Cinema in the Streaming Age — Where the Screen Is Headed

Last time, we watched CG and digital remake the very act of making movies. From something shot to something made, from film to data. Cinema greatly changed its form, and yet one thing alone it kept on guarding: strangers gathering in a dark room and looking up together at a great screen—that experience.

But in the twenty-first century, this last bastion too began to waver. Cinema left the vessel of the theater and flowed out to the television in the home, and then to the screen in one’s palm. Anytime, anywhere, as much as one likes. That convenience utterly changed the distance between cinema and us. In this final chapter, we trace the rise of streaming and the questions it brought, without rushing to a conclusion. Where will cinema head from here?

From the Mail, to Streaming

The story begins from a surprisingly modest place. Netflix, founded in 1997, was at first a company that rented out DVDs by mail. Without going to a store, the work you wanted to watch arrived in your home mailbox. That system won support, and before long the company took its next step.

In 2007, Netflix began streaming—sending video across the internet. Communication had grown faster, and there was no longer even a need to mail discs back and forth. Further, in 2013 it ventured into streaming serial dramas it produced itself, transforming from a company that ‘delivers’ works into one that ‘creates’ them. Movies and dramas were no longer the property of theaters and television stations alone.

Netflix eventually moved in earnest into making original films too. 2015’s ‘Beasts of No Nation’ came into the world in a form exceptional for its time, with simultaneous streaming and a limited theatrical release. A film is first released in theaters—into that long-standing common sense, the first crack had opened.

The Award Race, and the Line Drawn at the Theater

As films made by streaming companies increased, a new tension ran through the film world. Could a work not sufficiently screened in theaters truly be recognized as a ‘film’ and given an award? This question shook the world’s film festivals and award races.

In 2018, director Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Roma’ was highly acclaimed as a Netflix work and took multiple categories at the Academy Awards (the ceremony was in 2019). Over the limits of its theatrical release, a debate flared up over which—streaming or the theater—should be taken as cinema’s proper form. There were also cases, like ‘The Irishman’ around the same time, in which the freedom of streaming to allow long running times supported a master’s expression, and so the assessment is not at all simple.

The clash over where to draw the line occurred even at the Cannes Film Festival, regarded as the world’s pinnacle. When a Netflix work was chosen for the competition section in 2017, the French film world pushed back. The following year, 2018, the festival required films entered in competition to have a theatrical release in France, and Netflix, premised on streaming, is reported to have effectively withdrawn from the competition. A theatrical release is what makes a film—that tradition collided head-on with the new logic of streaming. There are also film people, like Steven Spielberg, who strongly advocate the value of the theatrical experience, and positions remain divided even now.

The Day the Seats Went Empty

And then in 2020, an event no one had foreseen struck theaters directly: the global spread of the novel coronavirus. To prevent infection, theaters everywhere were forced to close, and the figures of people vanished from the dark auditoriums. Worldwide box-office revenue is said to have fallen sharply from the previous year, and a situation arose in which the very survival of the cinema business was in doubt.

As theaters closed, the place where works were delivered tilted all at once toward streaming. One studio announced it would release its 2021 works in theaters and on streaming simultaneously, sending a shock through the industry. Directors who lamented the loss of exclusive theatrical release raised strong objections. Among the talked-about works, there were some in which, over a simultaneous theatrical and paid-streaming release, a featured actor raised a contractual dispute and later, it was reported, reached a settlement. Amid the confusion, long-standing practices crumbled one after another.

A review of practices surrounding the crisis advanced as well. Where it had once been taken for granted to leave a gap of several months from theatrical release to streaming, that interval is said to have shrunk greatly. Over how long is appropriate, a tug-of-war continues even now between studios and theaters, and it is hard to say a firm new standard has been settled.

Even So, People Gather

Even pressed by streaming, the theater retained an underlying strength. After the pandemic, 2022’s ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, and then ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’, released on the same day in 2023 and becoming a social phenomenon. These works drew many people back to theaters, to be savored above all on the big screen, and recorded great box-office takings. The experience of gathering before a screen had not vanished.

Here lies cinema’s present position. Streaming gave us the freedom of where and when to watch. Works from all over the world reach our hands, and overlooked talents have come to receive their light. Yet behind that richness, there is also a concern that countless works are buried in a sea of information, and that the time to face each one carefully is being whittled away. Convenience, and lightness. The multitude of options, and the inability to choose. The streaming age handed us both.

The single moving photograph the Lumière brothers projected. The journey that began there gave birth to stories of laughter and tears, made distinctive arts bloom across the world, passed through the rise and fall of a vast industry, and has now spread even to the screen in one’s palm. What vessel cinema will dwell in next, and what experience it will become, I do not yet have the answer. But as long as there are people who gaze into the light in the dark, the work of cinema will surely go on, changing its form. What the screen has projected was, in the end, perhaps the figure of we ourselves who have gazed at it.

Thank you for keeping me company on this long journey. I am grateful to have shared with you the world the screen has shown.

【A History of Cinema: The World on Screen — End】