Shardul Bhardwaj
Netflix tweeted “We love Cinema”. Steven Spielberg’s agent said, “Steven feels strongly about the difference between the streaming and theatrical situation.” Spielberg’s campaign was to oust online streaming giant Netflix from the Oscars. He felt that Netflix’way of doing things would eliminate cinema halls in the long run and take away from how actually cinema was meant to be viewed — in a cinema hall.
Spielberg’s claim is that for cinema to be alive, movie theatres need to be alive. Spielberg’s comments need to be seen in the light of Roma (a Netflix original), which won several awards in the recently convened Oscars. An award function, which has held fast to its refusal to include an experimental works category. The Academy of Motion Pictures attempts to monopolise and dictate what is good cinema through scores of its influential members like Steven Spielberg.
Cinema did not die when sound came in or when digital replaced the celluloid as predicted by certain pundits. Cinema only benefited by the aforementioned changes, newer voices were heard and the scope of the medium expanded. Unlike the aforementioned changes, the audiences shift from movie theatres to online streaming platforms has enormous capability to hurt the big players i.e. producers, distributors and big movie studios. Spielberg is not the only one criticising Netflix’s model of content generation, Netflix recently fought a long drawn out battle with the organisers of the Cannes Film Festival. The French law mandates a 36-month window between a film’s theatrical release and online streaming. Netflix did not want to wait til 2020 to release two of their films Okja and The Meyrowitz Stories, which they brought to compete in the Cannes Film Festival. So, they decided to skip the French theatrical release of these films. The result was that the French theatre owners revolted, which led the film festival to decide that only films with French theatrical release will be eligible to compete in the festival. The ostentation is that films are in danger since they predict that Netflix will destroy the film theatre experience and the reality is that the big businesses of Hollywood and European cinema feel threatened by Netflix’reach and the financial clout it has acquired over the period of past eight years or so.
The irony is that Hollywood, which has been crying foul at Netflix’ increasing monopoly, has its roots in a long economic tradition of big corporation monopoly structures. The big players are feeling threatened because two to three generations ago they used almost the same ways to ascension. Under no circumstance should it be thought that Netflix is the all-encompassing answer to big studio formulaic makes and remakes but what can be seen is that with the change in times, the formulas have also changed. Half of Netflix content tries to work on number-crunching ideas of ‘what works’. So, one will be hard-pressed to notice differences in plotting and characterisation between different shows since the ‘content team’ generally researches the ‘market trends’ rather than ‘content’. None of the criticisms against Netflix has the intent to consider the future of cinema, the real intent is to preserve big businesses and to eliminate somebody who has already started to eat a big pie of their investments.
from The Tribune http://bit.ly/2vsNtuY
via Today’s News Headlines
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