Netflix, Amazon, 'The Irishman' & The Academy: Oscars In The Age Of Streaming - Page 2 of 2

Sure, Sarandos has said in the past that his company is not in the business of making its customers wait for their products — “I don’t want to hold back movies from our subscribers,” he recently told the Financial Times — but Scorsese & De Niro making a hitman mobster movie could actually be a big-enough deal to reroute the Netflix gravy train, or at least make it idle in the station for a little bit longer in order to pick up a few gold statues. That in itself is a depressing thought: as Donald Clarke, critic with the Irish Times, put it, “Are awards now the *only* thing that can persuade such a company to put films in cinemas?”

But Anne Thompson, who originally broke the news of the deal and reported on it from another angle — that of Paramount‘s inability/unwillingness to pick up the tab following “Silence” — maintained that the streaming service’s practice so far will not change for “The Irishman,” and so a limited qualifying run, followed by day-and-date on Netflix, will be what we should expect. “They’re sticking to their guns,” she tweeted, “it’s their mode of operation.” And though I still found it hard to believe they’d “Beasts Of No Nation” this opportunity, especially given “The Irishman” is not slated for release until 2019 and so likely won’t be in the Oscar race until 2020, another piece of news that broke during Oscars week started to make me wonder.

It’s this article from Variety, about the continued push by at least five major studios to cut a deal with distributors and exhibitors whereby films could be available for “premium” download at home much earlier than they currently are. This is not a new initiative — in the past, repeated attempts to implement something similar have been blocked by the exhibitors, who stand to lose out most, with boycotts threatened as far back as 2011 when Universal announced that “Tower Heist” (!) would be available in a home format for $59.99 on the day of its theatrical release (they nixed the plan). And Sean Parker‘s similarly premised Screening Room idea, though it picked up some high-profile support from the likes of Steven Spielberg, has also been blocked at every turn by exhibitors in fear for their livelihood.

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Netflix entering the production game means those exhibitors have basically no bargaining ground, bar the fact that as of February 2017, anyway, in order to win Academy Awards, a traditional theatrical distribution narrative is highly preferable, if not actually necessary. But that in itself is reliant on nothing more than an idea, on a fickle culture that can easily shift between now and 2020. And so I realize that my own weird gut-level insistence that surely they would find some way of putting “The Irishman” into theaters for a decent amount of time was just me thinking about things in a topsy-turvy, perhaps willfully naive way, assuming that Netflix’ production side, at heart, has the same priorities that any traditional studio has (that Amazon clearly has) when it comes to this kind of film: gain prestige, win awards, be a hero. Not only does that grossly oversimplify a complex matter, it may fatally underestimate the scope of Netflix’s ambitions: perhaps they don’t want to change the movie landscape. Perhaps they want to be the movie landscape.

Seemingly effortlessly, Netflix has knitted itself into the lives of its 94 million subscribers worldwide (more than half of whom are in the U.S.) in a relatively short space of time, without reference to the culture that was in place beforehand (think how they’ve revolutionized television). And so the question changes from why wouldn’t they change their model to win Best Picture, to why would they, when they can concentrate instead on subtly moving the ground beneath our feet until they get to win Best Picture using their model?

Ken Lonergan and Casey Affleck at the post-Oscars Amazon Studios party

Of course, the real conundrum is why Netflix (or Amazon, for that matter) should even care about the old-school legitimization that Academy Awards bring, when they are in the business of revolutionizing that old school in every other way. It can’t be money — these are not the type of films that will make them a great deal of cash, certainly not in the scheme of wider businesses that are ragingly successful elsewhere, to the point that to the bigwigs at head office, the movie production arm must seem like a hobby: a billionaire’s butterfly collection.

Certainly, with Netflix such a secretive endeavor (was ever a company’s tight-lipped code of business more at odds with its approachable, ubiquitous exterior?), it’s really hard to say: perhaps enough of that old-world “romance” still clings to the Oscars (there are reports that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings “nearly teared up” discussing the ‘White Helmets’ win in the documentary short category), or perhaps it’s simply that in our entertainment landscape, it’s one of the last territories that doesn’t yet have a big black flag with a big red ‘N’ fluttering over it. To quote Plutarch (via Hans Gruber), “when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer” — Netflix might not be quite there yet, but maybe by the time “The Irishman” is ready for whatever release they choose to give it, and to make a grab for whatever awards are within its reach, they will be.