Category: Only on DVD

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Cinema Only on DVD

What We Learned from the “Mind-Boggling” Case of the Glass Onion

Only on DVD: Part 5

Continued from Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4

On my last ‘Only on DVD’ column, I dissected Paramount’s release of Confess, Fletch (2022). Looking at the reported production and distribution facts leading up to its super-secret release week, I’m tempted to call Paramount’s handling of the property “inept.” Comparing Paramount and Confess, Fletch (2002) with Netflix and Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022), however, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that Big Red’s distribution methodology is something else entirely. 

I wanted to learn more about why Netflix chose, according to the headline of a November 27th article in the Hollywood Reporter, to leave “tens of millions on the table” by shunning a traditional theatrical release. I’m looking into Netflix specifically because of Glass Onion, but many of these same criticisms could be lobbied against HBO Max and Amazon Prime and anyone else with a production business and a streaming service. They just have fewer notable examples – and none as big as Glass Onion.

Sidenote: Let me be abundantly clear – because some readers have been confused by this in the past – I write for DVD Netflix, an entity that was cordoned off from the streaming giant known as Netflix. DVD Netflix goes out of its way to cater to its subscriber base by absorbing steadily increasing postal costs and providing a wide variety of titles despite dwindling resources. In many ways, The Little Red Envelope is the antithesis of the Big Red Streamer – even though they share distant familial DNA.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) gave Netflix its first massive critical success.

Big Red first courted industry respectability by releasing Awards-worthy releases such as Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018). Since then, seven more Netflix-distributed and/or produced movies have been nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, including 2022’s All Quiet on the Western Front. To date, none have won the top prize. Traditional distribution for Oscar fodder doesn’t stray too far from Netflix’s practice of limiting the exhibition of their original feature productions. Open theatrically in a few major metropolitan areas and increase the number of screens in lockstep with critical buzz, Academy Award nominations, and ticket sales.

It should be noted that the Academy once again requires a qualifying theatrical release for awards consideration (the restriction relaxed during COVID but was reinstated in 2022), and if not for this stipulation it’s likely these films wouldn’t appear in theaters at all. The Netflix limited theatrical release model never stood out as something entirely dissimilar, especially since five of their eight nominees were released since the beginning of the pandemic, when “normal” became anything but.

And then they got into the Knives Out business.

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019) received widespread critical acclaim and made $311.9 million worldwide on a $40 million budget. Lionsgate greenlit a sequel in 2020 without much hesitation. Lionsgate, however, didn’t own the rights to the property. Rian Johnson had retained sequel rights and auctioned them off to the highest bidder. Enter Big Red, who outbid both Apple and Amazon, with an offer of $469 million for distribution rights of the two planned Knives Out sequels – more than double what Lionsgate had been prepared to offer.  Variety quoted one anonymous losing bidder: “The math doesn’t work. There’s no way to explain it. The world has gone mad. It’s a mind-boggling deal.” We’re left to wonder how Netflix views the value of the Knives Out franchise. Where do they plan to recoup their investment?

Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer considered this and saw an opportunity to stay in the Knives Out business. He thought he could parlay the distribution rights for the original Knives Out to maintain some involvement with the sequels. He imagined a world in which Netflix could stream the original alongside the sequels and release the trilogy together on physical media. Lionsgate supplied a more traditional theatrical distribution model, whereas Netflix had only thumbed its nose at exhibitioners. (Netflix attempted a simultaneous theatrical and streaming release of The Beasts of No Nation in 2015, causing the large chains to boycott the film.) Big Red would surely welcome a wider theatrical release for such a high-profile sequel. Feltheimer made the offer. Netflix declined.

In producing Glass Onion, Netflix crossed over into the mainstream; courting a big, burgeoning Hollywood franchise to compete with the headlining IP on streaming rivals Disney and HBO; and, for the first time, brokered an agreement with AMC and Regal Cinemas. (At the time, AMC’s chief executive Adam Aron proclaimed proudly and presumptuously that “both theatrical exhibitors and streamers can coexist successfully.”) And indeed, everyone expected Netflix to burst into theaters, box offices blazing, a parade of fanfare for their $469 million investment. A November 25th New York Times article suggested that sources inside the company expected Glass Onion to play on 2,000 screens nationwide. As a point of comparison, the current number one movie as I’m writing this, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, played in 2,176 theaters on Valentine’s Day 2023.

