Streaming Is Not Our Friend

Cinema is at our finger tips…but so is another rewatch of The Office.

Stop me if you’ve heard some variation of this sentence: “Why would I go to the theater? I’ll just wait for it to come out on Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/Max…”

It’s become an oft-recited reason why people pass up stuff like The Banshees of Inisherin, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Tár. All masterpieces, and all of them bombed at the box office by pretty significant margins.

Now, sure, there are barriers to entry here. Despite being arguably Scorsese’s most masterful film thus far, Killers of the Flower Moon can be tough to sit through for those who are not used to watching 3-and-a-half hour movies. Even Banshees and Tár, despite being among last year’s best films, may not entice an audience out for a night. After all, one is a dark comedy about two Irish men, one a lovable dolt and the other hellbent on playing the fiddle, and the other is an acidic and haunting drama about a perfectionist’s spiral into insanity (or, potentially, about how said perfectionist is being haunted by ghosts of her past, both figuratively and literally; I prefer that reading myself). But, as much as social discourse may lead one to believe that the cinematic binary is extravagant superhero spectacle and three-hour long biopics about white people who do evil things (but they’re complicated, so somehow it’s okay), the contrary is true. The cinematic landscape is as diverse, vibrant, and original as it has ever been.

In fact, 2022 and 2023 have been some of the best year’s we’ve had for cinema in the past decade.

Think about this: in 2022, we got Aftersun, Decision To Leave, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Bones and All, RRR, The Fabelmans, The Northman, Top Gun: Maverick and the aforementioned Tár and The Banshees of Inisheren. 2023 isn’t even over yet, and already we’ve had Past Lives, The Holdovers Oppenheimer, Barbie, Anatomy of a Fall, John Wick: Chapter 4, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Priscilla, Bottoms, and many more.

Yet, how many of those have you seen in theaters? How many of those were even available in a theater near you? And even if they were in a theater, how many did you consider before ultimately passing on because — let’s face it — who wants to go out to spend about a hundred bucks on tickets and concessions on a movie you might like?

If that’s your perspective, you’re certainly not alone. Theaters have quickly become the domain of spectacle. It’s not a new trend; in fact, it was happening pre-pandemic. But since theaters have opened again, it’s become even more noticeable. As superhero movies and big-budget spectacle dominates the box office, mid-budget and indie films have been shuffled off to streaming platforms. Even Martin Scorsese, one of the greatest filmmakers ever to get behind the camera, had to work with Netflix and Apple to get his last two films financed.

This perspective — that the economic situation makes it near impossible to justify a visit to the nearest theater for anything that’s not a huge extravagant CGI-laden feast — is not entirely wrong, either. After all, this was the entire reason so many people (myself included) flocked to MoviePass during that glorious half-a-year where they put everyone’s movie ticket purchases on some VC’s credit card. When you remove the financial burden of buying a ticket, more people are willing to stop by the theater to see something they may not usually go for. That’s the idea, at least. But when faced with expensive tickets, overpriced concessions, and a theater experience that can often be rowdy and off-putting, it’s no surprise that people are waiting until quiet dramas and smaller-scale movies hit VOD or streaming, where they can watch them at home and pause whenever the urge arises.

But I think this tendency to wait for certain films to come out on streaming and VOD has hurt every aspect of filmmaking and movie watching. For every The Irishman there is A Sun, an award-winning thriller that has waited amidst the endless Netflix library for people to watch it, largely to no avail. And now, with physical media slowly being shuffled off this mortal coil, modern cinephiles are at the mercy of who has which streaming rights and how long they have them.

Streaming, as much as it has given people access to seemingly endless amounts of cinema, has, in fact, paralyzed an entire generation of movie watchers, leaving them scrolling for hours and hours before they finally give up and watch something they’ve already seen. Or, even when they do watch something new, the temptation to scroll social media often supersedes actual movie watching.

Streaming makes many promises: lower costs, more access, more options. And, about a decade back, it may have even met some of these promises (who here remembers when Netflix was $9.99/month?). But along the way, after about a billion true crime documentaries and many ill-fated TV shows, streaming is now more expensive than a night out to the movies ever will be. But because the price-gouging comes at a steady trickle, it’s not as easy to notice when compared to dropping $50 at a theater. And while prices have grown, streaming platforms have splintered. Now, if you want to watch The Bear you need Hulu; if you want to rewatch The Twilight Zone you need Paramount Plus; if you want to catch up on Battlestar Galactica you literally can’t because Peacock scrubbed it from their platform. And even when a platform like Netflix works with a filmmaker like Scorsese, or uses its financial power and influence to do something as improbably as complete Orson Welles’s final film, it then gets lost in the miasma of “content” — just another rectangle in a sea of them. Just another thing for you to scroll past before you land on Love Is Blind.

