Good news. The final newsletter of the year will be landing in your inbox in the next couple of days, so keep an eye out. There will be a Blood and Ink update, some Osculum talk, and a script review from a writer who created one of my favorite scripts of all time. It’s going to be juicier than a Jack In The Box breakfast burrito.
As for today, I want to swan dive into a pool of industry chatter because it feels like I’m the only person in town who isn’t bothered by Netflix kicking Warner Brothers into its ocean of content.
This has been on the horizon for a long time, people. I wrote an article ten years ago about the streaming wars that were coming. The key word was WARS. That meant casualties. It was never going to stop with streaming platforms. Studios were always going to get pulled onto the battlefield. This latest power grab was telegraphed the second Amazon bought MGM.
The question I asked myself when everyone else started losing their minds was simple: Does this really matter? So let’s break it down.
The biggest concern I keep hearing is that this is the death of theatrical. The theory is that Netflix will dump every new Warner Brothers movie directly onto their service. Goodbye theaters. Goodbye popcorn. Goodbye happiness.
Here is the truth. That is never going to happen with anything IP driven. There is too much money to be made. But even if it did happen one day, is it truly the apocalypse everyone is making it out to be? Is it so dreadful to imagine yourself watching Matrix 7 on your seventy inch television in the comfort of your living room?
I used to be Christopher Nolan levels of “all-in” on theatrical. I believed the cinema was a sacred temple. Then two things rewired my brain. The first was an interview James Cameron gave a couple of years after Titanic came out. The film was about to premiere on network television for the first time and I was shocked to hear that Cameron was deeply involved in the television edit. As far as I was concerned he had already climbed Everest. He had made the hardest film ever shot. Why did he care so much about a broadcast version of the movie?
Yes, television edits were more complicated back then. There were built-in commercial breaks so you had to protect moments that landed right before the cut. There was also pan and scan, which meant your widescreen frame was crushed into a square and certain parts of the image had to be sacrificed. I could understand Cameron not wanting to leave those choices up to a thirty dollar an hour editor.
But it was Cameron’s answer to a simple question that completely changed the way I thought about theatrical. Someone asked him why he cared so much about this television edit. His answer stunned me. He said more people were going to watch his movie on television, in one night, than had ever watched it in theaters.
Paradigm shifted. Every week during Titanic’s run I was reading headlines about how it was the biggest film of all time. I assumed that if billions of dollars were being made then surely an un-toppable populace of people had seen the movie. Apparently that total could be topped easily.
Once I learned that, any preciousness I had about movies needing to be in the theater faded away. If you couldn’t control the fact that most people were going to wait for your movie to hit television before they saw it, then why sweat it? Why sweat where the person enjoyed your film?
Several years later, I had a second epiphany that sealed the deal. I went to see one of the Transformers movies in the theater. There is no film franchise more engineered for the theatrical experience. It is spectacle. It is sound. It is the full weight of two hundred and fifty million dollars exploding in front of you.
And I was bored out of my mind.
That was it for me. A bad film is going to bore you in a theater and it is going to bore you on your couch. A great film is going to move you in a theater and it is going to move you in your house. So, again, who cares where you watch it?
Now, are there going to be movies that would be genuinely better to watch on the big screen? Sure. There will be a few every year. And guess what? THEY’RE STILL GOING TO BE ON THE BIG SCREEN. That’s not going to change. I PROMISE YOU Netflix will give Christopher Nolan’s movie a proper theatrical release. Granted, him threatening to kill Ted Sarandos’s entire family if they don’t will have an influence. But superhero movies, Star Wars movies, Harry Potter movies – they’re all going to get theatrical releases. Theatrical will never die. It will just exist for the movies that make a lot of money for the studio. And that’s pretty much how it already is.
The more interesting conversation regarding Netflix buying Warner Brothers is whether Netflix meddles with the creative structure at Warner Brothers. That’s the real danger.
Netflix is notoriously bad at generating IP. Their strategy has always been to empower the filmmaker regardless of talent then stay out of the way. It sounds romantic. But all the great movies you remember were forged through the gauntlet of development. People pushed back. People challenged choices. Ideas were sharpened under pressure until the edges were clean.
Netflix loves being hands off with projects like The Old Guard, which is precisely the sort of movie that needs every possible voice in the room to push back. They do the same thing with legendary directors except in those cases the directors swindle Netflix into financing the one project they’ve been carrying around for twenty years that no studio will make it because it is both boring and uncommercial. Here’s looking at you David Fincher’s Mank and Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma.
The only valuable IP Netflix has ever created is Stranger Things. And that’s not even a movie property.
Warner Brothers, on the other hand, has spent decades building a system that develops scripts into actual stories that resonate with audiences. They know what they are doing. Netflix needs that. Netflix has leaned so heavily on its algorithm that it has lost touch with anything that connects on a human level. Everyone who has ever studied screenwriting knows that the secret sauce to making movies work is the human condition. You need a character who feels like someone you know. Someone who connects with you beyond the runtime. The algorithm cannot measure that.
So Netflix, if you’re listening? Stay far away from the creative structure at WB.
Of course, here’s the funniest part of all this.
It will probably never happen.
We are looking at two or three years of court battles and anti trust challenges. But even if it does go through, I promise you it will not affect your moviegoing life anywhere near as much as you think it will.
Don’t worry folks. Be happy. :)
