Pretend it was one year ago, when the streaming revolution, stoked by the pandemic (when is a pandemic good for business? When your business depends on people staying home), was feeling the first flush of being the New Paradigm That Ate The World. And pretend, in that spring of 2021, that you’d been asked to imagine how a film industry headline from the future might read. You would probably have predicted something like this: “For the First Time, Every Oscar Nominee Comes From a Streaming Service.” Or maybe this: “Movie Theaters: Still Here But No Longer Driving the Action.”
You probably would not have come up with something like this: “Netflix Buys Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s ‘Bardo,’ Plans Global Theatrical Release.”
But that’s the headline that ran on April 27 in Variety. Netflix has bestowed token theatrical runs before — to “The Irishman,” “Roma,” and “The Power of the Dog.” But not with a six-month-before-the-fact headline trumpeting a global theatrical release. Sorry, but that is not on-brand for Netflix.
That particular headline was not about the shocking attrition of Netflix’s subscriber base — the fact that the company lost 200,000 subscribers in Q1, and expects to lose another 2 million in Q2. Yet those stats, reported the week before, were, in effect, the deep background for the news about Netflix’s commitment to giving “Bardo” a full-scale theatrical release. Both headlines were broadcasting different aspects of the same thing: that there are now powerful countervailing forces to the streaming revolution.
Why did the loss of Netflix subscribers happen? A perfect storm of reasons, led by the war in Ukraine (Netflix cut services in Russia), but also driven by the fundamental fact that Netflix now exists in the hyper-competitive world it created — i.e., the rise of streamers like Disney+, Apple TV+ and HBO Max. (There is also the reality of password sharing, but that sounds, in the scheme of things, like a rather desperate rationalization.) The reasons matter, but the upshot is that as Netflix was navigating what is arguably the worst crisis in its 25-year history, the image of Netflix as the unstoppable locomotive of the new age of the entertainment industry took a major hit. And if those headlines provided the words, then last week’s CinemaCon, the annual gathering of the motion-picture theater industry, added the music, all of it coming together in a hit single that went like this: “Movie Theaters Are Back, Baby!”
Not that they’d ever gone away. But the fading of movie theaters — the decay of the theater experience and, yes, the potential death of movie theaters — has, over the last two years, become the most threatening specter haunting the motion-picture business since the rise of television in the early 1950s. At moments, it has struck terror in the hearts of just about everyone who loves this industry. And that’s because it’s all about the unknown.
But it is also, of course, about what everybody knows, at least in their moviegoing reptile brain, which is that people sitting at home watching a “first-run movie” on television is, quite simply, a bad business plan, since it’s a plan based on downgrading the fundamental magic of the product itself: making it less exciting, less essential, less mythological. For movies, make no mistake, are all about mythology. (Just ask George Lucas, Frank Capra or the creators of “The Batman.”)
And so, as it happens, is Netflix.
When it comes to the question of what, exactly, movies are going to look like (not just this year but five years from now, 10 years from now, 30 years from now), Netflix and the movie industry as we’ve known it have been engaged in a war of mythology. In the real world, movies theaters and streaming services can, and will, co-exist. But how? That will ultimately be decided by the viewers. And the news, over the last two weeks, that Netflix is mortal — not…
Read More: Netflix Crisis: What Losing Subscribers Means for the Streamer