Put simply, streaming is not our friend.

You Get a Streaming Platform, and You Get a Streaming Platform, and You…

The streaming landscape has fractured over the last five years. As companies wondered how profitable streaming was, they launched head-first into creating their own platforms. Some of them made sense — HBO Max, for example, allowed people who weren’t already subscribed to HBO a way to access shows like The Wire and The Sopranos. The price at the time was also fairly reasonable.

Other streaming platforms rose up from seemingly nowhere. Amazon Prime, for example, did not start as a streaming platform, but through a combination of VOD rentals and sales and streaming options (including, ironically, many HBO shows), they were able to build a thriving audience base that stood solidly in second behind Netflix. Even Hulu, to a certain degree, stood out in later years as it brought a wide array of FX shows to streaming and started adding their own original films and shows.

But somewhere along the way — maybe after Netflix admitted to spending $100 million just to keep Friends for another year — every media company got it in their head that they could have their own streaming platform. And then came Peacock, and Paramount Plus, and MGM+, and Disney+, and about a trillion other platforms using the “+” symbol. It didn’t matter that most of these networks had no real reason to create a streaming platform; they did it anyway so they could lock popular shows behind a personalized paywall. Instead of platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime working with studios and companies to acquire streaming rights to film and TV, those companies just took their basketball and went home, presenting viewers with even more hoops, and expenses, to hop through.

The Curious Case of Battlestar Galactica

I am not immune to the nostalgia drip. It’s quite potent, and sometimes it’s nice to rewatch a show that you haven’t seen in a while. After working through Justified (which I haven’t watched since college) and The Good Place (which I haven’t watched in a few years), I landed on Battlestar Galactica. I originally saw the show back in 2013 or 2014; I didn’t just watch it, I inhaled it. So, I bit the bullet and forked over the money for an ad-free subscription to Peacock.

Except, when I got into the platform, I saw that BGS was nowhere to be found. Not the show, not the prequel miniseries, nada. After doing a little research (AKA, Googling “where is BGS reddit” to make sure I got a reliable answer), I discovered that Peacock had quietly pulled the show from their platform.

Usually, when a movie or show disappears from a streaming platform, it’s due to the streaming rights expiring. Netflix, for example, buys the streaming rights to thousands of shows and movies, usually for a few months at a time. When those rights expire, the movie or show gets pulled from the platform. But in this instance, I couldn’t help but scratch my head. Battlestar Galactica is an NBC show, and Peacock is NBC’s platform. There is no rights issue preventing NBC from putting their own show on their own streaming network. In fact, that is the entire reason they created their own platform in the first place! So, why did the pull it? When will it be back?

The answer to both questions is simple: we don’t know. It could be back tomorrow. It could never return. They could replace it with episodes missing. It’s really anybody’s guess. But if you want to stream the show, you can’t. Your only option is to buy it outright on VOD or to buy a physical copy (between the two options, I recommend the latter; at least you have the piece of mind of owning the damn thing when it’s on your shelf).

But, in a way, the situation with Battlestar Galactica crystallizes streaming’s false promise. At any time, a streaming platform can pull shows and movies just because they want to. Or, in Netflix’s case, they can go through all the trouble of buying the rights to a show and then cancel it after two seasons when their algorithm decides it’s no longer getting enough streams (I’m still mad about Santa Clarita Diet).

Paying More While Thinking We’re Paying Less

Streaming used to be an affordable alternative to buying physical media and going to the theater. With Netflix, you could pay $10/month and get a seemingly endless trove of cinematic options, including old favorites you’ve watched a thousand times over and unknown gems that, otherwise, would be relegated to those $5 DVD bins at Blockbuster, Walmart, or Best Buy.

Times have changed, though. With the proliferation of platforms, most people are more likely than not paying more to stream than they would if they just bought their favorite show or movie on Blu-Ray. Waiting for a movie to hit streaming is essentially asking a streaming service to take the monthly fee out of your bank account until that movie finally lands (and that’s assuming you watch it).