But Glass Onion only opened on 638 screens.

This decision went against the wishes of Netflix’s Film Chief Scott Stuber and Rian Johnson, both of whom lobbied for a wide release and a traditional theatrical schedule dictated by ticket sales. Those previously enthusiastic major exhibitors threatened to pull out of their agreement but stayed under the assumption that a big opening weekend would change Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos’ way of thinking. Despite internal disagreement, Sarandos doubled down on his demands of a one-week theatrical run, followed by a 30-day window before arriving on Netflix’s streaming service.

There’s some industry thinking to back up Sarandos’ methodology. David Zaslav, chief executive at Warner Media Discovery, said “a movie that opens in the theater performs five times as well as a movie that you put directly to streaming.” The same held true throughout the history of direct-to-video releases, which must be seen as the most direct comparison for the more than 817,000 offerings cluttering app space. Movies that play in theaters receive a quality control pass from potential viewers, but here’s the problem – and I admit there’s a gap in available information, but let’s do the best we can. It wasn’t whether Netflix left money on the table, but how much money they left on the table. In the Hollywood Reporter, Wall Street analyst Eric Handler commented, “They had a big chance and they whiffed.” Netflix pulled a box office hit from theaters, during a period of industry uncertainty. Any other studio would have killed to have that kind of opening. Netflix denied exhibitors the chance to benefit from the increased patronage Glass Onion had generated, choosing market manipulation over concrete money in their pockets.

In Glass Onion’s first weekend in theaters, it made $13.2 million – good for third place behind Disney’s Wakanda Forever and Strange World. Both of those films played in more than 4,000 movie houses. Glass Onion made $4,000 more per screen than Wakanda Forever and $14,000 more per screen than Strange World. $14,563 to be precise. Sarandos, meanwhile, carried on undeterred and downplayed the theatrical significance. “…we make our movies for our members,” he said, following it up by saying, “Most people watch movies at home.” 

This statement might not seem like much, but it tells us everything we need to know. 

Sarandos only wants to exhibit Netflix movies on the Netflix streaming service. In a perfect scenario, he’d eschew theatrical exhibition altogether. As a company devoted to its streaming content, that makes sense, but it still needs theaters for credibility, awards eligibility, and the viewership bump (the number of eyes on home television screens). He does not care about the potential viewer experience. He’s in the content business, not the movie business. Anyone that’s not a Netflix subscriber should become a Netflix subscriber. This doesn’t benefit the public, many of whom want to see the film but don’t or can’t subscribe to Netflix. After all, there is this very real thing called The Digital Divide. The “most people watch movies at home” statement has been true for decades – since the proliferation of home video – but more and more people watch movies at home because they’re increasingly forced to watch movies at home. Paramount secreted Confess, Fletch into theaters. Netflix provided such a narrow window for Glass Onion that many just couldn’t make it. Roll back the calendar a few years and even the worst and least profitable mainstream movies had two weeks to prove themselves. 

Furthermore, no matter what they say, streaming services don’t want theaters to survive. The sooner the traditional exhibition branch goes extinct, the sooner Sarandos can operate Netflix in a vacuum. That kind of world would absolutely revive the pre-U.S. vs. Paramount (1948) distribution business model. He’s not alone, of course. Every studio with its own streaming service would prefer to use that as an exclusive subscription-based venue for exhibition of its product. I keep saying this because it bears repeating: a studio that produces a movie and exhibits it only on its own streaming service is engaging in the exact practice that caused the Paramount decision in 1948. The times and venues have changed, but without the protection that that Supreme Court decision afforded, the fundamental makeup of those monopolistic practices remains a very real potentiality.

The only barrier between a system whereby Netflix produces a film and exhibits that film only on its streaming service is the viewing habits of the moviegoing public. No physical media. No theatrical releases. If streamers successfully lock everyone to their couch, in perpetuity, endlessly scrolling a deluge of disposable content, the industry will be forced to change with the times, kneeling before its streaming overlords. The requirements for Oscar contention would be dismissed. The perceived differences between a theatrically released movie and a direct-to-streaming release decrease every day.

