I heard yesterday that a major Hollywood-focused N.Y. Times piece would break today — an article that would cause a sharp intake of breath all over town. I knew that it wouldn’t really blow anyone’s socks off because…you know, the Times needs to play the game.
The piece, written by Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling, is no one’s idea of a gutslammer. It merely observes that the likelihood of CODA winning the Best Picture Oscar tomorrow night is (or soon will be) a watershed event because it’s an Apple + streamer that barely caused a ripple theatrically.
The piece also says that streaming is damn near everything now, that a significant percentage of the town doesn’t even differentiate between streaming and theatrical, and that fewer and fewer people are concerned about the receding of big-screen exhibition.
Many of us still are and always will be theatrical stalwarts, of course, but that’s because of our 20th Century roots and recollections.
The whopper, for me, is Barnes and Sperling’s statement that “with streaming proliferating, the worry is that theatres could become exclusively the land of superheroes, sequels and remakes.”
This has been a fact for some time. The growing animal character of the megaplex experience has been a creeping “thing” for at least 15 years. (The last great cinema year was 2007 — Iron Man opened in ‘08.) One of HE’s more familiar refrains has been that theatres have largely become “gladiator arenas” — places of congregation for the under-educated and anti-sophisticates, and particularly where films that aspire to adult-level quality fear to tread, or at least arrive with low expectations.
