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experience to streaming, despite what Sarandos might say about the communal experience of a movie theater being “outdated.”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.