The Future of Cinema
In this recent New York Times article from The Projectionist(LINK), Rian Johnson defends Netflix's decision to treat a week-long teaser release of Glass Onion in theaters as a novel form of advertising for the streaming release.
In December 2020, I wrote an essay titled The Future of Movies Is Still Sitting in Theaters, arguing that streaming services would become the crucible for testing the value of films promoted to theaters.
What I didn’t consider was using a limited theatrical release to generate buzz in big cities. The commercial film industry is desperate to prop up the flailing consumer face of cinema, which was once the movie theater and has now become many sizes of screens in the home.
David Lynch is famous for railing against people watching movies on their phones. Still, it didn’t do any good because no one listened to the directors' advice on how to watch a movie. This is because, by the time the films reach the audience on whatever screen they’re watching, they no longer belong to the director, the producer, the studio, or even the theaters.
A revolution has occurred at the point of consumption for an art form that is rapidly approaching 130 years old.
I am working diligently to divest as many streaming services as possible. I am rapidly moving towards disengaging from the current streaming dramas and regressing into a comfortable pool of the hard media I have collected over the years.
Despite Netflix flipping the script with the nearly half-billion dollars they paid for Glass Onion and the next Benoit Blanc mystery, I still believe theaters have a vital role in the quality of the cinema experience. The move of Marvel and Star Wars into small screens has been a massive blow to cinema's sad commercial state.
But I also predict that theaters will make it through. First, the archaic operations of the old theater chains will collapse and merge. They are likely to be purchased by a streaming-platform conglomerate, which will then compete for quality in a real-time Academy Awards. Then, by the end of the year, we’ll know which films are the best because they’ll again be the ones we watched in theaters together as a communal experience.
I celebrate this for the art of cinema. That being said, I built a theater in my house, so I don’t have to sit next to another stranger to experience the art of sound and vision in the dark.
