Wait, What's Happening to Streaming?

Why Write About Streaming?

If you’ve been feeling like there haven't been a ton of new movies released into theaters lately, you aren’t alone or wrong; according to Statista, there were 873 movies released in North America in 2018 and only 403 in 2021. While the COVID-19 pandemic is the largest contributor to this decline, it’s far from the only suspect. I believe that streaming, IP-franchise domination, and specifically their combination have done significant damage to the industry that we’re only now beginning to appreciate.

Frankly, I’m torn about this. There are franchise films that I enjoy, and a couple of franchises that I have loyalty to despite their missteps (I’m looking at you, Star Wars). Every now and again, the “multiverse” of franchise “content” gives us a truly special and meaningful movie that reaches a large audience. Also, as a budding cinephile who has a running and growing list of classic films to watch, streaming services have given me instant access to options that might be otherwise difficult to find. I’ve loved having the works of Kurosawa, Hitchcock, Ford, and Scorsese right at my fingertips; yet every time I watch one of their films, I lament the fact that we aren’t making anything like them at a noticeable volume today.

Netflix

To say that Netflix “changed the game” for media consumption when it debuted House of Cards in 2013 is a statement that is both obvious and trivializing. The idea that this service would now be creating stuff that only existed on its platform was groundbreaking. And more importantly, at least at the beginning, the stuff was good. The effects of this approach were obvious: in the first quarter of 2013, Netflix had 34 million subscribers. 4 years later, that number had tripled. Its subscriber number reached an all-time high in Q4 of 2021 at 222 million, largely off the back of a surge in 2020 brought on by the pandemic and quarantine.

Netflix’s impact on culture and movie consumption, while profitable for them and ultimately other large studios who pursued their own streaming outlets, has not been positive. Although Netflix consistently maintains some quality in their library and have given us the occasional masterpiece such as The Irishman, the sheer amount of forgettable “content” they produce waters down the best of its offerings. It’s hard to disagree with Martin Scorsese when he said in a reflection on Federico Fellini’s career that the streaming business has reduced all cinema to content, both in how business decisions get made as well as in the mind of someone who turns on Netflix and sees Lady Bird right next to The Kissing Booth. We used to realize that “straight to video” movies weren’t the same as movies that got theatrical releases, but if Netflix is how we watch, then how are we to make that distinction?

Furthermore, as movie budgets have become increasingly polarized (the small movies got smaller, and the big movies got bigger), Netflix produced the kinds of mid-budget comedies, drams, rom-coms, thrillers, etc. that would have been released in theaters as recently as 10 years ago. Now, it’s rare to see something like that get a theatrical release, and it’s hard to locate the chicken and the egg here. Did these kinds of movies move to Netflix because the idea of a “theater movie” changed? Or did Netflix create that change by making them available to subscribers at a lower production quality than their predecessors?

In early 2022, the steepest decline in subscriptions that the company has experienced occurred – nearly 1 million. As a result, Netflix’s stock price fell – the company’s price now sits at its lowest since 2018 and the company went through significant layoffs. After this, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Netflix was changing its priorities. Instead of consistently greenlighting “vanity projects”, they would be emphasizing fewer and better films that would be attractive to mass audiences. Recently, they’ve gone all-in on big budget “blockbusters” that succeed at getting middling critical reviews but dominating their top 10 “most watched”. What I don’t know is how many people will either newly subscribe, or stay subscribed, just to watch big-budget projects like The Gray Man or Red Notice, which is essentially how those big gambles would be worth it.

Disney+

At this point it feels like it’s been in our lives forever, because the last three years have been a time vortex, but Disney+ is less than three years old. In fact, most of the other streamers besides Netflix are comparatively quite new, but Disney+ is nipping at its heels in terms of subscriber count. Disney+ contains a vast library of Disney classics and films from its subsidiary studios that include Pixar, Marvel, and LucasFilm. During the worst of the COVID pandemic, Disney began dropping new Pixar films directly onto Disney+ exclusively, thus keeping them out of theaters, and that has remained the case this year. I find this to be a shame since the animation is often quite beautiful, and I fondly remember what Pixar was able to conjure up on the big screen for Finding Nemo and Wall-E.

