Will the Rise of Netflix Benefit the Art House Market?

Spending this year abroad and the last two years in little Southampton I have found it extremely difficult to find cinema venues that screen the challenging, thought provoking, international or independent cinema that really pushes cinema forwards as a contemporary medium—as these films often lie away from the multiplex. (Because this type of films is most often found on the festival circuit for the sake of this article let’s call them ‘festival films’.) However even when I think of my time in London only a few venues come to mind, primarily the fantastic ICA cinema, as a huge proportion of ‘art-house’ (for lack of a better term) cinemas share their catalogue either with Blockbuster cinema or the screening of established classics that draw a wider audience (this is by no means terrible, it just doesn’t satisfy the needs of a contemporary cinephile like me). For example if I look at today’s (3/1/18) schedule for BFI’s wonderful Southbank cinemas, arguably to be taken as the pinnacle of cinema in the UK, I see only re-runs of pre 90s films from established filmmakers. Of course, it is fantastic and necessary to see these films in a cinema space, however within their current programme we see Ingmar Bergman’s Persona being screened two-to-three times a day for over two weeks! Here I ask if they are really presenting us with a challenging and important range of cinema, or if they provide such cinematic ‘masterpiece’ staples to simply fill seats? Therefore the question still stands; where are we to see these festival films, especially if we live outside of major cities? Well I want to argue that the rise of Netflix (and online platforms) may in fact be a boon for us contemporary cinephiles.

Netflix Rising

Netflix has furthered itself dramatically in 2017, and we can only expect more in the future. In the years second quarter, in the US, the number of Netflix subscriptions surpassed the number of cable subscriptions (combining the six major cable companies) with 50.85 million to 48.61 million subscribers respectively.1 While in the third quarter the domestic (US) subscriptions (52.77m) were surpassed by international subscriptions (56.48m), meaning such a phenomenon is no longer limited to a US context.2 And as we expect these numbers to increase Netflix has also upped it’s game at distributing films exclusively on the platform, a trend which begun in 2015 with Beasts of No Nation but now peaking with 26 releases in 2017—most memorably with Okja.3 Okja’s release was clouded with debate as it’s release date saw it release online as well as in cinemas. Although some viewers still went out of their way to see it in the cinema-space, many watched it online as a ‘free’ (that is no added fee) screening in the comfort of their homes. Thus the films audience was split between the home and cinema, undoubtedly reducing it’s box office haul. While many take this as a sign of ‘the death of cinema’, I want to propose an alternative which may in fact benefit the exact festival films we are dying to see on the big screen.

How Can This Benefit The Art House?

As Okja, by in large, was a successful film we can expect an increasing number of films to take on this framework—especially given the increasing number of online-film-platforms that Neflix and Amazon sit at the top of—and thus we can expect a larger amount of film viewers to watch their favoured blockbusters online on their release date, rather than forking out more money to see it in a cinema. This of course isn’t to suggest such blockbusters will not screen in cinemas or draw audiences, simply that these audiences will now be split and thus there will be fewer cinemagoers. The impact of fewer cinemagoers would be a lessening of the screenings, say, reducing the numbers of screenings of said film from 10 to 5 on any given day. The cinema then has two alternatives for this free space in the schedule; they can (1) find alternative programming for those screens or (2) reduce the number of screens. Option (1) may provide a route for these festival films to be screened as they are less likely to be immediately picked up by the online giants, thus providing not only a schedule filler but a ‘cinema exclusive’ film to be seen. Option (2), although a sad thought, also provides hope for festival films as large proportions of viewers go to the cinema not only for the film they will watch but for the activity itself of going into a dark and mysterious space to experience something that is never the same at home. Thus with fewer screens at multiplex cinemas these viewers would turn more readily to art house cinemas boosting their admittance and, in the process, increasing the viewership of festival films. If either of these alternatives played out it would also provide greater box-office draws for the films, thus pumping money back towards their creators and production companies to produce more content with larger budgetary freedom.

Therefore should we really lament the rise of the Netflix or Amazon ‘original’ film as the death of cinema? It may in fact be the turning point that brings contemporary festival films, and truly original content, to dominate our cinema screens.

~Leo

1 Statistics as of July 2017. Source: http://fortune.com/2017/06/15/netflix-more-subscribers-than-cable/

2 Statistics as of October 2017. Source: https://www.recode.net/2017/10/16/16484970/netflix-q3-earnings-subscribers-stock-wall-street

3 Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_programs_distributed_by_Netflix#Original_films