Due to the pandemic, movies like Tom Hanks’ Greyhound have been forced to premiere on streaming services. Now, Broadway is taking note. Diana: A New Musical will premiere on Netflix ahead of its 2021 Broadway opening.

The musical about the late Princess Diana was scheduled to open on March 31st, but it was put on hiatus due to the pandemic. Now, it will be filmed without an audience in the Longacre Theatre and will appear on Netflix ahead of its Broadway opening, rescheduled for May 25th, 2021.

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— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 26, 2019

Theater Mode was rolled out as part of the Version 10.0 update earlier this year, and allowed people to use their Tesla’s screen for more than just controlling the car. Initially, it offered Netflix, YouTube and Hulu options (as well as local alternatives in China), available only when the car is parked. In addition, Tesla Arcade enabled folks to play a limited version of Cuphead, should they have a USB gamepad in the car.

The top pricing tier is set to cover all Regal Cinemas, and the lowest will apparently grant you access to tickets for about half the chain’s locations. If you subscribe to a tier that doesn’t cover a theater at which you’d like to watch a movie (say, a venue in Midtown Manhattan), there’ll likely be a surcharge for a ticket. Subscribers will also get 10 percent off concessions.

However, the report indicates you might need to sign up for a year at a time, which may prove too steep a payment for many movie fans. It’s also not clear whether you’d have to pay a surcharge on premium options, such as IMAX, 3D screenings and D-Box — AMC’s plan includes those types of moviegoing experiences. Regal and its parent company Cineworld are still said to be ironing out the details with major studios.

It’s the latest example of a theater chain seemingly recognizing there’s a clear appetite for unlimited movie ticket subscriptions, as made evident by the popularity of MoviePass and Sinemia — though those services have struggled to keep their heads above water financially. AMC’s Stubs A-List, however, is rapidly gaining traction among film fans. It has more than 860,000 subscribers, up from 800,000 in May.

“The Seven Ages of Man” first appeared at Sundance Film Festival last year. The three-minute experience shows a volumetrically captured actor reciting the famous speech from “As You Like It.” As he describes the human passage through stages of life, a digital tree in the background blooms then slowly wastes away.

In another demo, “The Grinning Man,” a theater stage about two meters wide appeared in front of the venue’s bar, neon-glow in the background. A five-minute song from the West End musical called “Laughter is the Best Medicine” was performed by nine singing, dancing tiny actors. Andy Serkis — the motion capture legend of Gollum fame — directed the demo through his production company The Imaginarium Studios.

Wearing Magic Leap One, audience members stuck their faces right up to the video game-like characters, and maneuvered behind the virtual set for different angles, arms crossed. A man in Allbirds sneakers and a red chili pepper print shirt tried to grab at the stage.

Magic Leap touted the idea that these experiences can immerse the audience better than a 2D screen, or allow the flexibility of watching from different angles. But the narrow field of view and small figures on a stage that’s meant to be viewed from the front anyway hardly make it a TV replacement.

Instead, these demos were more compelling as indicators of Magic Leap’s intention to merge with traditional art forms.

“All we’re doing is going ahead and creating more choice.”

After years of hype and stealth, Magic Leap released a $2,295 headset last August. It has been creating a plethora of experiences since — involving Sigur Ros, Meow Wolf and Star Wars to name a few — in an effort to find the “killer app” that’ll make it a de rigeur platform. In these two experiments, they’ve taken cues from the world of theater, a form which has a few millennia on mixed reality.

“These are just the very first steps,” said Andy Lanning, executive creative producer at Magic Leap, who led both projects. “Our goal was: Can we create that sense of a performance?”

Lanning has ideas for what’s next.

He’s interested in real-time tabletop theater, a West End production in your living room as it takes place on stage — similar to National Theatre Live, which already exists in cinemas.

Audiences sitting in theaters could also don Magic Leap headsets, allowing organic and synthetic production elements to merge. In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Lanning says, a fairy could come out from the stage and fly in front of you. (He also warns, though, that “we don’t want to oversaturate the experience”).

And Lanning wants to create photorealistic volumetrically captured actors that the audience can also interact with.

Sarah Ellis, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s director of digital development, said their goal was to expand the toolkit for artists. “All we’re doing is going ahead and creating more choice,” she said.

Tools like Magic Leap point to a bigger question. As Lanning puts it: “What is the natural, native form of storytelling that’s going to emerge?” Early experiments in any new media technology are going to start by replicating old narrative forms — like remaking the same musical, but smaller and holographic. More interesting is how technology can create an altogether new grammar of theater.

That shift likely won’t be made solely by mixed reality. The future of theater doesn’t hinge on one technology but the confluence of them. Lanning cites the UK’s Secret Cinema as an organization that creates immersive theatrical experiences that start online, where you’re assigned a character to play for the evening, before you’re even physically present at the show.

The value of “The Grinning Man,” then, is not just how an entire production has been photocopied for Magic Leap today, but what could be done with that motion capture footage in the future. “We’ve bottled that performance,” Lanning says, and it could be used in anything from a video-game to a VR experience when the right idea comes around.

Images: Magic Leap