Mark Murphy, director, graduated from film school in 1996 before embarking on his directorial debut with The Untitled – a short film starting Norman Pace, Ronald Pickup and Sean Chapman that was picked up by ITV. Mark Murphy (Solar Productions company director) also directed and produced Casanova’s Love Letters, an acclaimed six-part drama documentary staring Armand Assante and Patrick Bergin that featured numerous famous Hollywood A-listers.
This article will look at the ongoing ‘streaming wars’ and their impact on cinema artistry.
Blockbusters have returned to movie theatres all around the world. However, in spite of their resurgence, the buzz is elsewhere in Hollywood today. Streaming services are turning the film industry’s traditional model on its head, with consumers benefiting from an explosion of content from streaming services like Amazon Prime, Netflix and Hulu.
Independent filmmakers have always faced significant challenges in terms of getting their films seen, with their productions eclipsed by releases from big studios with vast production and marketing budgets. Small production companies have to rely on a robust independent theatre market to help them gain traction. Take for example Parasite, Moonlight and Tangerine, movies that built audiences via word of mouth before becoming must-see hits and eventual award winners.
While major filmmaking studios have lured moviegoers back to theatres with blockbusters like Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun: Maverick, art-house cinemas and independent distributors have had less luck, with many prestige titles proving to be a flop at the box-office and not one art-house movie breaching the $20 million mark in the United States in 2022.
Today, many smaller movies are struggling to attract viewers. Meanwhile, Hollywood is cutting back on spending and taking fewer risks. At Cannes Film Festival in 2023, numerous producers, financiers and sales agents related how challenging it had become to raise money for new films, with Shant Joshi reflecting that award-winning films out of Sundance or Berlin were selling for $0, with buyers unwilling to provide an advance against future earnings.
Annually, tens of thousands of people from the international film industry attend Cannes Film Festival, participating in the world’s most global film market. Independent studios and producers raise funding from financiers, as well as selling distribution rights in certain territories and convincing online streaming services to buy the rights to a movie after it leaves theatres. Film producers hire sales agents to meet with potential financiers and distributors, with the sales agent spending hours a day piecing together the requisite amount of production funding, be it $5 million or $50 million. However, poor performance of art-house movies in theatres has made this task an uphill struggle in many instances.
In recent years, major studios focused on cutting costs and creating franchises are becoming increasingly disinterested in art-house movies. Meanwhile, smaller distributors are reluctant to spend money upfront. While foreign-film financiers are keen to invest in commercial concepts like Rebel Wilson’s comedy Bride Hard, branded a fusion between Bridesmaids and Die Hard, they are less tempted to take a chance on a title with a more esoteric plot or no stars.
The big question looming over film festivals like Cannes and Sundance is whether the market will ever bounce back, and if so, what form it will take. Movie ticket sales have been declining for years, with the pandemic accelerating that trend. Today, moviegoers tend to be wealthier and more mature, a demographic that has been less willing to return to crowded theatres in a post pandemic world.
However, for streaming services like Amazon and Netflix, business is booming. AT&T recently announced plans to merge a WarnerMedia spinoff with Discovery, culminating in the creation of a giant content conglomerate. Meanwhile, Amazon has acquired MGM and its vast library of thousands of television shows and films, including James Bond, with continuing rumours of other mergers.
The streaming wars are revolutionising the way that studios compete with each other, with power to produce and exhibit films online rapidly becoming consolidated under the control of a select few companies that are reshaping what gets made and seen.
In 2021, Netflix estimated a total spend of some $17 billion on content, with original programming accounting for approximately half of the platform’s shows. Over at Disney, investors also pressed the company aggressively to produce a slew of original content, including dozens of Marvel and Star Wars properties.
Streaming platforms are currently seeing astronomical growth, with 87% of UK households subscribing to at least one streaming service and the average US household subscribing to five streaming platforms. The battle for audience attention is changing television and filmmaking, paving the way for a new era of quality TV and film production, with huge investment from streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon as people across the world make the leap from watching locally produced programming to a smaller slate of high-quality programming.
In terms of traditional consumer value, audiences are winning, with streaming subscriptions typically costing less than traditional cable bundles. In addition, streaming services are also providing consumers with access to a broader range of titles as libraries consolidate.