We are not powerless. We are not slaves to entropy, but we do need to engage in a little more consumer activism. We not only need to return to theaters, but we need to continue to purchase physical media and rent physical media from DVD Netflix and our library systems. Maybe you’re still one of the lucky few with a brick-and-mortar DVD rental store in your neighborhood. It’s a little more effort, but if we become slaves to convenience, we’ll lose one of the things that made us movie watchers, cinephiles, and film geeks in the first place. Choice. 

How we watch movies matters. Streaming services can be wonderful tools; they’ve given us the ability to find movies that had been completely unavailable for decades. If we abandon all else, however, we’ll be subscribing to a system that dictates how we watch and when we watch it. It’s not a new system, of course. We once liberated ourselves from a similar construct with the invention of the VHS tape, but this time around we won’t have the luxury of escapism provided by our connection with big movies on the big screen. The movies might never even play on the big screen. 

Roku produced and distributed Weird: The Al Yankovic Story without an accompanying theatrical release or the wide viewership guaranteed by Netflix or Amazon.

Maybe there isn’t some sort of diabolical schematic for how to take over the world via streaming video. Maybe it’s nothing more than this oft-repeated rumor that physical media is dead, that home video consumers have been wooed by the streaming dawn. Netflix certainly isn’t the only service that fails to offer alternative viewing methods for their product.Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022) saw an initial Blu-ray and 4K release in Australia months before one was even announced in North America.

I would be shocked if the Roku-produced film had even found a fraction of its audience on the little-known streaming service. Most people I asked about the film didn’t even know how to watch the film online. Much like the belated release for Confess, Fletch, Weird may have missed any sort of window to capitalize on its good reviews. At least its devotees could eventually slot this film on the shelf next to UHF (1989), which is far more than I can say for the prospects of ever seeing a case spine that reads Glass Onion.

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Cinema Only on DVD

What We Learned from the Sad Case of Confess, Fletch

Only on DVD Part 4:

Continued from Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

In a case unworthy of a master sleuth with an elusive accent or a retired investigative journalist with a penchant for finding trouble, the answer to how studios would approach theatrical and physical media distribution in a post-U.S. vs. Paramount world has become more clear. Paramount showed its hand with the release of Confess, Fletch.

The blockbuster began dominating Hollywood methodology during the late 1980s. Starting around 2004, people began going to the movies less frequently after a long, steady period of increase. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, the average American went to the movies 4.8 times a year, with 30% going to 5 or more movies a year.

By 2021, the average American visited the theater 1.4 times per year with only 9% seeing 5 or more. 61% saw nothing at all. While the precipitous drop off is directly attributable to COVID, streaming and video-on-demand has directly impacted the number of tickets sold since 2008. (Netflix’s streaming service debuted in 2007.) To compensate for sliding attendance, the price of the individual ticket rose, making the old family night at the movies something of a luxury.

The diversion of focus away from cinemas and network television also caused movie marketing to become more difficult. The old reliable media outlets shrank. Attentions became fractured between streaming services and apps and social media. As a population we became elusive, dancing around forced advertisements with skips, scrobbles, and premium subscription services. The only surefire way to sell a movie was to make a movie the public already knew they wanted to see. Studios simply do not believe they can market a movie without a pre-existing audience. They’re not entirely wrong. We don’t go, but the reasons we don’t go aren’t so clear cut.

I’d argue that the studios stopped backing them with conviction before we stopped going. Without casual moviegoers buying movie tickets, studio bottom lines become increasingly reliant on big tentpole movies for which the “sometimes” moviegoers would still line up.

Let’s take a look at the sad case of Confess, Fletch (2022) to see how the mid-budget movie reaches our eyeballs in the pandemic era. (I love a good case study, don’t you?)

Miramax owned the rights to the Fletch books written by Gregory McDonald (except the first). Jon Hamm went to Greg Mottola with a Confess, Fletch script written by Zev Borow. Mottola rewrote the screenplay and took it to Bill Block at Miramax, who was excited to revive the character, at a certain price. That price permitted only 27 days of shooting, a trifle for a mainstream movie.