There is no denying that theaters are expensive. And even while Blu-Ray costs have fallen dramatically over the years (it wasn’t so long ago that Blu-Rays were the expensive counterpart to DVDs), building a physical media collection is still rather expensive. And yet, compare those costs to what you’re paying on streaming.

According to survey data from Forbes, the average person subscribes to 2.8 streaming services, with 10% of people subscribing to more than five. But let’s take the conservative estimate and round it up to three. Say you only pay for Netflix, Hulu, and Max, three of the most popular platforms. And let’s assume you only take the cheapest ad-free options. In that case, you would be spending a whopping $60 a month, not including taxes. That price increases if you want to stream 4K shows and movies on Netflix and/or Max, and if you want to bundle anything with Hulu.

Of course, there are “ad-supported” plans for all these platforms that are cheaper (Netflix, for example, has a $6.99/month ad-supported plan), but at that point we’ve circled the yard back to plain-old TV, haven’t we? The entire allure of streaming was that it was ad-free. We could watch our favorite shows without being interrupted every fifteen minutes by Bounty and the NFL. We subscribed for that premium experience. So, in effect, the idea of downgrading back to endless ad cycles just to watch Stranger Things is laughable.

Meanwhile, some theater chains, like Alamo Drafthouse, offer a monthly plan that allows you to watch a free movie every day of the year for a monthly price lower than that of every single aforementioned streaming services’ ad-free plans. AMC has a similar offering. Even Cinemark’s movie club, which is more stringent on how it doles out free tickets, gives you a free ticket a month for $10.

This is not me saying that those theaters and their plans are perfect. After all, the entire allure of the Alamo Drafthouse is ordering a beer and a meal with your movie, and those costs can rack up. Similarly, concessions are expensive, even if your movie plan gives you a slight discount. But if you only order a soda and some popcorn with these movie plans, you actually would save money month-to-month as compared to how much you’re paying for just three streaming services.

And what about TV? Well, that same Forbes study showed that more than 50% of respondents said they have signed up for a streaming service with the intention of only watching one particular show. Even $20 a month is an expensive proposition to just watch The Office, Friends, or Breaking Bad, especially when each can be bought in their entirety on Blu-Ray for $50 to $60.

The Path To Non-Ownership

As physical media sales have dwindled and people have turned to buying movies, games, and TV shows digitally, or relying entirely on streaming for that entertainment, the concept of ownership has dramatically shifted. When you buy a Blu-Ray copy of your favorite movie, you own that movie. Yes, of course, it’s not eternal. Bit rot is a sad fact of life. But you can be confident that, as long as you take care of it, that movie will never change. It will be there, on your shelf, available to be watched as often or as little as you like, and all you paid was the sticker price and tax.

Digital purchases are not the same. When you buy a movie on VOD, you are actually just buying a lifetime license to that product. What’s the difference? Well, the owner of that license can pull it at any moment. You may really love watching your copy of Ocean’s Eleven that you bought on Amazon. But if Amazon loses the license to that movie (which does happen) then you will no longer be able to access that movie, even though you bought it.

In essence, anything you buy digitally you don’t “own” in the traditional sense. There is always the possibility that you could wake up and find your favorite movie inaccessible due to some legal jargon or a strange dispute between studios.

For streaming, this issue is even more pronounced. Of course, no one buys a Disney+ subscription with the idea that they “own” all those movies and shows. Even still, when you turn on a movie (especially one you’ve seen before) you probably expect it to be intact and unaltered. But, again, this is another thing that the streaming world has changed.

Disney+ is the most prominent actor in this arena. CGI hair was edited into the movie Splash to hide Daryl Hannah’s butt. Another edit occurs in The French Connection — a film owned by 20th Century Fox, which is now owned by Disney. One character, Doyle, utters the n-word in the original film. It happens toward the beginning, and it’s used as a way to illustrate how racist Doyle is and how that informs his approach to being a cop. However, in the current streaming version, that conversation is entirely removed from the film with a jarring jump cut that disturbs the film’s pacing and feels, well, like somebody cut something out of the film.

Eyebrow Cinema, a YouTuber I quite enjoy, did a great video breaking down this particular edit if you would like to learn more about that particular example.

