How Streaming Killed Quality: The Death of Hype

And so, finally, we come to Part 3, the final installment of a short mini-series in which we have been discussing some of the reasons why the transition from the theatrical movie model to a streaming model has had a catastrophic effect on the quality of the movies Hollywood actually produces.

Part 3: The Death of Hype.

Every Sunday morning I ride my bike fifteen miles down Venice Blvd here in Los Angeles. This is an excerise habit I began back when the insane COVID lockdown regimes here in the slowly rusting Golden State forced gyms to close or to require that members work out in a mask, something which I simply refused to do.

At the major intersection of Venice Blvd. and La Cienega Blvd. are four billboards, one on each corner, all of which are owned by Amazon and which advertise the latest “content” available on Prime.

One particular Sunday in the Spring of 2021 as I cruised through this interesction I looked up and saw that all four billboards were advertising the previous week’s release of “Without Remorse” based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name. The existence of this movie was a surprise to me, that I had missed the premeire entirely was even more shocking.

Given that I am a Tom Clancy fan who read all of his novels in hardcover as they were published, for me to be completely unaware of this movie constituted a major failure of the Amazon marketing department. But as I look across the streaming movie landscape, it is a failure that seems to happen more and more often.

I understand why, of course, the theory goes that if you don’t have to “open” a weekend at the theatrical box office, there is less reason to spend money to alert people to the fact that a movie is opening on a specific date. But I think that’s a mistake. Marketing is more than just a way to let people know when and where they can see your movie. When done well, marketing is part of a hype machine that once upon a time helped Americans fall in love, and stay in love, with Hollywood’s movies.

In 1998, Director Ed Zwick teamed up with Denzel Washington for the third time to produce a movie called “The Siege.” Released three years before 9/11, the movie predicted, wrongly as it turned out, that a massive terrorist attack in New York City would push the country to the brink of Martial Law and would institutionalize the torture and oppression of American citizens who happened to be practicing Muslims. That said, “The Siege” is a really good film, and Denzel Washington is fantastic in it.

I saw the movie twice in theaters, in part because Fox announced that they would be running the trailer for the first of George Lucas’ “Star Wars” prequels in front of the Zwick film. The crowd was already buzzing when the lights went out and when the “Star Wars” logo exploded on screen the audience went bananas. It was electric, and the moment carried over into the film we’d all actually paid to see. In the end we probably enjoyed “The Siege” just a little more than was warranted, because good hype is infectious.

And just like movies, trailers are better when seen with a crowd. We laugh, scream and cheer harder and louder when we are in a room full of people who are doing the same. And a better trailer experience makes us more likely to pay to see the movie.

To the extent we even see trailers in theaters anymore, we are no longer surprised or excited by them. In all likelihood, we’ve already squinted at them on our phones, struggling to separate the dialogue from the background noise of our busy lives, long before we ever make it into a theater. Watching trailers this way is a solitary experience that does nothing to replicate the experience of seeing them in a crowded theater.

And if the movie is premeiring on Netflix or Disney+ or Max, we may not see a trailer at all, because in the streaming business, “content” matters less than the platform. This sad truth constitutes a reversal of a long-standing and lucrative transactional relationship with the audience.

Contra the streaming experience, audiences go to theaters for the movies, not the theater. A theater can seek to enhance the audience experience by offering amenities… more comfortable seats or cocktails and good food, but at the end of the day, that stuff matters much less than the movies people have actually come to see.

Look… I can make a cocktail at home… I can’t make a movie. And the theater is still the only place where I can see a truly great movie and enjoy the collective experience of feeding off the energy of a hyped-up crowd.

Once upon a time, the entire process of going to the movies on a Friday night was an exercise in hype that began the very moment we walked up to the box office. Above our heads were long lightboards displaying all the movies playing at the threater along with showtimes. Those showtimes in blinking red were already sold-out, and so the first emotion we experienced upon arrival at the theater was FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Your pace across the parking lot quickened alongside your anxiety as you scanned the showtimes for one that was still available.

But the truth was that once you got out of the house and actually went to the theater, there was very little chance that you would go home without seeing a movie. And so if your first choice was sold out, often you went to your second or third choice instead. In this way, the hype machine for the biggest releases wound up boosting the fortunes of every other movie released during roughly the same time period. You might have been planning to see “Jurassic Park”, but wound up seeing “Cliffhanger” or “Striking Distance” instead. Back in the day, this phenomenon was what allowed studios to release more than one big movie every summer weekend without worrying if they would make their money back, and it helped to create an all-around robust and profitable movie business as the rising tide lifted everyone’s boats.

And the hype continued long after you bought your ticket. Before the rise of internet pre-sales and assigned seating, we’d wait in lines for the most popular releases. At the appropriate time, we would sprint for the first-come first-served best seats in the house. The dramatic lowering of the lights, the raising of the curtain and the eardrum-rattling Dolby Sound System ad were critical moments of theatricality too. It was all a part of a hype machine that helped make a night out at the movies feel special.

By contrast, watching a movie on a streaming platform is effortless and requires no real investment… of money, time or attention. Certainly it is never glamorous. You don’t even have to wear pants. Worse, movies made to be streamed don’t have to be good, sometimes they are, but they don’t have to be in order for the ROI on an audience member’s investment of precisely zero to pay off. All they really have to do is take up space on an already crowded homepage… to guarantee that the waterfall of content never fades to a trickle.

All of which means the streamers no longer feel any need to hype you up for their movies. Whether you find them today or next week or five years from now, it doesn’t matter to them… just as long as you keep clicking “renew” on your subscription.

But without the hype machine, the entire enterprise quickly begins to fall apart… after all, if the streamers aren’t excited about the movies they’re making, then why the hell should we be?

Increasingly, we are not. More’s the pity.

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