How Streaming Kept the 2020 Summer Movie Season on Life Support

Summer is traditionally the biggest movie season of the year. It’s the time when folks hurry into the bracing air conditioned chill of a movie theater to watch superheroes fight, beloved franchises return, and mind-bending visual effects. However, social distancing has put the summer movie season on hold in 2020. Films like Tenet and Wonder Women 84 have been pushed back, while kid-friendly flicks like Scoob! have made the seamless leap to not only SVOD, but HBO Max.

Streaming seems to have saved the summer blockbuster. Denied the thrill of seeing Black Widow on screen, we’ve happily settled for Charlize Theron’s band of immortals in Netflix’s The Old Guard. Stuck in a daily loop indoors for months, we’ve not only related to the folks stuck in a time loop in Hulu’s Palm Springs, we’ve fallen in love with them. Movies like The Outpost and Greyhound, which might have struggled on big screens, have become massive streaming hits. Cinema’s not dead; it’s just streaming.

But has streaming really saved the summer blockbuster? Or has it actually killed our love of going to the movies forever? Will folks be as easily lured into the overpriced cinema experience now that they know the comfort of their couches? And is there a difference between movie you can only see on the big screen versus what might work best on streaming? (I think there is.)

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet was supposed to premiere in movie theaters this past weekend. For over a year, it’s been hyped as the director’s most ambitious film yet and Warner Bros. has bet big on it being one of the biggest movies of the summer. So much so that the studio held firm to the film’s July 17th release date until reluctantly pushing it back a few scant weeks. It has since been delayed indefinitely. Besides becoming something of a grim joke, the film’s shifting release dates have become an emblem of larger concerns over the state of the movie theater.

While fans clamor to studios to just drop these big tent-pole films on SVOD, studios can’t exactly recoup the cost of the film even with a luxury rental price tag. Big movies need a big movie theater rollout to break even. That means that if theaters are closed indefinitely, studios might not have the economic stability — let alone incentive — to make these massive spectacles. Tenet is just one case. A whole year of film releases has been affected by this shuffle. Our relationship to the cinema and studios’ financial outlook has been shaken in tandem. Not to mention the larger toll lockdown might be taking on movie theaters’ ability to stay afloat.

Despite all this, the summer movie season hasn’t been a complete disaster this year. At least not for fans. Thanks to streaming, we’re still watching, obsessing over, and arguing over new cinema. You could even look to the Independence Day holiday weekend as being the film industry’s big moment this summer. It was then that The Old Guard premiered on Netflix, Palm Springs on Hulu, and The Outpost toppled SVOD charts. Each of those films has been an unmitigated hit, with The Old Guard inspiring legions of fan art and fic, Palm Springs shattering previously-held Hulu records, and The Outpost proving that some movies can still thrive in this new world order. Emphasis on the word “some.”

The truth is there is a kind of film that just is better sorted to streaming: the character-focused one. All films feature compelling characters, but the hook of The Old Guard and Palm Springs were undoubtedly their characters. Same goes for Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, which prompted an avalanche of Delroy Lindo appreciation when it premiered last month on Netflix. What do these films have in common? You kind of walk away more in love with the characters in the film than perhaps the films themselves. People didn’t just like The Old Guard, they loved the heady romance of Joe and Nicky. Palm Springs didn’t necessarily break new ground in the “Groundhog Day” concept, but it did give us a generation-defining rom-com couple in Cristin Milioti’s Sarah and Andy Samberg’s Nyles. And it goes without saying that the best part of Da 5 Bloods is Lindo’s fevered jungle monologue.

In streaming cinema, character is king. And it makes sense. When you see a movie in a cinema, you’re prepared for a theatrical experience. You are immersing yourself in a different world. When you watch a movie in your living room on streaming, you are letting the film’s characters into your home. If those characters are likable, you’re going to be more accepting of what’s on screen. In fact, you’re maybe even more likely to fall hard for the film despite its flaws. If the characters, and film itself, hold more challenge? Put more emphasis on spectacle? Eh…you might have preferred to see that on a big screen.

The future of cinema may turn out to be a hybrid of classic movie theater releases and a more robust straight-to-streaming slate. But what about movie theaters themselves? Even before COVID-19 hit like a crushing tsunami, the movie theater industry was feeling pressure from streamers. In January, The Hollywood Reporter quoted then AMC CFO Craig Ramsey as telling investors, “The streaming market has built some momentum and it’s had a negative overhang on our equity trading. … It’s not been a particularly good year for our shareholders.” Indeed, Netflix’s push into the world of film has been met with nothing but hostility by theater owners and the Academy itself. COVID-19 has only given Netflix and its streaming siblings a more fortified position with which to edge into the film distribution market. (And it’s not like Netflix and Amazon hadn’t already begun looking into purchasing movie theaters and cinema chains with their warchests…)

Streaming has definitely given film fans the semblance of a summer movie experience, albeit on a smaller, more intimate scale. Was this a blessing for the film industry, which has struggled with mid-tier film distribution for a while, or is this the beginning of the end of the movie theater as we know it?