Roma, The Irishman, Netflix & The Future of Cinema

During the Academy Awards, Netflix had a short teaser trailer for The Irishman, one of its many upcoming original films. For film fans, there are a lot of reasons to be excited for The Irishman; the film has been a passion project for Martin Scorsese and marks the first time that he is reuniting with Robert De Niro in over a decade. The trailer doesn’t even show any footage from the movie, just brief snippets of dialogue and the names of the cast (which also reunites him with past collaborates Harvey Keitel and Joe Pesci), which is more than enough to sell you on the movie.

Yet the prospect of just turning on Netflix on a weekend and clicking on a thumbnail for The Irishman under the New Releases feels deeply wrong. The service that I primarily use to watch episodes of Jeopardy! In background while doing other things shouldn’t be where I have to go to watch the new Scorsese movie.

With streaming, the lines between TV shows, movies and online video are become more and more blurred. While it can be convenient to watch things from your own home, I feel it is causing a passivity to media consumption and devaluing the way films are experienced in a way that is ultimately detrimental to the future of films.

I don’t want this to seem like a purist argument; there are tons of films that I watched for the first time at home and still fell in love with. I don’t think that every film has to be seen in a theater. I’m sure you wouldn’t be missing out on much by not watching The Ridiculous Six on the big screen. But when I watched Roma, Netflix’s highest-profile prestige film they’ve released so far at home on my TV, it felt like I was doing it a disservice.)

Director Alfonso Cuaròn densely populates his frames with hundreds of extras and striking landscapes all to tell what, at its core, is a very personal and intimate story. While I still loved the movie, I certainly think it would have been a better and more impactful experience to have seen it in a theater instead of a 720p TV.

Seeing a movie in the theater is not a passive experience in the way watching it on Netflix is. It demands your full attention in the way watching it at home cannot. Free from the distractions of your phone, roommates, family or switching to watching something else if it doesn’t immediately grab your attention. Watching a movie in the theater is also a communal experience. While occasional rude patrons will diminish the experience, a good audience will enhance the experience of watching any movie. comedies are funnier when there is an audience laughing with you. You can feel the tension hanging in the room during a great scene in a horror movie.

Director Steven Spielberg recently made comments on the eligibility of Netflix movies for Academy Awards. His comments were misinterpreted as being an attack on the quality of Roma specifically, or otherwise largely met with a universal “get with the times old man” sort of response. I don’t think these people genuinely believe that watching Roma at home vs. in a theater is truly a 1:1 same experience. I’m sure they would also say that Roma was released in theaters, so if that was your preferred format there was nothing from stopping you from seeing it that way. While Roma did play in limited release in theaters, this decision was done in order to qualify it for awards (it had to screen at a commercial theater in at least Los Angeles in order to qualify for The Oscars.) If this restriction hadn’t been in place, there is little reason to believe they would have screened it in any theaters, as their business model is driven by having a large enough volume of content that you can only watch on Netflix so you remain a subscriber, and allowing their movies to play first or simultaneously in theaters would cut into that.

Even outside of an artistic context, this presents a threat. Ever since a 1948 supreme court case, United States v. Paramount Pictures, antitrust laws ruled that studios couldn’t own theaters that held exclusive rights to show there. With the amount of capital that Netflix has and by circumventing theaters in essence acting as their own producer and distributer, they stand to become a monopoly, which would be bad for everyone.

Netflix responded to the controversy with the following tweet : “We love cinema. Here are some things we also love-Access for people who can’t always afford, or live in towns without, theaters -Letting everyone, everywhere enjoy releases at the same time -Giving filmmakers more ways to share art. These things are not mutually exclusive.” There are more than a few reasons to be skeptical of Netflix acting as purveyors of great cinema. The company has had past controversies of cropping films shot in different aspect to fit the 16:9 aspect ratio of your television. They do this without even letting the audience know that the film has been modified.

And I think the core difference is that, to Netflix, it’s all just content. Reality TV shows, stand-up specials, movies, it doesn’t matter. All that matters to them is that there is enough of an audience between everything that they put out that people will keep paying their $7.99. But for the people who make films and love them, they’re more than just content. It is totally fair to express discontent towards this becoming the future of movies.