The business outlook remained bleak, of course. Throughout the nineteen-sixties, amid vast social and generational changes, the studios, many still under their longtime executives, struggled to keep pace, and Hollywood continued to face declining attendance, from thirty million in average weekly attendance in 1960 to eighteen million in 1970. A wave of takeovers began, attracting purchasers with no previous connection to the media. The auto-parts manufacturer Gulf & Western bought Paramount, and Warner Bros. was acquired by Kinney National, best known as a parking-lot chain. Again, the outcome was surprisingly positive, and the seventies are now seen as another Hollywood golden age. The industry, turning in desperation to a fresh cohort of directors, revitalized itself both artistically (as with Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich, Elaine May and Clint Eastwood, Francis Ford Coppola and Terrence Malick) and commercially (as with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas). These directors, having grown up amid the cultural shifts that had left the studios out of touch, made movies that connected with a new generation of viewers. Suddenly, movies became, as they’d been at the start, an art of youth, and the art advanced.
The movie business faced a similar crisis, early in the twenty-first century, when confronted with the popularity of so-called prestige TV, such as HBO’s “The Sopranos.” Movie viewership declined, most notably for mid-budget dramas—which is to say, the productions closest in kind to cable’s acclaimed programming. Many veteran filmmakers found themselves stranded, and again there was much hand-wringing among critics and directors. Yet independent producers came to the rescue. They saved some of the most illustrious of careers, including those of Scorsese—whose frustration with the studios had brought him to the point where, he told me, “I realized there was no way I could continue making films”—and Wes Anderson, who was freed up to ever-wilder inspirations. The crisis also inspired yet another new generation of filmmakers, working entirely outside the industry on ultra-low budgets, whose utterly uninhibited work marked another revitalization of the art form. They include Greta Gerwig, the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, the couple Ronald and Mary Bronstein, and the group of actors—such as Adam Driver—who joined in.
And who were among the independent producers writing the checks? Streaming companies. Spike Lee, in the twenty-tens, had resorted to making self-financed and crowdfunded movies and had no independent producer, but then Amazon inaugurated its slate of film productions with “Chi-Raq” (2015). This set Lee on a path that he has been blazing ever since with other streaming companies: “Da 5 Bloods” was made with Netflix, and his latest, “Highest 2 Lowest,” with Apple. As for Scorsese, only Netflix was willing to pick up the colossal tab—reportedly as high as two hundred and twenty-five million dollars—to produce the technologically complex and large-scale gangster film “The Irishman,” one of his greatest works. And it was Apple that provided most of the approximately two hundred million dollars to produce “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Wes Anderson’s four short Roald Dahl adaptations from 2023, some of his most boldly and concentratedly innovative films, were produced by Netflix, which also produced two of Richard Linklater’s best recent films, “Nouvelle Vague” and “Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood.” Meanwhile, Amazon was behind one of this year’s best and most unusual movies, Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda.” The point is, simply, that crises yield solutions from players who are standing outside the crosswinds—whether streaming services or smaller production companies that don’t face the same financial pressures as major studios, independent filmmakers, and the micro-institutions that foster them.
Of course, the traditional studios’ power to produce and release great films remains strong, as with this year’s slate of Warner Bros. productions and Jordan Peele’s three masterworks, “Get Out,” “Us,” and “Nope,” all from Universal. And streaming services are no panacea, not least because films such as “Hedda” remain rare exceptions. The services are businesses, no less than studios and theatres are—and, because their business model doesn’t depend on paying customers for individual films, illustrious movies serve as advertisements, a way of displaying respectful benevolence toward the art of movies, even as streamers cut into the fundamental revenue source for theatrical releases. The challenge posed by streaming services to distribution companies and movie theatres gives rise to a thought experiment. Suppose Netflix had already owned Warner Bros. when the studio produced “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another,” and given them only brief and limited theatrical runs rather than wide releases: would these films’ eventual place in the history of cinema be diminished?
The movie named best of all time in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, Chantal Akerman’s film “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975), wasn’t released here until 1983, at New York’s Film Forum, and the reported domestic box-office figure for the year was $19,858. Doubtless, despite its many repertory screenings since then, exponentially many more viewers have watched it at home, whether on physical media or through streaming, than in theatres.
The experiential difference between watching a movie in a theatre and on a screen at home varies for every movie, and in no predictable way. Having done most of my primordial childhood movie-viewing on TV and most of my artistically formative viewing, in adolescence and early adulthood, in theatres, I’m agnostic. I love the scale, the concentration, and the uninterrupted time of the movie theatre—the submission to directorial command—but I also love the intimacy of home viewing, the one-on-one communion, the power of obsession and in-depth exploration of a movie as an image-book. Fundamentally, I’m grateful to see movies that expand the art of cinema wherever they’re available. There are great movies that wouldn’t exist were they not considered commercial propositions for theatrical release, others that wouldn’t exist if they weren’t of value for streaming services; and still others that, released in very few theatres, owe their endurance to home video.