When I mentioned the domination of IP earlier, Marvel films were top of mind; the most successful franchise ever did more to the culture than just reap a lot of profit. The 23-film “Infinity Saga” was the signature pop culture movie event of the 2010’s. However, after Avengers: Endgame, audiences have been showing up in varying numbers, with the recent films receiving mixed critical reviews. Beyond more existential questions of franchise fatigue, one very noticeable trait of this recent slate of films is that the special effects look… unfinished. Between streaming shows and recent films, there’s been as much Marvel in “Phase 4” as all three previous phases combined and yet the films are much lower quality in effects and story. As it turns out, there is a serious backlog at the special effects studios that is causing delays in upcoming films, and VFX artists are speaking out about poor treatment at the hands of Marvel. In parallel, a recent Morning Consult poll found that audience interest in superhero movies, even among self-identifying Marvel fans, is dropping. This decline in interest is showing up in box office results, and Marvel’s emphasis on quantity over quality may be driving this trend.

I can’t talk about Disney+ without talking about Star Wars, which is a damned odd thing to say. Disney+ was launched around The Mandalorian, with interest in that show being the key reason many initially subscribed in 2019. That same year, Disney released The Rise of Skywalker to the series’ worst reviews in over 15 years as well as the lowest box office haul of the entire “Sequel Trilogy”. Their next move was obvious: double down on the success of The Mandalorian and steer away from Skywalker by leaning fully into streaming shows. In the past two years, we’ve seen another season of Mandalorian, the abysmal Book of Boba Fett, the high-ceiling, low-floor Obi-Wan Kenobi, and we’re buckling in for the premier of Andor. Fett and Kenobi both had unpolished special effects suffering from the same issues as Marvel, and while there was plenty of good in Kenobi, the final product was rather inconsequential. One of the most important and beloved movie events of all time is no longer an event nor a movie.

I wonder at what point subscribers will begin to turn against Disney+ the way that they have against Netflix – Disney’s library is a massive advantage, but none of their recent offerings have been a signature event equivalent to Top Gun: Maverick nor as technologically accomplished as Dune. Perhaps the recent announcement that they will bring ads to their platform will change some minds?

HBO Max

Launching in May 2020, HBO Max had the benefit of an existing audience of HBO subscribers that it was able to convert to HBO Max subscriptions. Through its parent company, WarnerMedia, HBO Max has access to the Warner Bros studio catalog, including everything related to DC Comics. Notably for me, they also have the TCM (Turner Classic Movies) hub, which features a vast and rotating library of some of the greatest films ever made. They truly do have the best content, reaching cinephiles and DC fans alike, along with the most prestigious shows from HBO.

As the COVID pandemic, lockdown, and film production outages continued, Warner made a rather bold decision for their 2022 slate: all their films would be appearing in theaters and then moving to HBO Max after 45 days. In 2021, like many other streamers, their movies premiered in theaters and on the service simultaneously. The 2022 hybrid approach feels like a smart way to begin bringing audiences back into theaters yet yanking The Batman out of theaters after only a month and a half was certainly too soon.

The main reason why I wanted to write this article was that HBO Max and their parent studio, Warner Bros, announced some pretty momentous decisions last week. For one, they revealed that this 45-day window won’t be sticking around. They also announced that they were cancelling the already-completed Batgirl, which they had poured $90 million into, because they figured the best way to reclaim that value was through writing the production off for tax purposes. In doing so, they exposed a “twilight zone” of movie production budget where it was too expensive for movie theaters without a guaranteed box office return, yet too expensive to just be dumped on HBO Max. This contradicts what Netflix and Disney+ are doing, which is often spending $100 million to make properties that only ever stream.

The service will also undergo significant changes in the coming months, as Warner’s recent merger with Discovery will result in a single platform. I’m not sure what that will look like yet, and I doubt that the executives at Warner will shutter all of HBO Max’s current content, but they’ll have to do something to make room for the real prestigious content, like Flip or Flop.

Don’t Be Crazy John, Streaming’s Not Going Anywhere

You’re right; across the major streamers, there are nearly 800 million subscriptions globally, and that number continues to grow. How much of that growth is driven by someone like me subscribing to yet another service that finally has GoodFellas is unclear, but growth is growth. The industry may be too big to fail, but it’s not too big to evolve. Top Gun: Maverick is currently the 7th-highest grossing film of all time at the domestic box office and the 13th-highest globally, and it accomplished that in less than 3 months in theaters without streaming anywhere. Though consumer preference has certainly shifted to streaming, Maverick has proven that his way is the most lucrative. Maybe that’s why after all this time, Bloomberg reported that Netflix is – get this – considering widely releasing more films theatrically and letting them play longer. The movies as we knew them might be back sooner than we think.