Is Cinema Dying?

Is 2020 Killing Cinema? // Thoughts on My Ex-Favorite Director // Revisiting Terrible Editing

My original intro for this second issue on the state of cinema got a little out of hand, so it’s been repurposed as an essay and moved below. So instead I’ll just say thank you to everyone who has subscribed to the newsletter in the last month! My YouTube videos are so topic-specific that I don’t really get to weave a broader narrative about my thoughts on Film, TV, media, and why I like talking about them and making video essays in the first place. I’m hoping this newsletter serves to connect the dots between the other pieces of content I make, expounding on why I think Film and TV are two of the most exciting artistic mediums right now.

Published This Month:

For quite some time, Wes Anderson held the mantle of “my favorite director.” While more recently some of the films of Scorsese, Malick, and Bergman have had more personal significance than Anderson’s films have, Anderson’s work will always be very near and dear to me. He’s the director I’ve studied the closest, he’s the director who’s filmography I’ve watched the most in total, and yet, until recently, I had barely covered his work on my channel.

My video Why Do Wes Anderson Movie Look Like That? is the sum of several years of thinking about and studying Anderson’s style. If I was avoiding making this video, it was because Anderson is perhaps the most discussed director in the video essay space. In tackling a subject that I know has been so extensively talked about, I wanted to make sure I had something fresh to say. That said the essay certainly draws from and leans on, perhaps a bit too heavily, the work of Matt Zoller Seitz, a critic who’s been very influential on how I approach criticism, and who’s own video essay series on Wes Anderson’s style was one of my first exposures to the form. So credit where credit is due.

Mulan’s Terrible Editing - A Breakdown

While my dissection of Bohemian Rhapsody’s tragic editing is still one of my most popular videos, I resisted returning to this topic for quite some time. Partially because I generally try to talk about things I like instead of things I dislike, and partially because I don’t want to re-hash the same content repeatedly. Pointing out the minute flaws in bad films can be a tedious endeavor that nevertheless apparently provides people with endless entertainment. While I think negative criticism is valid and has a home, it’s not where I want to spend the majority of my time, and I think it needs to be done with care, so as to be productive, and not as a way of simply asserting the critic and viewer’s superiority through a simplistic “can you believe how bad this is?!” attitude.

That said, I saw with Disney’s new Mulan, an opportunity to expand on and add to the nuance of the discussion, to cover not just what’s bad about the editing, but to look a little more closely at why bad editing happens in the first place.

Is Cinema Dying?

There’s been lot’s of bad news for cinema lovers recently. No Time to Die, the new Bond film, was pushed to April 2021, in response Regal has closed all its theaters in the US, Cineworld in the UK. The dominoes falling have lead to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (the film of 2020 I was most anticipating), along with pretty much any other big release still slated for this year being pushed back to 2021.

You’ve probably already heard about some or all of this, and while it’s disappointing, it’s likely the right thing to do as COVID-19 continues to rage. Regardless, it’s becoming clear that the implications of 2020 on the theater and filmmaking industry will echo for a long time. Disney is reorganizing its business to focus on streaming.

“I would say Covid accelerated the rate at which we made this transition, but this transition was going to happen anyway.” -Bob Chapek Disney CEO

This is my feeling about this year overall. I think it’s clear the Pandemic is serving to skip us ahead 5 or more years in an industry shift towards streaming that was happening anyway. What isn’t clear, is how this will actually change the experience for cinema-goers.

The most pessimistic part of me thinks that without the massive tent-pole films propping up corporate theaters, they’ll begin a slow decline and fade out of the mainstream. Avengers 10 and Star Wars 17 will release on streaming only, and “cinema” will become a vinyl-like, hipster novelty, relegated to classic re-runs and independent releases that want the authenticity lent by certain physicality.

Many, however, like Martin Scorsese, have lamented that theaters have become overrun by corporate studios. The finite screen space at the theater, once occupied by drama and artistry, has been monopolized up by industrial remakes. Perhaps this space becoming less economically tenable for mega-budget productions will open up room in the theaters again for the kind of film Scorsese sees as the namesake of cinema itself. One can hope.

It seems like a pipe dream though. With Netflix nabbing Scorsese’s new film last year and being the home of the new Spike Lee, Charlie Kaufman, and David Fincher films this year, it seems more like Scorsese’ “Cinema” is the one leading the charge into streaming. And if streaming is where the money and viewers are, why would it flee back into the theaters it was once pushed out of by larger corporations?

But I don’t think we yet have a complete picture of the situation. While Disney and others say they’re shifting their focus towards streaming, the fact that they aren’t releasing more films on demand this year, like they did with Mulan, seems to indicate that they still believe they stand to make more money from the theatrical viewings than they do from direct-to-consumer or streaming sales.

Ultimately I’m not too worried. While I love going to theaters and I sympathize with the sadness Scorsese and others feel to see that experience becoming less universal, I believe more in the power of long-form visual storytelling as a form than I do in the specific mode of consumption. While cinema-going’s cultural impact might fade, I think Film and TV are still in their youth as narrative forms, and I don’t see their relevance diminishing anytime soon, with or without big rooms where we can all watch them together.

What have I been watching?

I don’t get a chance to promote it often, but I do a monthly podcast for my patrons where I talk about everything I’ve been watching. I go over all the films and TV I watched in the last month and give short spoiler-free reviews for each. If that sounds like something you’d like you can become a patron at any level to receive access to the podcast.

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No recommendation this month. Things are busy as my wife and I are in the middle of moving across state lines to Asheville, NC. We’re excited to explore a new city and everything it has to offer. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, I love to hear from people. My email address is: me@thomasflight.com

Best,

Thomas