Mottola looked for production partners, but everyone passed because they didn’t know who would watch a character-driven dialogue-heavy comedy. (They even considered putting Chevy Chase back in the role to attract an investor.) To lock in three extra days of shooting, including one day in Rome, Hamm gave back 60 percent of his salary. Mottola added some more. 

Miramax shopped the finished movie – a movie that multiple studios have tried to make over the last 25 years – to every distributor on the block, both traditional studios and streaming services, and nobody wanted it. Ultimately Paramount granted the film an outlet in theaters, perhaps because of their ties to the 1985 original. But their heart wasn’t in it.

Paramount didn’t advertise the film. They didn’t let the public know they could walk into a movie theater and see a new Fletch film. I know die-hard Fletch fans who didn’t know until it was happening until it was too late to buy a ticket. 

There’s a cultural divide to consider. A certain generation has been putting champagne on the Underhill’s tab for almost 40 years. Anyone younger than 30 probably thinks Irwin M. Fletcher might be the name of their uncle’s dentist. And yet the movie opened to mostly critical praise and positive word of mouth. Still no advertisements. Jon Hamm appeared in the biggest movie of 2022 (Top Gun: Maverick). Seems like a good thing to mention. Silence. Paramount may have provided the means for exhibition, but they weren’t going to spend another dime to get anyone into the theater to see it.

Confess, Fletch opened in 516 theaters on September 16 (with a simultaneous video-on-demand offering) and disappeared entirely by the end of its second week. I wanted to go back for a second viewing with my wife, but the only local theater playing it dropped it mid-week after 10 days. Without advertising the movie needed the assistance of word-of-mouth. Without time to build word-of-mouth, the studio performed an old-fashioned theatrical dump, normally reserved for movies without hope of success – a curious fate for a moldy, but established franchise backed by a financially proven director (Mottola’s Superbad made $170 million worldwide on a $20 million budget, but Hollywood has a notoriously short memory). 

After disappearing from theaters, the film appeared on Showtime on October 22. The belated announcement of a physical media edition felt like an afterthought, detailed and released well after it evaporated from top-of-mind.

So, what did we learn from Irwin M. Fletcher? We learned that the mid-budget movie is as dead as the dodo, and if we forecast the future based on Fletch, the studios are not about to institute any conservation efforts. Paramount undermined its own theatrical release by failing to advertise. The film’s abbreviated release prevented repeat business and word of mouth necessary to drive ticket sales. Despite all of this, the film had generated some buzz by the end of its theatrical run. Did Paramount follow with a wider release on its Paramount Plus platform? Or a shorter release window for home video? No to all of the above. 

As a point of comparison, Paramount’s The Lost City (2022) starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum debuted on Paramount Plus 45 days after it opened in theaters. The studio, like most others, has been operating on a 30- to 45-day release window. Confess, Fletch will have waited more than 200 days to appear on Blu-ray and DVD. Long enough to evaporate any buzz generated from its limited theatrical release, ensuring it will be forgotten and considered a failure on all fronts.

Paramount put Confess, Fletch in the gallows to be a public example, to provide supporting evidence for the industry’s assertion that mid-budget movies don’t work, to prevent frivolous future spending on movies that aren’t guaranteed a $200 million box office. 

But we’ll never know because, intentionally or not, Paramount created a self-fulfilling prophecy. We won’t support this movie because it won’t make money, and it won’t make money because we won’t support it. 

Meanwhile, Bill Block and Miramax said they’d be happy to support more Fletch projects from Greg Mottola and Jon Hamm. Mottola’s written a screenplay based on another McDonald novel, Fletch’s Fortune.

In that 1978 novel, Fletch attends a journalism convention at the bequest of the FBI (else face charges of tax evasion). When one of Fletch’s former employers winds up dead, everyone’s a suspect, including Fletch and he must figure out who did it and why the FBI wanted him there in the first place. There’s a sexy love interest, a cast of eccentrics, and an Agatha Christie-type mystery isolated in a big hotel. It would make a good movie, with low production overhead – and could capitalize on some of that Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery genre buzz.