The French Connection edit may be more understandable to some. This is, of course, not an issue of hiding Darryl Hannah’s butt with badly-incorporated CGI hair but rather the elimination of a word that causes direct pain to people of color. But I also think it’s a dangerous precedent to set — having Disney go into existing films and cut them up. This is, after all, the same company that has a history of editing films to appease Chinese authorities and who removed a gay kiss from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (a film that has plenty of problems, though a gay kiss certainly isn’t one) so it could be shown in Singapore.

In short, I don’t think it’s a good idea to give any corporation the power to edit an already-released film, or to edit films on a whim. Even when done for what may have been good intentions — like with The French Connection — it gives a corporate body the power to alter and edit art, and as the recent WGA and SAG strikes prove, corporations both don’t understand art and have no interest in it beyond how it lines their fancy pockets.

The Future of Cinephelia

Years ago, Steven Spielberg predicted that a series of box-office flops would lead to widespread change in the industry — particularly the way movie tickets are priced. 2023 — as much as it has been an incredible year for thoughtful, powerful, funny, and intuitive cinema — has given us many a box office bomb.

The Little Mermaid had $250 million budget and reportedly needed about $500 million to break even after marketing. It earned $560 million worldwide, just barely eking over that threshold.

The Flash had a $200 million budget. It earned just $268 million worldwide — not nearly enough to cover its sizable marketing tab.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny had $300 million budget. It needed roughly $600 million to break even after marketing. It grossed $368 million worldwide.

Haunted Mansion had a $157 million budget. It grossed just $59 million.

These are just a few examples of how 2023 has gone for blockbusters. Even the MCU hasn’t been immune to this trend. The Marvels opening to the lowest box-office numbers in the franchise’s history. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantamania flopped after a promising opening weekend.

That does not mean that audiences are just sitting home, though. Look at Barbenheimer, one of the most giddy and exciting weekends I’ve had at the movies since I fell in love with cinema in the first place. Barbie earned an incredible $1.4 billion worldwide, while Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer earned $950 million, making it the third highest grossing movie of the year. The takeaway is clear: people love movies, and you don’t need a massive bloated budget, superheroes, or legacy characters like Indiana Jones to get them out. You just need to give them a compelling reason why they need to watch this at the theater instead of at home.

Oppenheimer leaned into its visual extravaganza, with Nolan explaining endlessly how this film needed to be seen in a theater. That its sound design and visual style would not translate as well on a 40-inch Smart TV. Barbie’s appeal was the community of the experience (not to mention a remarkable marketing campaign).

In short, people still love the theater.

Yes, there are of course downsides. I remember going to a showing of Smile a couple years ago with my wife, only to have it be interrupted by a gaggle of high school kids who were yelling, taking Snapchats, and answering phone calls in the middle of the theater. But there is also no other experience quite like going to the theater.

Killers of the Flower Moon is destined to be a traditional box office flop. It’s a $200 million passion project that’s 3-and-a-half hours long. It illustrates one of the darkest chapters in American history, and it does so with a granular specificity. Even given that, sitting in a theater this October (which was mostly fully, I might add) and taking in this story was nothing short of revelatory. You could feel a collective shock, horror, and pain gripping every person in the audience. During those three-and-a-half hours, the individual experience became a collective. We experienced this story together; we experienced this film together.

I love watching movies at home. Hell, I love when I get a ticket to a smaller movie and I have the theater to myself. I remember watching It Follows all alone at the Roxy Cinema in Burlington and being scared out of my mind. But I wouldn’t trade the theater experience for endless individuality. A theater screen commands your attention in a way your entertainment set-up at home doesn’t. There is no pausing. If you are going to pull out your phone, you are taking a risk to miss some aspect of the story. And when the story is good, you never want to take that risk in the first place.

I don’t know what the future of cinema holds, but I pray that it isn’t streaming. I pray we don’t wall ourselves up in our house, watching re-edited movies on expensive platforms that break down half-the-time. I hope cinema doesn’t just become another form of content — something for us to mindlessly digest beside reruns of Kitchen Nightmares and whatever the TikTok algorithm decides to spit at us.

Because cinema is not just content. Even the most bombastic and silly films are art in their own way.

If streaming has its way, cinema will just end up being a tile, trapped within a sea of miasma, just something for us to scroll by so we can watch Michael Scott’s antics for the umpteenth time.