’s New York gallery. An anodyne pretty boy, James serves as a proxy for the viewer, a wide-eyed tourist in a seductively foreign land. He enters partly by chance, although his looks and good timing help: Dalí (Ben Kingsley), who’s struggling to produce sufficient new work for an upcoming show, recruits James as an assistant, ushering him into the frantic, at times funny and often bleak bacchanalia of the movie’s title.Much of the story takes place in 1974, starting with one of Dalí’s customary winter sojourns at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. There, in a spacious suite wreathed in cigarette smoke and throbbing with rock music, he and his formidable, sometimes terrifying wife, Gala (Barbara Sukowa), preside over a glittery circus that’s populated by beautiful people and supplicating waiters, and watched over by Dalí ’s longtime aide, Captain Moore (Rupert Graves). Amid the ostrich boas, flowing Champagne and lines of coke, the slack-jawed James meets hangers-on like Alice Cooper (Mark McKenna) as well as the artist’s muse Amanda Lear (Andreja Pejic), and one exceedingly dull love interest, Ginesta (Suki Waterhouse).James isn’t all that interesting, either, and there’s too much of him in the movie. This isn’t Briney’s fault; he’s pleasant to look at, and he manages his transition from tourist to accidental Dalí-wood guide well enough. It’s just that once Dalí and Gala swan in, they immediately and rightly become the only characters you want to spend time with. They’re entertaining, for one, having long settled into roles that feed their public profiles and public relations: She’s the money-grubbing dominatrix while he alternately cowers, begs for her attention and upstages her. The relationship provides tension and mystery that the well-matched Kingsley and Sukowa complicate with gargoyle masks and shocks of vulnerability.The story — the screenplay is by John C. Walsh — follows James as he tumbles further and further down the curious Dalí-Gala rabbit hole. It’s a predictable scene on one level, filled with writhing bodies, orgiastic evenings, pathological marital warfare and a great deal of tawdry art-world shenanigans. Considerably less obvious is Dalí and Gala’s confounding union, which began in the 1920s. Harron fills in some of the couple’s fascinating story largely through a few inventively staged flashbacks in which the old Dalí and James share the screen with the young Dalí (Ezra Miller, vivid and otherworldly in a small role) and Gala (Avital Lvova).I wish “Dalíland” incorporated more of the young Dalí and Gala, partly because the images of the older Dalí physically transported into his memories are both visually striking and quietly touching. They also illustrate the centrality of time in Dalí’s work, a theme encapsulated in his most popular painting, “The Persistence of Memory” (1931), of a clock melting like warm Camembert on a long-lashed human face. The flashbacks help establish the emotional and psychological foundation for the couple’s relationship, one that’s encapsulated by the sight of the young Dalí, having apparently just completed that early masterpiece, weepily burying his head in Gala’s lap like a child. (The movie doesn’t include any of Dalí’s actual artworks.)Dalí and Gala’s relationship mystified many people over many well-publicized tumultuous decades. The filmmaker Luis Buñuel, Dalí’s old schoolmate and collaborator on the Surrealist classics “Un Chien Andalou” and “L’Age D’or,” pointedly blamed Gala in his memoir “My Last Sigh” for the men’s estrangement, calling her “a woman I have always tried to avoid.” Buñuel’s violent animus toward Gala (he wrote that he once physically attacked her) is startling, and it’s hard to know how much of his loathing was inflamed by old-fashioned sexism. While “Dalíland” occasionally edges into caricature, its take on Gala’s role in the marriage, her temperament and feverish attention to money is happily more complicated.“We need money,” the older Gala blurts out to the abashed Dalí during one bellicose confrontation over his lack of productivity, “money, money!” It’s a comic-pathetic scene, and while it would be easy to turn Gala into the villain of this story, Harron never does. Gala may be outrageous and at times deeply unkind, but Dalí married her, stayed with her, painted her. And she isn’t wrong: With their expensive habits and tastes, she and Dalí do need money to pay their bills, but also — as this movie repeatedly reminds you — “money, money, money” is what the far crueler, far greedier and far more destructive art world demands.DalílandNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Universal Says On-Demand Film Strategy Has Increased Audience

      by

