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Netflix isn’t killing cinemas, Hollywood is…
Cinemas hate Netflix. For years these gate keepers to the spectacular fantasies cooked up by Hollywood had it good. When a blockbuster was released there was only one place you could watch it. But as the film industry seemed to run out of ideas, streaming services like Netflix decided they’d start making films, not just buying them. Now the best new films and TV aren’t being made by big studios — and cinema owners are very unhappy.
Tim Richards, CEO of VUE, one of Britain’s biggest cinema chains, recently published an open letter to BAFTA moaning about the inclusion of Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar tipped film, Roma at their recent awards ceremony.
In his two-page letter he complains that while “Cuarón is an incredible filmmaker for whom [he has] a huge amount of respect,” his film Roma did not “adhere to BAFTA’s rules”.
He also accuses the British film institution of “not [living] up to its usual high standards this year in choosing to endorse and promote a ‘made for TV’ film.
To most people this will just sound like rotten tomatoes. Vue and the rest of the cinema industry rely on big films screening their latest pictures for the public. They are the gate keepers of Hollywood and they have become quite cosy in the business they call show. Tickets got more expensive, films became franchises, which became reboots, which became gender reboots. All the while studios and cinemas made money by turning their customers into cash cows.
But Netflix is set on changing all that.
Cinema is an antiquated institution on almost every level. The bricks and mortar events business has been well and truly outdone by experiential film companies like Secret Cinema who produce sell-out showings of old classics like Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back or 28 Days Later. These immersive film experiences are unlike the gimmicky 3D films that cinemas and studios market as “immersive experiences” — or worse still 4D.
