A Blog Update

 

This is the fifteenth year I have been writing this blog and I think it is fair to say that 2020 was the worst year for movies in my lifetime. It is entirely the fault of the pandemic.

 

The crisis has made a few things clear though: First, it has been proven to me that seeing a movie in a theater is preferable to seeing a movie at home. The obvious differences are the size of the screen and the presence of an audience. These things are important, sure, and the presence of an audience is particularly helpful when watching a comedy or horror movie, but what I have come to respect even more is the focus that a movie theater provides the viewer. When one is at home there are a multitude of potential distractions that take the viewer out of the experience. Even a small pause in action would prompt me to look at my phone when I otherwise would not in a theater. For blockbusters this would not be all that important. You are not going to miss much when you look away for a few seconds. The movie I just watched, “The Personal History of David Copperfield” is a smaller movie, but it moves fast and has a lot of detail. Distractions can ruin the experience of this type of movie. I had to pause the movie several times and rewind so that I would not miss anything. I really wish I had seen this movie in a theater.

 

The pandemic also revealed one great thing about movie theaters I had completely taken for granted. As someone who lives in New York, I had the benefit of living in a market where almost every movie worthy of being released in theaters was available at some theater in the city. In effect, I always had the opportunity to see a particular movie at the time of its release. Now all the theaters are closed indefinitely. Since then, the movies that would have been given a theater release are now hoarded by streaming platforms. These streaming platforms, may they rot, don’t even allow movie night. That is, they do not allow a consumer to buy a single ticket to a newly released movie. I must subscribe to AppleTV, or Disney+, or HBOMAX to see anything on the service. Imagine my surprise, when I couldn’t see the latest Tom Hanks’ movie “Greyhound” earlier this year. I would have paid $15 to see it in a theater. I would have paid $15 to see it at home. But AppleTV wanted me to subscribe to AppleTV and would not sell or rent the movie to me otherwise. I believe I am like most people when I swear I will not subscribe to ten different streaming services (At this moment I have Netflix and Ami has Amazon Prime and Hulu). I’m not subscribing to a streaming platform just to watch one movie. That is stupid.

 

Worse, this development comes at the end-times of the rental market. For the first fifteen years of this century, movie-lovers lived in a golden era when every movie and TV show that was released was also put on DVD for general consumption in the rental market. In fact, all the great old movies were put on DVD too. With a Netflix DVD subscription, one had access to the entire DVD universe, which seemed to be almost everything. This golden era has ended. It is starting to become common that movies are not getting a DVD release (Compact Disc slots themselves are being omitted from new electronic devices). This would not be such a problem if there existed a general rental market where individual titles could be downloaded. However, that does not appear to be happening. “Greyhound” will not come out on DVD and it won’t be available to rent from AppleTV or any other streaming platform in the near or far future. It appears that it is fated to forever be locked within AppleTV. There are two ways a movie becomes widely seen. It is either widely marketed and highly anticipated. Many people see it immediately upon its release in theaters. Or it gains popularity once a critical mass of people have seen it and recommend it to other people. "Greyhound" did not get a release in theaters. A required subscription to AppleTV should severely limit any possible spread via word-of-mouth. It is hard to imagine a different scenario in which the rollout of this movie would result in it being seen by less people. It is almost as if Apple has no experience whatsoever in the business of making and marketing movies.

There is this idea of a shared popular culture which comes from a time (50s to 70s) when there were only five television channels and movies were expensive to make. Everyone in the country seemed to be watching or at least aware of the same cultural happenings. The splintering of our shared culture has been occurring for awhile now (let’s put the start of it at basic cable). The closing of movie theaters and the obsolescence of DVD rentals will only exacerbate that trendline. Where we go from here I do not know, but I am noticing the change.