Episode #4
Is Cinema Dead Yet? EP 4 - Streaming / Covid
On December 3rd, 2020, some of Hollywood's biggest filmmakers went to bed thinking they worked for the greatest movie studio in the world. They woke up working for a streaming service instead. This episode is different from the rest of this series. Every other threat we've covered — sound, television, home video — was a technology Hollywood eventually out-innovated. This one comes in two parts, and one of them wasn't a technology at all: it was a global pandemic that shut down every movie theater in America overnight. We're tracing the whole arc: Netflix's humble 2007 streaming launch, the data-driven bet that became House of Cards, the algorithm quietly deciding what you watch before you ever open the app, the COVID shutdown and the box office collapse that followed, the Warner Bros. decision that blindsided Christopher Nolan and the entire industry, and the weekend three years later — Barbenheimer — that proved something about what people actually want from a movie theater that no boardroom saw coming. Streaming and COVID didn't kill the movies. But this is the closest we've come in this series to finding out what it would actually look like if they did. Follow me on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/Scalerious/
