At a time when one of the few genuinely exciting trends in the world of cinema is the growing popularity of repertory theaters screening old movies on film, taking a major library off the market would be yet another blow to the theater industry that Netflix is apparently keen to destroy entirely. As movie theaters have struggled with finding creative solutions to the problem of Hollywood’s substandard (and decreased) output, repertory cinema has been a rare bright spot.
Theaters like Metrograph in New York, the New Beverly in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Film Society (PFS) in Philadelphia, Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston, and Music Box Theatre in Chicago have thrived as young cinephiles have flocked to see old movies on the silver screen. Recent rereleases of films ranging from Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (only in IMAX 70mm) to Jaws to Kill Bill have enthralled moviegoers. Even more important, studies show that the supposedly “YouTube-addled” Gen Alpha actually prefer the theater experience to streaming, despite what Sarandos might say about the communal experience of a movie theater being “outdated.”
Rather than trusting Netflix to be stewards of such an important piece of America’s artistic and cultural landscape, they should turn over control of the archive to an institution like the University of California, Los Angeles, which already does a great deal of film preservation, along with the rights to license movies for rep screenings and physical media releases, the way Warner itself has assumed control of a number of old studio libraries.
I may be inclined to more sympathy had theaters and cable providers made any effort to stay competitive in the, what, 15 years since streaming started to take off? These guys are about to get hit by an oncoming train that they’ve been standing motionless in front of for a decade, have made no effort to save themselves - barring, perhaps, having Nicole Kidman politely ask the train to stop - and are now at the last possible minute begging the engineer to switch tracks, even though it would run over like a dozen other people in the process and, really, there’s no guarantee the train would actually be going fast enough to hurt them beyond the word of some people that have, again, been sitting in front of an oncoming train for 15 years, one of whom is the guy in the tophat and handlebar mustache that tied all those other people to the tracks in the first place. Sorry fellas, you woulda had my condolences six years ago but now you’re on your own. I’ll be over here in my much cheaper boat with a five-meter-high stack of DVDs, which in this metaphor represents a five-meter-high stack of DVDs.
Also, I can’t make this fit the train metaphor, hasn’t Netflix been doing more theatrical runs recently anyway? Like, as recently as last week? Am I just completely misremembering that one K-Pop movie having to add screenings because too many people bought tickets, drawing a bigger audience than the competing Disney and Dreamworks movies in the process? If anything, these guys have got to be salivating at the idea of being able to charge people $19.99 for one movie plus arbitrary processing fees and 30 minutes of unskippable preroll ads.