If you’re a parent with a kid of a certain age, there’s a damn good chance you’ve seen at least one of the “Trolls” movies. They are wildly popular and now ranks as one of the more successful toy-to-screen adaptations in modern Hollywood history. The first “Trolls” film was released in 2016 during Hollywood’s 2010s franchise boom. It was a solid hit that gave rise to a sequel, which arrived in the form of 2020’s “Trolls World Tour.” On the surface, that movie seemed to be an unassuming, harmless animated follow-up to a hit film aimed at kids. In reality, it helped change Hollywood forever.
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Let’s rewind the clocks a bit. It’s March 2020 and movie theaters all around the world have been forced to close due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The box office is on life support, with drive-ins making an unexpected comeback. Hollywood studios are fearful of an uncertain future and are busy looking for answers. It’s at this point that Universal Pictures decided to make the unprecedented move to release a brand new, big-budget film that was intended for theaters at home for people to watch for a premium fee. Hence, the birth of Premium Video On Demand, aka PVOD.
Notable 2020 films such as “Bloodshot” and “Birds of Prey,” among others, were released on VOD early after having their theatrical runs cut short by the pandemic. This was an understandable measure in a time of critics. However, “Trolls World Tour” had yet to hit the big screen, so Universal’s change in strategy was something else altogether. It proved to be a decision that permanently altered the way we watch movies, for better or worse — and, once again, it all rested on the shoulders of an animated sequel about singing Trolls dolls.
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Let’s rewind the clock even further back for a moment. The notion of renting movies at home and VOD as we know it was nothing new in early 2020, but it had largely been reserved for smaller movies or films that had already gone through their theatrical life cycle. Be that as it may, as DVD sales began to decline, studios wanted to make up that revenue somewhere.