https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/
"Until recently no Hollywood studio had ever released two movies with the same
name at the same time. At most studios, such a strategy would be unthinkable.
Audiences might accidentally buy tickets to the wrong film, and the PR fallout
would be disastrous: snipes from trade-magazine writers; angry calls from
investors questioning the studios’ business acumen; angrier calls from agents
demanding to know why their clients’ images were being intentionally sabotaged.
Netflix, however, is not most studios. On April Fools’ Day, 2022, the company
released a Judd Apatow comedy titled
The Bubble, which takes place on the set
of a Hollywood dinosaur franchise that’s forced to quarantine in the middle of
the Covid-19 pandemic. Four weeks later, it released an animated film by
Tetsurō Araki, director of the popular Japanese anime shows
Death Note and
Attack on Titan, about a postapocalyptic world in which the law of gravity
ceases to exist. Araki’s film was called
Bubble.
There were no box office mix-ups, no snipes from the press, no angry calls. The
few critics who bothered to write about it panned Apatow’s
Bubble, an unfunny
comedy that’s duller than the blockbuster franchises it makes fun of. Nobody
had anything to say about Araki’s
Bubble, a TV movie better suited to a
graveyard slot on a children’s cable network. Like all Netflix movies,
Bubble
and
The Bubble floated away as quickly as they appeared, becoming tiles in
the company’s sprawling mosaic of content, destined to be autoplayed on laptops
whose owners have fallen asleep.
For years Ted Sarandos, the Netflix co-CEO who pioneered this distribution
strategy, has been hailed by the press as a visionary. Even after the streaming
giant faltered in 2022, recording an overall loss of subscribers for the first
time in a decade, the podcast impresario Scott Galloway raced to Sarandos’s
defense in the
New York Times, comparing him and Netflix cofounder Reed
Hastings to “A-Rod and Barry Bonds.” He added, “You don’t want to bet against
these guys.” Galloway had apparently forgotten that the two baseball players he
named had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs at the height of
their careers. In this way his comparison was more accurate than he intended.
Netflix is a steroidal company, pumped up by lies and deceit, and has broken
all of Hollywood’s rules.
For a century, the business of running a Hollywood studio was straightforward.
The more people watched films, the more money the studios made. With Netflix,
however, audiences don’t pay for individual films. They pay a subscription to
watch everything, and this has enabled a strange phenomenon to take root.
Netflix’s movies don’t have to abide by any of the norms established over the
history of cinema: they don’t have to be profitable, pretty, sexy, intelligent,
funny, well-made, or anything else that pulls audiences into theater seats.
Netflix’s audiences watch from their homes, on couches, in beds, on public
transportation, and on toilets. Often they aren’t even watching.
Over the past decade, Netflix, which first emerged as a destroyer of video
stores, has developed a powerful business model to conquer television, only to
unleash its strange and destructive power on the cinema. In doing so, it has
brought Hollywood to the brink of irrelevance. Because Netflix doesn’t just
survive when no one is watching — it thrives."
Via
Garbage Day: Elon Musk is, unfortunately, still important
<
https://www.garbageday.email/p/elon-musk-is-unfortunately-still-important>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
