Ever since Oscar-oriented films began showing up on streaming services in the late 2010s, Hollywood has worried that such movies would someday vanish from multiplexes. The diminishing importance of big screens was accentuated in March, when, for the first time, a streaming film, “CODA” from Apple TV+, won the Academy Award for best picture.
This is about more than money: Hollywood sees the shift as an affront to its identity. Film power players have long clung to the fantasy that the cultural world revolves around them, as if it were 1940. But that delusion is hard to sustain when their lone measuring stick — bodies in seats — reveals that the masses can’t be bothered to come watch the films that they prize most. Hollywood equates this with cultural irrelevancy.
People like to call it, Jeanine Basinger, the film scholar, said.escape, but that’s not actually what it isIt’s entertainment. It can be a serious topic, by the way. But when films are too introspective, as many of these Oscar ones now are, the audience gets forgotten about.Brooks Barnes
Give us a laugh or two in there! When I think about going out to see misery and degradation and racism and all the other things that are wrong with our lives, I’m too depressed to put on my coat, continued Ms. Basinger, whose latest book, “Hollywood: The Oral History”, co-written with Sam Wasson, arrived last month.
I feel there’s no need to theorize about the shrinking audiences of Oscar-aspiring movies beyond this simple reason: the audience seeks entertainment. And these days there’s no shortage of competing sources of entertainment, starting with streaming services and their seemingly endless supply of content, some of which can undoubtedly rival Oscar-awarded productions.
The watching experience could certainly play a part here. Considering how movies are getting longer – Tár is some two-and-a-half hours long, rivaling superhero blockbusters – would you rather watch that in a cramped seat in a movie theater, wondering when the right moment is to take that long-overdue bathroom break, or in the comfort of your home, where you can eat and drink whatever you like and pause whenever you need? I am convinced that the future of the movie business relies on embracing consumer preferences and needs, not preaching against them with arguments reeking of entitlement and self-interest. Still, there is a lot of back-and-forth over studios’ strategies for releasing movies to streaming. Warner’s current 45-day window before making their titles available on HBO Max seems a reasonable compromise to me – but with their current turmoil, who knows what the situation will be in a couple of months?
I have never been much of an avid movie goer myself, generally quite content to wait for the digital release. But I too feel this growing weariness of watching dramas and human sorrow onscreen. These past years reality has been harsh enough, between a pandemic and war breaking out in our neighborhood, that I lost almost all interest in realistic stories. I continue to watch – and very much enjoy – gritty and dark fiction where characters fight for their very survival – most recently Alice in Borderland – but these are sufficiently remote from real-world settings that the stories don’t remind me of our present challenges.
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