First it went after television.
Now Netflix is going after movies. Adam Sandler is involved. It’s
the future of cinema, people. Better get used to it.
The streaming online video company, which has helped
revolutionize delivery models and viewing habits for television
series, announced two separate deals to produce and distribute
original feature films this week, one of which—a sequel to
the Oscar-winning 2000 martial arts epic Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon—will also
hit some movie theaters on the same day it goes out to Netflix
subscribers.
The other deal involves the production of four new Adam Sandler
movies, reportedly with budgets comparable to his traditional
studio releases, which typically cost $40 million or more.
Why did Sandler take the deal? Here’s his explanation,
via The New York Times: “When these fine people came
to me with an offer to make four movies for them, I immediately
said yes for one reason and one reason only….Netflix rhymes with
Wet Chicks.”
It’s that sort of brilliant verbal wit, folks, that makes
Sandler such a comedic force to be reckoned with.
An alternative explanation is that Sandler’s last few movies
haven’t performed very well at theaters—but his movies are,
apparently, hugely popular on Netflix. According to the
Times, Netflix noticed how strong the numbers were for
Sandler’s movies on the service and approached the actor through
his agent about making a production deal.
The Sandler deal suggests the promise (and, okay, the peril) of
all-online, all-on-demand media, in which users not only choose
exactly what they want to see but leave a perfect digital record of
their choices. That means that entertainment companies can make
deals that more accurately capture and reflect the interests of
their customers, and that products—and let’s be clear, Sandler, the
movie star, is a product—that don’t or no longer have the mass
appear to make it at the box office can find other homes.
This touches on some of the issues involved in both media
ownership and Internet privacy debates as well: A company like
Netflix obviously collects an awful lot of data on its users, well
beyond the ratings that users submit about their tastes. But
collecting all that data allows Netflix to know its customers
better, and to create products they are more likely to enjoy. Other
studios would have a harder time doing business this way, in part
because they can’t collect data on viewership quite as easily, and
in part because they don’t have the built in distribution network
that Netflix has. (HBO is probably the closest competitor, and
certainly when it comes to original television series, it blazed a
trail for Netflix to follow and expand upon.)
The Crouching Tiger deal, on the other hand, is pretty
clearly aimed at helping to, ah, degrade and eventually destroy the
power of the big movie theater chains. The movie itself is not
unimportant, but what Netflix really wants to crack are the
distribution windows that give the theater industry a three-month
exclusive on most big releases. That’s why a big component of the
deal is simultaneous distribution on IMAX screens, many of which
are located in chain theater locations, but are operated somewhat
independently.
As Netflix chief content officer told The New York
Times, “What I am hoping is that it will be a proof point that
the sky doesn’t fall. These are two different experiences, like
going to a football game and watching a football game on TV.”
The theater chains are
not happy about this, and at least two have already
indicated they won’t allow the movie to play on their screens.
So it may be that we’re in for a protracted business battle over
release windows and distribution rights.
Fundamentally, what’s happening here is that Netflix is taking
aim at the movie business in much the same way it took aim at the
television business—attempting to upend the old models and systems
that have dominated Tinseltown for so long. Whether or not Netflix
gets everything it wants, it’s eventually likely to shake up the
movie industry somehow. In the meantime, if the transformation of
the movie industry looks anything like the transformation of
television, we’ll benefit as consumers from the competition.
I have a long
look at how HBO, Netflix, ad-supported cable and others helped
reshape television programming, and save it from decades of
public-interest focused awfulness, in Reason’s new,
TV-themed print
edition.
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