But it won’t probably get made because the basic, understood tenets of movie production and distribution went out the window. 

The studios think this is progress because they’re re-taking the control taken from them in 1948 and they’ll shoot themselves in the foot to prove a point and pave the way for the future, a future that looks increasingly like Hollywood’s past. 

On my next ‘Only on DVD’ column, I’ll look at Netflix’s release of Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion because Netflix told us exactly what we thought they thought about theatrical distribution.


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Cinema Only on DVD

A Hollywood Anti-Trust Primer & The Lawless Digital Frontier: Only On DVD Part 3

Continued from Part 1 / Part 2

On the last episode of Only on DVD… Universal forced the theaters to reconsider he theatrical release window when it released Trolls: World Tour (2020) directly to VOD. The idle theaters had lost their leverage during the time of the COVID pandemic. In Part 2, I suggested that Universal CEO Jeff Shell only had to change consumer behavior to rewrite the theatrical release playbook. That’s because, legally, the studios could do whatever they wanted as long as the gambit paid financial dividends for their corporate ownership. Now we dive into the old issue of Hollywood Anti-Trust.

A Hollywood Anti-Trust Primer

I say “legally” because once upon a time there could have been a legal challenge to Universal’s day-and-date release strategy. Since I love backstory, let’s rewind all the way back to the silent era when the Federal Trade Commission first began investigating the film companies for violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The major film studios produced the movies, printed and processed the film, distributed the finished prints, and owned many of the theaters in which the movies were shown. Under Sherman, this vertical business integration amounted to a de facto oligopoly (a business dominated by a small number of 800 lb. gorillas). The U.S. Justice Department couldn’t make their case until 1938, at which point they named the Big Five (Paramount, MGM, WB, 20th Century Fox, and RKO) and the Little Three (Universal, Columbia, and UA) as defendants. The case was settled in 1940 in a New York district court with a consent decree that required studio compliance by 1943 with certain conditions that limited the practices of block booking and blind buying.

Block booking: the licensing of motion pictures for exhibition in a block or group, with the licensee (the independent theater chain) being required to take an entire group of films or none at all. The book would generally include one desired feature along with B-grade features and shorts to pad the total.

Blind buying/booking: the independent theater chain had to schedule films based on the studio’s description alone. The studio would not provide an actual print for preview.

The independent spirit that led Mary Pickford (second from left) and Charlie Chaplin (second from right) to form United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks (left) and D.W. Griffith (right) caused them to co-found the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers to help protect their interests in Hollywood. 

When studios didn’t voluntarily comply, the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers (SIMPP) filed a lawsuit against Paramount’s United Detroit Theatres. Hollywood luminaries Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Walt Disney, Alexander Korda, Orson Welles, David O. Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn, and Walter Wanger formed SIMPP to “advance the interests of independent producers.” The suit forced the Justice Department to resume prosecution of the original consent decree of which the studios were found non-compliant. At best, they merely tried to disguise their problematic business practices with larger blocks of films. Their best effort came when independent theaters begrudgingly agreed to an increase in block size from 5 films to 12 in exchange for the ability to decline to exhibit a film based on quality or content. 

SIMPP’s letter to the Attorney General’s office is well worth a read if you crave more detailed insight into Hollywood’s anti-competitive business model. 

The case reached the Supreme Court in 1945. In United States vs. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948), the court ruled against the studios 7-1. William O. Douglas delivered the “incontestable” conclusion that the studios had engaged in “bald efforts to substitute monopoly for competition.” The court rejected the notion that block booking was an essential component of their copyright. The fallout from the decision forced the studios to divest of their exhibition chains, which caused a dramatic increase in independent theaters and largely neutered the Hays Production Code. Formally codified in 1934 (after being largely ignored for seven years) and enforced by the rigid Production Code Administration’s public relations officer Joseph I. Breen, the self-adopted industry guidelines for acceptable motion picture content required each film to receive a formal MPPDA (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America) seal of approval. Among his many deeds in the name of Catholic decency, Breen infamously transformed Betty Boop from a flapper into an old-fashioned housewife.

