And the Screen Went Blank
At the start of this year - we are just a quarter of the way through it, guys - my wife and I had a decision to make.
We didn’t quite agonize over it, but there were several discussions about what to do.
The service we were using in lieu of traditional cable, Playstation Vue, was scheduled to shut down at the end of January. With it would go our convenient access to HBO as part of the Vue service, and so, for the first time in our relationship, we wondered if we still actually wanted HBO. Game of Thrones was over. My wife rightly pointed out that we’d essentially seen every episode of Last Week Tonight, and all the good clips end up on YouTube anyway. Wasn’t $15 a lot to pay for John Oliver? Didn’t we already have enough streaming services? Doesn’t this cord-cutting utopia - sans cable boxes and mysterious taxes and fees - feel, well, a bit dystopian in its own way?
How quaint.
OK, so, yes, we ultimately decided. Netflix and Amazon Prime and YouTube TV and The Criterion Channel and Disney+ and my wife’s cousin’s Hulu account would have to be enough. It was more than enough, actually. We have two small kids and a busy social calendar. Who has time for all those services anyway?
I resolved to write about all of this - to bring the film angle to our personal decision, and in so doing provide a quasi-update on a piece I wrote almost two years ago about the future of film. The time was right.
But, there was also life - Saturday morning ballet classes, Maryland basketball games, my Sunday night pickup games, and, of course, there was work.
***
Now, of course, there is nothing on our calendar, but, fortunately for us, work and childcare and weekly dashes to the grocery store to ensure we have enough milk and eggs to supplement our stockpile of food in the freezer and pantry.
There is more downtime than before, though not as much as you might think. Never leaving the house has a way of wearing you down. Still, there is no March Madness or Saturday morning ballet, and so there is certainly more time for film.
One of the bizarre footnotes of this grave crisis we all find ourselves in is sure to be the fact that not only is there more time for film, but there are somehow even more films at our fingertips. COVID-19 gave people stuck at home a reason to watch more movies and even more movies to watch.
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Right around the time it became apparent that COVID-19 would lead to mass shutdowns here in the United States just as it had elsewhere in the world, I told my wife that, if I were a movie studio, I would be looking to get my properties - both the ones currently in theaters and the ones about to be - on to streaming services. Treat it like a pay-per-view boxing match, I told her. Charge a premium for the ability to watch a tantalizing new release at home.
I mention this not to tout my own clairvoyance. Anyone with an eye on the film industry and a little bit of intelligence could have forecasted what I did.
Rather, I mention it because I thought it would take months for just one studio to come around to the idea. by which time the first, terrible crest of this pandemic might have passed. Theaters are famously resistant to the idea of same-day digital releases, and this sort of disruption just doesn’t fit with what we know about the established players in Hollywood.
And then Frozen II arrived on Disney+ months early. Pixar’s Onward is soon to follow. Amazon Cinema is now a thing. For $19.99 you can rent Emma or Invisible Man - films that either just finished their theatrical run or had just started. The movie industry, it turns out, is just like everything else swept up by COVID-19. Change is blowing in with breathtaking speed. It all feels like the world you’ve known is being reshaped, radically and in a matter of hours. The only question at this point is whether Amazon Cinema will ever go away now. Will things return to normal or will we find ourselves in an all-new one?
I’d be lying if I professed to have some sort of educated prognostication. All I do know is that I think it would be a mistake to assume that the theater-going experience will be quite the same in the near future, if ever. The Atlantic’s David Sims uses China to drive home this point:
For a sense of what the U.S. might face once the outbreak begins to slow, look to China: The country is only now beginning to reopen theaters after closing them in January. Even as new cases of the coronavirus have rapidly declined and the government has begun to ease social-distancing rules, citizens have so far been reluctant to go back to theaters. The 507 theaters open on Saturday (about 5 percent of the country’s cinemas) made only $4,355, according to Deadline. That’s just a few dollars per theater.
If this is a glimpse of our future as moviegoers, then it is a grim and sudden one, albeit one that doesn’t surprise me. In the piece I referenced earlier, I posited that it was not film but the “theatergoing experience as we know it that is in danger in the coming years.” It seems I may have been right directionally, though who could have imagined it coming on a timescale such as this.
Christopher Nolan probably put it quite a bit better in a piece for The Washington Post imploring the federal government to consider shuttered theaters and the people who staff them as they dole out aid:
In uncertain times, there is no more comforting thought than that we’re all in this together, something the moviegoing experience has been reinforcing for generations.
He strikes a more optimistic tone than I am able to muster at this stage, but I hope he is right and I am wrong.
There really is something about being in a theater - about experiencing a story with other people all around. “We need what movies can offer us,” as Nolan puts it.
Yes, but where will it be offered, and with who? This might seem like a secondary concern, but as we all grow accustomed to physical distance - from friends, family, even the guy next to you hogging the armrest at the multiplex - I think we all feel it more acutely.
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Lately, I have been wondering if we need to subscribe to HBO. This makes no real logical sense, other than the fact that Chernobyl suddenly seems even more relevant. There is more content, even without HBO, than I could ever possibly get through over the coming months, even if I were being paid handsomely to watch it.
If I’m honest, I think those pangs for premium cable are rooted in the same thing that is causing toilet paper to be in short supply. There’s a part of me that wants to hoard streaming services because it is what I can control. I can’t go anywhere - certainly not to a movie theater. I don’t know when any of this will end. But I can watch whatever I want on HBO Now.
It doesn’t make any sense, but it is one way to cope as tragedies - large and small, life and death, meaningful and trivial - mount all around.