Giants of the Silver Stream – How Streaming Services Are Remaking the Movie Market
“Oh boy, you don’t know how fast time goes by until you get there.”
You would be forgiven for thinking that this was uttered by me, 30 minutes deep into a scroll through Netflix, deciding between my sixth rewatch of Into The Spiderverse or a return to the compelling melancholy of The Devil All the Time.
Rather than just being a collection of great movies that the platform has acquired the streaming rights to, an increasing amount of the little film squares we scroll past are earmarked by a little red “N”. The Devil All the Time is one such film, and that little red “N” tells us it is a film produced by Netflix’s own studios. It also now tells us that the film will likely be of exceptional quality.
This train of high-quality Netflix originals is showing no sign of stopping. With the recent release of His House to critical acclaim, and the acquisition of Zendaya’s new black and white romance project Malcom and Marie for $30 million, the trend only seems to be gaining momentum.
Films nestled in this upper echelon of streaming studio flicks include Roma, Uncut Gems, Annihilation and The Irishman. In fact, the above quote is from Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, nominated ten times in the 2020 Oscars. Scorsese’s recent entry into the decades old “three-hour mafia film” genre delves deep into how the notions of Irish nationality and the oncoming entropy of age plays into the life of a notorious gangster. This is a trend throughout the mafia-epic genre, one of the underlying tensions that wracks Ray Liotta’s character in Goodfellas.
So, what is it doing in the 2020 Oscars? Three hour gangster epics just are not films that Hollywood produces anymore, with the desire to recreate a kind of dynamic story steeped in historical verisimilitude (to a Mafia that arguably didn’t really exist) having been replaced by the recent rise of the dramatized celebrity biopic.
That’s just the thing. The Irishman did not have to pass a marketability focus group in a Hollywood studio. In fact, the project was dropped by Paramount and STX in 2017 due to the monumental cost of the de-aging CGI required to make its aging actors look authentically young. Netflix snapped up the picture as soon as it possibly could.
A rumoured $200 million cost of pioneering this de-aging technology was weighed up against the commercial failure of Scorsese’s previous film Silence, and the scales did not balance. The type of profit motive that drives huge swathes of the modern movie industry just does not have space for project like this. Bloated costs that only accrue because of an insistence on certain actors not having younger doubles does not always speak to a profitable movie.
That, however, does not bother Netflix. Netflix’s business model is one based on accruing as many unique subscribers as possible alongside venture capital investments. So, if they already have enough unique subscribers to front the cost of the de-aging technology, then a film like this can only act as a potential draw.
But there must be more to it, right? Sure, it might attract a few more customers, and they might be able to afford it, but why do they want an expensive film like this? Why not just stick to your business model, getting the new releases as they come across?
Well, The Irishman is not Netflix’s only grasp at “prestige” filmmaking. Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma won three different Oscars for the studio in 2019, and in the 2020 Oscars Netflix received 24 nominations, the most of any studio.
There seems to be a real drive within streaming companies and their film studios to capture a place within the wider film canon, to make an indelible mark on the medium.
Antonio Campos’ The Devil All the Time strikes a similar chord. A bizarre, winding collection of events and timelines all unfurling around a family’s trauma, and how that sits and ferments within a small town and beyond. It’s an odd film, and for me it sounds a similar tone to pieces like Once Upon A Time in Hollywood and Bad Times at the El Royale.
The Devil All The Time reads more like a gothic character study than a cohesive narrative. It is an ambitious project to give to Campos, who does not boast much recent experience directing films.
Again, it is the kind of project that perhaps would not fly in a traditional Hollywood production setting. When you give this material to a production company like Netflix, however, it simply adds another feather into the rapidly growing cap of films that hit a very particular prestige niche.
Another aspect that is particularly potent here for Netflix is the speedier production time their studios tend to have. This allows for much more reflexive casting, making the stellar casting choices of Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson so much easier to cement in place. Holland, just off the tail end of the most popular cinematic franchise in history, and Pattinson, having starred in indie darling The Lighthouse and the lockdown cinema blockbuster Tenet.
These are smart casting choices on Netflix’s part, two extremely popular actors in both mainstream and cult circles that could only help to secure old subscriptions and acquire even more new ones. This streamlined casting and production system afforded to studios under streaming giants allow for a much more reactive grasp of emerging trends. Mixing this strategy with the production of pieces aimed at piercing classic film canon, like The Irishman, allow for a healthy mix and diversity of content, telling us why more and more directors are turning to streaming sites for work.
Scorsese himself is a huge proponent of various aspects of “traditional” cinema (made even more clear by his infamous lambasting of superhero cinema). However, even this giant among the old guard of directors has extolled the benefits of working with sites like Netflix, discussing the freedom associated with them.
“[H]aving the backing of a company that says that you will have no interference, you can make the picture as you want – the trade-off being: it streams, with theatrical distribution prior to that. I figure, that’s a chance we take, on this particular project.”
It seems that the freedom from focus groups and market approval and the ability to accurately shoot for your directorial vision is an incredibly attractive prospect for directors.
Netflix are not the only ones pushing into the “straight-to-stream” film trend. Amazon Prime has recently released a selection of films in partnership with horror blockbuster giant Blumhouse, releasing the “Welcome to the Blumhouse” package. These are a selection of horror and thrillers that hit a particular style and thematic concern outside of Blumhouse’s usual remit. For me, it was reminiscent of Ari Aster’s horror masterpiece Hereditary, produced under studio A24.
La Nocturne, the story of two twins competing at music school taken to an almost eldritch extreme, stood out to me from this package. It ebbed and flowed in a beautiful, mesmerising rhythm. It may not be the kind of film Blumhouse would usually produce for wider cinematic release, but the fact that a platform like Amazon Studios was able to let it air is certainly a great boon to the wider cinema scene.
What comes next then? Are we moving towards an all-digital film future? I don’t think so. There is still an undeniable magic in the atmosphere within a cinema. Despite Scorsese’s protests otherwise, the reactions of a large audience to something like the final shots of Avengers: Endgame was utterly electric. Unfortunately, we cannot go to the cinema right now, so the rise in films that leap straight to our laptops and iPads does allow for quick, easy access to some exceptional art. It also grants access to those who would not usually go out of their way to catch them in cinema.
While the splintering of unique content among streaming services is starting to make pop culture rather expensive to consume, the competition among these platforms is leading to some great movies. A plurality in art is fantastic, and the content produced by some of these studios is a promising glance into the future of film, be it on stream or in cinema.
Written by Martin Docherty
Martin is a recently recovering English Graduate, hoping to rehabilitate himself by producing content about all the media he can. You can find him on the Movies and Martins podcast chatting about films and despairing at the Now You See Me films.