Did you hear that director Steven Spielberg wants to propose a rule change for the Academy Awards? According to Indiewire, the proposal would require any film being considered for an OSCAR will need to have an exclusive theatrical window (of at least 90-days). This would certainly have put Roma out of the running this year, and might cause all sorts of conflicts when Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman lands on the Netflix streaming service.
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How many movies these days make it to 90 days in the theaters? Many seem to be gone after two to three weeks, and into video/streaming soon after.
First run theater – two to four weeks depending, then second run theaters for another four to eight, then VOD/digital, then home video/streaming. This is why the digital version of Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse has been available since February 26th, but the blu-ray release isn’t available for another week. That is the way hollywood wants it, though they don’t know how to deal with disruptors like Netflix and soon Hulu, Amazon, and Disney +
For someone who went against the crowd for so many years, Spielburg has become elitist. Maybe he wants less competition for his upcoming movies.
What’s to keep a studio from paying a theater in Hoboken to show a movie for 91 days?
There are really 2 types of movies that are made. ones made for the creation of drama and art. and ones made for the creation of profit. I will admit that sometimes the lines are a bit loose between the two, those are really the two major motivations. Sometimes the ones created to make the profits are not exactly worthy of Oscar nomination, and sometimes the ones that offer the best creative dramatic performances are not money makers. Profit seeking movies have a built in form of recognition of success, they earn profit. the longer they are in theatres, the more they can make. However dramatic movies-or ones with a artistic bend, only have the OSCARs as a way of showing recognition of their work. they also may only have a limited release, to make room for those who build the profit more successfully. Theatres are businesses first. and focused on that profit so they may sacrifice the Art for the profit. They are concerned more about the fiscal baring and not the artistic, They would pull movies that don’t earn the best profit, even of they are more artistic and more likely to draw Oscar nods that profitable ones,
TL/DR Theatres are about making money, and the length of time in the theatre’s, making money, have no baring on the artistic merit of the films.
These folks are going to legislate themselves into further irrelevancy. I guess winning an Oscar gives a movie a certain cache but I find that overwhelmingly I do not agree with their choices and find a VAST majority of non-OSCAR movies much better than their selections. The TV ratings are that bad for a reason ;)
I am quite behind on my podcast listening, so I’m sorry that I didn’t get my comment in when discussion was actually happening. I honestly don’t have much of an opinion about theatrical release and the Oscars, but I want to talk for a moment about movies and libraries.
Stephen is very proud of his 85-inch screen, and he has subscriptions to many services which he pays for on a monthly basis. That’s a wonderful thing, but I think it’s important to understand that there’s a massive viewing public out there for whom all of that is a luxury. Many people do not have reliable home internet, and many more only have internet on their phones, and for most of those people a Netflix subscription would mean missing a family meal or half a tank of gas in the car. For people in that position, checking out a DVD or BluRay from the library is going to be the only way they will watch a movie.
I am far more disturbed by the fact that many of these services that are producing original content are never releasing that content on disc, which means that libraries don’t have access to it, and neither do their patrons. There are library streaming services (the best known are hoopla and Kanopy), but no content produced by Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc is going to make it to those platforms either. It worries me a lot that film, which used to be a great social leveler, is becoming increasingly stratified into what’s available to the haves (everything) versus the have-nots (the dregs).