by Carol Guimarães
The public is already sitting, waiting for the entertainment that the producer and distributor refuse to create
There is an ill-resolved relationship between distributor and digital and it is born of fear, not strategy. The still dominant reasoning is: if I deliver film content in the digital environment before or near the premiere, I'm delivering the film for free, I'm burning the product. That fear made sense when the internet was just a channel of transmission parallel to the room. It doesn't make sense anymore, because the behavior of the viewer has changed, and no one in the sector has updated the mental model to follow.
The desire to watch a film today is born of what the viewer already knows about it before entering the room. It's not abstract curiosity, it's built familiarity. And the format that most proves this now is the microdrama, the short vertical video, almost disposable, which appears in the feed and delivers only a fragment, a scene, a hook. The person is not satisfied with that fragment. She exits the social network actively behind the rest, seeks streaming, searches the platform, searches for the entire film. The print didn't satisfy the desire, it manufactured the wish. It's the opposite of fear that stops the distributor.
Coachella understood that before the film industry. When Justin Bieber went on stage at the festival, a lot of people called it a minimalist, lazy show. It wasn't. He built the presentation thinking of who was watching on YouTube as much as who was in the desert, seven stage broadcast simultaneously, multiview, creators reacting live. He didn't use the fingerprint to replace the physical show. He used it to connect with a community that had existed online for years and turn it into immediate belonging. Result: The biggest streaming jump of his career the next day, more than 250% increase. The print didn't compete with the festival. He multiplied the audience who wanted to be part of that moment.
This is the way for the Brazilian distributor to see: digital is not a threat to the film, it is the mechanism that builds the desire to belong to the universe of the premiere before it happens. Those who treat the internet as a safe to protect are losing the cheapest tool available to get the viewer to reach the room already emotionally invested.
And the producer has a question to answer, too. Why do we still produce so little thinking natively in vertical format, instead of cutting leftovers from the horizontal to fit into the story? Why is the internet still treated as a display display display with its own language? And why is the content creator, in the industry's imagination, still just a hired poster boy to talk good about the film, instead of a language partner who already knows how to build a community better than any campaign pays? The hearing is already sitting, cell phone in hand, waiting for someone to deliver something worth her time. The sector is that it has not yet decided to produce for this audience.
And who can't be there? Generating expectation for streaming debut is a reasonable way out, a way to keep the person waiting for something. But waiting isn't living. Tightening play alone at home creates no belonging, creates only access, again. The question that no one in the sector is asking is: how to turn digital display itself into an experience that generates community and not just a delivery of content one more click?
That's not a new question for me. In 2021, on my startup's first pitch, an investor asked me what was my biggest competitor. I answered: TikTok, social media. He disagreed and said I should study my competitors better, because the right answer to him was Netflix. Five years later, it's Netflix that's on the couch, testing publicity, testing live channels, testing sports, trying vertically while "thinking" about turning TV again, because it didn't look at TikTok in time as a threat. The error wasn't product. It was a reading: the entire market still measures audience by looking at number and catalog, not looking at behavior.
The Netflix crisis is not a content crisis. It's a crisis on purpose. The internet was born to connect people and digital entertainment. At some point, he switched connections by catalogue. Showing movies on the internet has become synonymous with tightening play. Easy, scalable, and no ritual around. Except ritual is exactly what separates people who watch from those who participate. It's what makes a spectator community. And, community is the only asset that no algorithm can automate.
It was this gap that made me draw, since 2021, another business model for digital entertainment. The e-Teatro WeDo!, the world's first virtual and interactive showhouse. Here we go beyond content transmission, we schedule sessions, with tickets, scheduled hours and audience reacting live. The viewer doesn't press play alone, he enters a room full of people, meets his friends and laughs together in real time, exactly how they would react in a movie theater, only without having to be physically in one of them. This audience doesn't replace the people in the physical room. She's a second audience, entitled to their own experience, the community itself, the ritual itself.
Entertainment does not need to choose between physical presence and digital presence. You need to stop treating the internet like a window and play as a line-up. The way is to use the digital as a bridge to create anticipation that fills physical room and to draw, for those who cannot go, an experience that also generates belonging, not only access. The distributor and the producer who starts looking at it will not just retain audience. He's gonna draw the audience that Brazilian entertainment doesn't even know he has yet.
The themes presented in this article are part of the discussions that move the audiovisual market and will be present, as sub-themes, in the programming of panels, lectures and debates of EXPOCINE 2026. Between September 29 and October 2, in São Paulo, the main professionals of production, distribution, exhibition and other segments of the industry meet to discuss trends, challenges and opportunities that impact the future of cinema. Ensure your FORUM credentials and follow these debates closely at expocine.com.br
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