The decentralization of the exhibition branch increased the number of independently owned and operated movie houses, and these “art house” theaters could exhibit foreign and independent films that fell outside the Production Code’s jurisdiction. Until this point, the studios had used their control over exhibition to prevent the import of foreign cinema. An influx of movies that challenged the Code’s strictly enforced gender roles and social prejudices flooded into the American market. The final nail in the Code’s coffin was the 1952 Supreme Court case, Joseph Burstyn, Inc. vs. Wilson, in which the Court ruled that movies were entitled to first amendment protection, preventing the New York State Board of Regents from banning Roberto Rossellini’s L’Amore (1948).

The Paramount ruling reconfigured the industry, ending the “golden age” of the studio system. With parallel ascendance of the medium of television, the majors mistakenly believed (in the long run at least) that the lack of exclusive theatrical arrangements would devalue their existing film libraries. Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros. sold or leased their catalogs to other companies for TV exhibition. Disney saw things differently, instead forming Buena Vista Film Distribution to become a holding company and in-house distribution unit. This paved the way for the construction of Disney’s theme parks and extremely profitable leap into television programming. 

Dixie Cup Disposability

I spoke to Anthony L’Abbatte, Preservation Manager at the George Eastman Museum, about the studios’ treatment of their back catalog. He suggested that Disney’s perspective differed because Walt Disney considered animation a more timeless medium, unlike how other studio executives and the moviegoing public viewed film in general. “Once you saw a movie,” he said, “you probably weren’t going to see it again. Studios cranked out 40-50 feature films a year. There was always new product. They were like Dixie cups. Use it once and throw it away. Unless it was a really popular title that they’d reissue every eight or so years, but that was a rare exception.” It wasn’t until the 1960s that a more concerted effort began to preserve old prints by converting them to safety stock for storage. Consider that only 20 years prior, companies like Universal were burning their silent nitrate prints to fuel on-screen fires in films produced during the 30s and 40s. The money men in charge of companies like Universal and RKO couldn’t see a future in which these films were more valuable than kindling – really combustible kindling – but kindling, nonetheless.

In 2022, we witnessed a return to this Dixie cup mentality that also simultaneously brought U.S. vs. Paramount (1948) back into the conversation. Even before the pandemic further shifted viewing habits toward the small screen, a multitude of streaming services began to pop up to service couchbound demand. Here’s a list of the major launches during this period:

Apple TV+ (November 1, 2019)

Disney Plus (November 12, 2019)

HBO Max (May 27, 2020)

Peacock (July 15, 2020)

Paramount Plus (March 4, 2021)

If you want to watch Hamilton (2020), you can only do so with a subscription to Disney+. 

Though methods of operation differ among the participants, the general business model for each is to provide unique, premium content to lure new subscribers and enough depth to maintain subscriber numbers. That last part is the bit everyone’s still trying to figure out. According to The Wall Street Journal, half of the new subscribers to Disney+ who joined for Hamilton (2020) unsubscribed within six months. The same statistics held for HBO Max and Wonder Woman 1984.

Viewers tethered to their homes and scrubbing grocery items with alcohol wipes readily adapted to the streaming convenience – devouring content and moving on to the next service like locusts. This includes content fueled by studios’ back catalogs and newly produced TV series and movies, many of which made their debut on streaming – not on broadcast TV or in theaters.

It wasn’t until HBO Max, with little warning, purged dozens of titles from their service in August of 2022 that many of these new viewers became aware of the hazards of plenty. The purge included 20 original HBO series, 2 movies, and a bunch of Cartoon Network programming – including Infinity Train, Generation Hustle, Close Enough, and The Not-Too-Late Show with Elmo just to name a few. People enjoying the shows at their own pace were just out of luck. Only a few had accompanying physical media releases; many existed only on HBO Max. I know it seems obvious, but the fact bears repeating: the only way you’ll ever be sure to have access to the shows you love is by owning a physical copy. Unfortunately, this is becoming increasingly more difficult in the age of streaming.

Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998).

Viewers looked to the streaming overlords and asked them “Why?” To quote Tom Hanks’ Joe Fox in You’ve Got Mail (1998), “It’s not personal.” To which the public responded according to Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly, “It’s personal to a lot of people. And what’s so wrong with being personal, anyway?”

