Media Disrupted: Surviving Pirates, Cannibals, and Streaming Wars by Amanda D. Lotz

Author:Amanda D. Lotz [Lotz, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Communication Studies, Technology & Engineering, Social Aspects, Social Science, Technology Studies
ISBN: 9780262046091
Google: _GhBEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2021-10-05T00:25:52.696552+00:00

4

Netflix Is Destroying Hollywood

with Daniel Herbert

The recent controversy surrounding streaming services such as Netflix producing full-length movies has prompted a number of high-profile, even Oscar-worthy, performances. For instance, Hollywood icon Steven Spielberg argued that showing a movie in a few theaters should not warrant status as a film, or make it eligible to be a contender for an Academy Award. After Netflix received a best-picture nomination for Roma in 2019, Spielberg opined that such films should be considered in the made-for-television film category of the Emmys if a streaming service was the primary mode of distribution.1 A similar round of debate repeated later that year surrounding Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, when Netflix bought the rights after its original funders backed out.

Spielberg’s comments were just the latest in the ongoing debates over how to understand the relationship of services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to the film and television industries. In many ways, these debates were about the fundamental question of what makes a film a film and featured great creative luminaries aghast at the notion that their masterpieces were being compared with works that might never be shown on the big screen. A similar rhetorical tempest broke out at the prestigious Cannes film festival in May 2017. Here, too, top-shelf directors backed the film festival in a policy change that required competition films to have distribution in French theaters, a move that thereby excluded Netflix. Jury head and famed director Pedro Almodóvar took the same position as Spielberg, asserting that a film becomes a film only through theatrical screening. Amid these histrionics, Hollywood actor Will Smith, also serving on the Cannes film jury—and notably starring in a soon-to-debut Netflix original film—offered a different take. He reflected on the movie-viewing behavior of his family: “In my home, Netflix has had absolutely no effect on what they go to the movie theater to watch, go to the cinema to be humbled by certain images and stay home for others—no cross. In my home Netflix has been nothing but an absolute benefit—[they] watch films they otherwise wouldn’t have seen. It has broadened my children’s global cinematic comprehension.”2

Smith’s comments were subtle, and they supported the position of those frustrated that Spielberg and Almodóvar failed to acknowledge their privilege in having access to theatrical distribution. Meaningful politics exist as to who gets to make films shown in theaters and who can afford to see them there. The refusal to acknowledge Netflix and other streaming services as legitimate distributors and producers of movies reinforced a system by which only the tiniest percentage of filmmakers can claim to make “films” and present their story to what is also only a fraction of those interested in watching a film. Calling Netflix a democratizing force would be an overstatement, but it and other streaming services certainly do make movies more accessible.

Another particularly unenlightened aspect of these debates is that they are so familiar. The argument was remarkably similar to one from the 1980s when videocassette sale and rental emerged and allowed people to select movies to watch in their own home.

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