As a side effect of the pandemic, the Metropolitan Opera in New York has seen audiences melt for its live opera broadcasts at the cinema. The institution is counter-attacking this week by proposing The Met: Live at Homewhich will officially make it possible to reach audiences far from dark rooms.
By launching, at the turn of 2007, the live broadcast of shows in cinemas, the Metropolitan Opera induced a revolution in the musical landscape. “It’s not just ‘like you’re there’, it’s almost ‘better than if you were there'”, to quote our first cover in January 2007.
At the same time, the new phenomenon proved the existence of a larger public than had been thought, quick to attend daytime performances relocated at a more or less painless pricing ($20). In the period of economic maturity of the model, between 2009 and 2019, the Met and its associated cinemas will have sold in more than 70 countries and more than 2,000 theaters between 2.3 and 2.6 million tickets. The Met: Live in HD per season.
A fall
About ten years ago, on pre-sale days for subscriptions, scenes of crowds took place here in front of the participating cinemas. Fifth in number of cinemas, behind the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and France, Canada is the third largest market for The Met: Live in HD behind the United States and Germany. At the dawn of this 2022-2023 season, which will open next Saturday with Medea of Cherubini, no one is fighting for tickets and subscriptions anymore. The 2021-2022 season, between closings and reopenings of rooms, has been devastated and the restart is more than slow.
It is in this context that the Met is launching, next Monday, The Met: Live at Home. The offer is not intended to replace cinemas, as it is geolocated. Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, has agreed to give an interview to the To have to to make a point.
“We are connected to cinemas and I still believe that when the general public is comfortable with endemic COVID, the experience in cinemas, in groups on the big screen, is the most satisfying and in line with the experience at the opera. »
Throwing The Met: Live at Home, the Metropolitan Opera has taken great care not to cut cruppers to its lifelong partners. The offer does not replace the cinema and access to the broadcast will only be possible on computers whose activated geolocation attests to a distance from a cinema showing the performance. “In Canada, it will be 16 miles [25,75 km] says Peter Gelb.
Originally, the Met favored theatrical release as an aesthetic and strategic choice, an option that The duty exposed in 2014 in an article comparing the contrasting business plans of New York and Vienna opera houses. “The social phenomenon of people gathering in a cinema to share a performance is capital,” the director of the Met told us at the time. During this interview, he explained to us the economic data surrounding The Met: Live in HD. “The average cost of a program is about a million dollars, we collect half the ticket price, which is $10. The breakeven point is therefore around 100,000 spectators. […] Between live and repeats, the Met attracts an average of 225,000 to 250,000 spectators per show in the cinema. We also learned that a “pointy” opera had around 130,000 admissions and that a “hit” from the repertoire like Tosca exceeded 300,000.
“I’m surprised I gave you so much detailed information at the time, although I’m sure I did. What I can tell you for after 2014 is that we have reached a plateau. The figures you mention correspond to the mature market which remained so until the pandemic”, explains Peter Gelb.
The last reference season is therefore 2018-2019, since 2019-2020 was interrupted in March and 2020-2021 was canceled entirely. A season The Met: Live in HD did take place in 2021-2022, but it was badly affected. “Audiences were smaller, because sometimes the cinemas weren’t even open, sometimes there were room capacity limitations. In addition, the elderly public was fearful even when it could have gone to the hall, ”notes the boss of the Metropolitan Opera.
Impossible to know what happened to the 300,000 type barometers for Toscawhich could have applied in 2021-2022 to Rigoletto or at Turandotor figures for hard-to-sell productions like contemporary operas Fire Shut up in my Bones by Terence Blanchard or Eurydice by Matthew Aucoin. “Depending on a show’s place in the season, it was more or less affected by the circumstances. In January 2022, with the Omicron variant, everyone stopped going to the cinema, so we cannot draw any conclusion: it was the pandemic that dictated things”, pleads Peter Gelb, who agrees to say that As far as entries are concerned, the overall result is “less than half” of the usual figures.
Visions of the future
The director of the Met is not afraid for the moment of losing the support of dark rooms. “The cinemas remain linked to us, because the whole cinema industry has suffered, in particular the offer intended for an adult or older audience… The only successes in theaters have been films aimed at teenagers and young adults. So I don’t think theaters are thinking that our audience in particular would have dropped so much that they wouldn’t want to continue. Also, Cineplex’s commitment to Canada is very strong. »
Peter Gelb admits that “some exhibitors want the Met to broadcast only famous operas”. But he does not intend to change his strategy: “If we do this, we will run out of titles quickly and we want to remain faithful to the idea that the cinema season reflects the indoor season. Our programming is more and more oriented towards the introduction of new works, never played at the Met. We haven’t announced it yet, but there will be four in 2023-2024 and we want them to be part of our cinema season. Because enriching the repertoire with new works is forging the future of opera. I am committed to this path, Yannick [Nézet-Séguin, directeur musical du Met] also, because it is a question of survival of our artistic discipline. »
Matching the enthusiasm of the public in cinemas with that of the New York public with regard to these repertoire renewal initiatives will be one of the main challenges of the coming years. Peter Gelb is fully aware of this: “We have to bet on the fact that our cinema audience follows us. But he is convinced that opera should “reflect people’s lives”, taking example from Fire Shut up in my Boneswhich had drained a younger and more diverse indoor audience in New York City.
Peter Gelb refuses to predict that the Met will return to the cinema to its figures of yesteryear. “Something will come back. Maybe not at this level. No one is sure of anything anymore. But with The Met: Live at Home, we increase the palette and the possibilities. So that’s a potential development. There are, for example, underserved countries, such as the birthplace of opera, Italy, where only one cinema shows the Met. The new initiative will bring Met productions to Italian homes.
In addition, the pandemic has created an audience accustomed to artistic webcasting: “We want to make sure that everyone can have access to the product, when more and more people have big screens and good sound systems. At the start of the pandemic, the Met offered its webcasts. “We got a lot of gratitude emails in the first few months when everyone was home. I’m sure we generated new opera lovers. And, factually, we doubled the subscribers to the service Metropolitan Opera on Demand. We had 15,000 subscribers and after six months of the pandemic they were over 30,000.”
The question of the abolition of geolocation, which would allow consumers to choose between cinema and home and to opt, in the latter case, for French subtitles, is not yet on the agenda. “Our partners would not be happy. As for Canada, we are working very well with Cineplex and we have to see what will happen this season. A season for which Peter Gelb is “reasonably optimistic”.