Like I said in a prior Only on DVD episode, the entertainment business is indeed all business. Heartfelt pleas of devoted fans don’t keep the servers running. Keeping titles on a streaming platform isn’t free. The parent company pays residuals to the creators, cast, and crew. Once a show’s residual cost exceeds its value in viewer engagement (a constantly sliding variable), that title disappears. It becomes that little paper Dixie cup. And as a purely digital enterprise, it doesn’t even have the marginal value of fueling new on-screen fires for early talkies.

Without a push to distribute physical media, I asked Anthony L’Abbatte, what could be the hazards of a streaming-only environment from the perspective of a preservationist? Was there a chance, however unlikely, that we could lose some of this content forever? He paused for a moment before agreeing that parallels were beginning to form between now and the 1920s and 30s, when studios discarded thousands of original film elements. “If they’re not on top of a good a migration program and constantly transferring properties to improved hard drives and storage solutions, some of these films might disappear. It could be a problem going forward.”

Arriving Again at the Start

If you’ve been putting the pieces together, this is where you might begin to ask questions. The questions might not be fully formed because, by and large, we’re film fans, moviewatchers, and cinephiles. We look at movies through the lens of passionate appreciation. When I first started digging into how the pandemic affected the business of film distribution, I wanted to know how the production studios had so easily avoided the 1948 Paramount decision. They seemed to be once again creating a vertically integrated business model with their own streaming services standing in for theatrical exhibition – the exhibition tier that had been stripped of them in 1948.

Tong Po in Kickboxer (1989) might be a questionable analogy for the utility of the U.S. vs. Paramount Supreme Court decision, but I’m highly amused by the villain of a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie being a figurative heavy in a theoretical match between the studios and theater chains.

When theater chains threatened to boycott Universal’s films after the studio tried to narrow the release window to 30 days, they had the Supreme Court decision standing silently in their corner, looking menacing and dipping its resin-laden fists into a bucket of broken glass, a la Tong Po (Michael Qissi) in Kickboxer (1989). When they released Trolls: World Tour during the pandemic, Universal had the overwhelming support of parents who’d run out of quarantine crafting activities. This time, however, U.S. vs. Paramount (1948) sat on a stool, reading the trade papers in search of employment, and shrugged. The U.S. Department of Justice had formally filed a motion to terminate the United States vs. Paramount ruling on November 22, 2019, stating that it was “unlikely the Defendants can reinstate their cartel.” Though vehemently opposed by the theater chains, the Independent Cinema Alliance, and independent filmmakers; the Court granted the motion without contestation or much publicity. Under the cover of night, aka the pandemic, the DOJ had eradicated the safeguard assuring the continued viability of our brick-and-mortar theaters. We don’t know if streaming platforms would have been deemed a violation of the Paramount ruling. Objectively speaking, however, there’s more than just a passing resemblance. In 2022, Paramount or Netflix or Warner Bros. is allowed to produce a movie and then distribute that movie directly to its own streaming service for exhibition. That movie may not appear anywhere else, not even on physical media.

I don’t want to suggest that theaters will be shuttered by next Tuesday. The big studios still need theaters, at least for now, but the future’s a little muddier. As consumer behavior shifts and the current trends continue, fewer and fewer movies will appear in theaters. Anything other than the largest tentpole blockbusters or Oscar-seekers could opt instead for streaming premieres. The movies will live for a time on a particular service and then, one day, they won’t. Will we still see physical DVD releases for movies that only ever existed on the Internet? I asked this very same question to Anthony L’Abbatte at the end of our conversation. “It’s maybe too new to tell,” he said. “The public will likely be losing physical media because the studios want the most control over the content.”

I’ll crack open a few recent case studies and play prognosticator in Part 4: What We Learned from Irwin M. Fletcher and Benoit Blanc.  

Jon Hamm in Confess, Fletch (2022).

I would like to thank Anthony L’Abbatte, Preservation Manager at the George Eastman Museum for taking time to field my questions. Each year the Eastman Museum plays host to The Nitrate Picture Show, four days of beautiful nitrate prints projected onto the big screen at the Dryden Theatre.