Amazon May Be Getting Into the Movie Theater Business

We’ve been chronicling in GlobeSt. this year an exponential growth curve for film production studios and soundstages.

In Hollywood, New York, Georgia and places in between, big-ticket soundstage projects have been announced on what seems like a weekly basis in response to the insatiable demand from streaming services like Amazon and Netflix for new film and TV content.

Now comes news that Amazon has opened its first physical movie theater—The Culver Theater, in the California city of the same name—a month after announcing that it would spend $1B making films earmarked for theatrical release in real movie theaters.

It’s only one popcorn palace—formerly named ArcLight Cinemas—and it’s across the street from The Culver Studios, where Amazon’s streaming outfit occupies about 530K SF—so that doesn’t represent another industry-disrupting move by the tech giant, does it?

We were preparing to tell you tentatively that no, it does not, when the US Postal Service delivered what appears to be the script for a new science-fiction film that was addressed to Amazon at The Culver Studios but was sent to the wrong zip code.

The would-be sci-fi flick is entitled Vertical Disintegration. Here’s the abstract on the cover sheet:

“The year is 1890, and Sen. John Sherman is walking across Pennsylvania Avenue on his way to introduce what would have become known as the Sherman Antitrust Act in Congress. Instead, Sherman gets run over by a runaway horse and carriage and thus America gets no protection from the vertical integration that creates monopolies.

Cut to 1994. Capt. James T. Kirk makes an emergency landing of the starship Enterprise in a field outside of Bellevue, WA. Unbeknownst to Capt. Kirk, an alien stowaway is onboard.

The creature, an intelligent life form that communicates in C++ code, calls itself Be-Zos. “Take me to your leader,” Be-Zos says, pointing to a Seattle Times front-page story about a visit from Vice President Al Gore, who was on his way to Alaska to investigate a strange anomaly in the ozone layer of the atmosphere.

When he meets Gore, Be-Zos offers to give the VP the hypertext code for the Internet in exchange for what the alien calls “tax-free com-merce start-up” in a goofy but friendly monosyllabic way that immediately resonates with Gore.

Cut to 2021. The company Be-Zos founded, named after the largest river on Earth, has paralyzed the US logistics system by swallowing 400M SF of warehouses, which it needs to digest the billions and billions of dollars in retail that it consumes annually through its voracious maw.

Standing astride the Internet like a colossal multi-tentacled octopus, the unstoppable e-company keeps growing new arms that crawl up to unsuspecting industries and offer to “distr-ibute” their “con-tent” before encasing the victim in a python-like grip as a body-snatching “digital transformation” begins…

Nah, there’s nothing to worry about here. We’ve all seen this movie before, and it’s all make-believe, right?