      The studio let viewers rent or buy movies earlier for a higher price. This made more than $1 billion in less than three years, with nearly no decrease in box-office sales.In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Universal Pictures and its art-house sibling, Focus Features, set off alarm bells in Hollywood by ending the long-held practice of giving theaters an exclusive window of about 90 days to play new movies. Instead, their movies, which have since included “Jurassic World: Dominion,” “Belfast,” “Cocaine Bear” and “M3gan,” would become available for digital rental or purchase — at a higher price — after as little as 17 days.For a change-phobic industry that still views the 1981 arrival of armrest cup holders as a major innovation, the introduction of the service, known as premium video on demand, prompted extensive hand-wringing. Filmmakers and theater owners worried that ticket buyers would be more reluctant to leave their sofas if they could see the same films on their TV sets or iPads just a couple of weeks later.Universal’s competitors mostly stuck with the status quo.But the willingness by Universal to experiment — to challenge the “this is how we’ve always done it” thinking — seems to have paid off. Universal has generated more than $1 billion in premium V.O.D. revenue in less than three years, while showing little-to-no decrease in ticket sales. In some cases, box-office sales even increased when films became available in homes, which Universal has decided is a side effect of premium V.O.D. advertising and word of mouth.Universal, for instance, made “Minions: The Rise of Gru” available for premium V.O.D. after 33 days in theaters in 2022. The movie stayed in theaters after that, selling more tickets than “Minions,” released in 2015, did after 33 days, according to data from Comscore, an analytics company. Data for Universal’s “Jurassic World” and “Fast and Furious” franchises show a similar effect.An interesting wrinkle: Donna Langley, the chairwoman of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, which includes Focus Features, said the company had seen only a small decrease in revenue from traditional V.O.D. That service lets viewers rent or purchase movies at a lower price after 90 days in theaters. She said the premium offering was “an additive, important new revenue source that didn’t exist three years ago.”In other words, Universal thinks that, to some degree, it has found an entirely new customer.“It has had a hugely positive impact on our business,” Ms. Langley said, adding that without it, Universal would have likely had to make fewer movies. Universal and Focus will release 26 movies in theaters this year, more than any other Hollywood studio.Donna Langley, the chairwoman of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, calls premium on-demand “an additive, important new revenue source.”Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesUniversal charges as much as $25 to rent a film for 48 hours and $30 to buy it during its premium V.O.D. sales period. Those prices can drop to $6 and $20 in the later, traditional sales window.About 80 percent of premium V.O.D. revenue goes to Universal, with sales platforms like iTunes and Google Play keeping most of the rest. (A small cut goes to theater chains like AMC Entertainment — grease to get them to agree to reduced exclusivity.) Ticket sales are typically split 50-50 with theaters.Premium V.O.D. revenue is small compared with box-office sales. But it’s certainly not nothing.“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” has generated more than $75 million in premium V.O.D. revenue since May 16, Universal said. “Jurassic World: Dominion,” “The Croods: A New Age” and “Sing 2” each collected more than $50 million. Universal said 14 films, including “News of the World,” a period drama starring Tom Hanks, and “M3gan,” each had more than $25 million.Films from Focus, including “Belfast” and “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” have generated roughly $5 million each. For some art films, a theatrical release has become valuable mostly as “a marketing tool” for premium V.O.D. rentals and purchases, according to Julia Alexander, the director of strategy at Parrot Analytics, a research firm.Much like DVD sales in the 1990s and 2000s, premium V.O.D. has started to provide a type of financial safety net on box-office misses. “The Focus titles, in particular,” said Peter Levinsohn, the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group’s chief distribution officer. “Those smaller films aimed at older moviegoers have become, I wouldn’t say reliant on it, but they have benefited hugely.”It’s also about flexibility, Mr. Levinsohn said. The studio often decides that 17 days (three weekends) of theatrical exclusivity is enough. Sometimes, based on ticket sales, it allows for longer. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” played exclusively in theaters for 41 days.“We have also taken back control of the decision of when to make our content available in the home, based on the most optimal timing for an individual film,” Mr. Levinsohn said. NBCUniversal said in January that revenue from its studios (both film and TV) increased 23 percent in 2022 from a year earlier, to $11.6 billion.Every studio has been trying to find creative ways to maximize movie profits in a fast-changing business. Part of Universal’s challenge is guessing what kind of impact premium V.O.D. might have on streaming: If movies are sold or rented more widely before they arrive on a streaming service (in Universal’s case, on Peacock and Netflix), does that make the movies less valuable tools for encouraging people to sign up for streaming services?“The impact on streaming is not quite as big as people might have expected, but it’s still notable,” Ms. Alexander said. More