Streaming Service Austerity and a Couple Nights at Marvel Releases
Weekly Reel, May 16
Streaming Service Austerity
We’re currently experiencing a shift in the streaming era. There exist multiple endings: companies devoted solely to subscription-based streaming without advertising, the Golden Age of TV, consumers willing to pay for more subscription services, Netflix dominance. But also, multiple beginnings: rapid growth of free ad-supported TV (FAST) streaming services, reemergence of movie theater attendance, mergers & acquisitions—some going after gaming services and others swallowed by competitors with more successful streaming services. The overall trend for streaming companies is paying for less original content and consolidation of subsidiaries.
The recent Netflix news of subscriber loss, their first decline in 11 years, and expectations for losses next quarter is the ringing church-bell of danger for an industry accustomed to constant growth. The reasons are obvious: post-lockdown churn and burn and too many streaming services. Without home confinement, consumers are much less likely to sign up for more services that cost more money. The explosive growth of Netflix and Disney+ in 2020 shored up all consumers that would have signed up months or years later. They burned out.
Netflix, though spending massive amounts on original series and movies, has much less overall content because studios started their own streaming services and took all their content with them. RIP Netflix binging The Office—the Dunder Mifflin hit was seven percent of all Netflix viewing at its peak. This makes the limitation of possible new consumers even worse. And now, instead of endlessly scrolling through Netflix without finding what to watch, we now have the Tyranny of Choice compounded five- to ten-fold across multiple services.
Although Hollywood is gleefully watching the Silicon Valley bully veer into an iceberg, media companies, to survive, must compete directly à la Disney, license their content à la Sony, and/or exhibit superhero films at the theater aimed at male Millennials à la Sony-Disney.
It seems for most consumers, they’re willing to pay monthly for Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, and maybe one other service. Paramount+, Peacock, Discovery+, Apple+, and dozens of others fight over that last slot. Prime Video is unique in being a retail add-on that doesn’t have to compete in the same way. Most streaming services offer ad-supported tiers, which offers a reduced subscription price in exchange for ads. The only holdouts offering exclusively ad-free content, but not for long, is Netflix and Disney+, but only because they can afford it. The ad-supported tiers are especially attractive today; consumer surveys reveal, shockingly, that consumers are price sensitive. Wasn’t the point of cord-cutting to reduce the monthly bill?
While this is happening on the business level, changes at the content level show that the Golden Age of TV is in decline, another Tyranny of Choice victim. In the 2010s, broadcast and cable shows were on the outs while streaming series dominated. In the 2020s, consensus viewing via viral pop culture moments are increasingly limited as the number of services increases. Only HBO gets close to must-watch TV—Succession and Euphoria—but is still going through a Game of Thrones hangover. This downfall further pushes consumers away from services that fail to offer massive cultural hits and towards services that offer their niche. Little known are the smaller services that, for instance, corner the horror/thriller market (SHUDDER and Screambox) or curated arthouse indies and classics (MUBI and Criterion Channel). My favorite is Kanopy, which offers a massive collection and only requires a library card or university login for access.
But where did the broadcasting advertisers go? They went to FAST: Tubi (Fox), Roku Channel, Freevee (Amazon), Pluto TV (Paramount), and Peacock offer free viewing with ads. FAST is to post-cord-cutting broadcasting advertisers as Ukraine is to post-Afghanistan defense contractors. While FAST services are certainly competing for subscriber numbers, more important for them, and for the ad-supported tiers of HBO Max, Peacock, and Paramount+, is to capture advertisers and maximizing advertising opportunities. This is the way out of the quagmire of constant subscriber growth, which Netflix, previously hostile towards ads, is moving towards.
FAST also allows consumers to sign up for new services, oftentimes streaming the same content as their owners, without paying more. The companies also benefit by having a single consumer using two of their services, which doubles their opportunities for targeted advertising and data collection. With this advertising influx, FAST services are starting to produce their own content instead of relying on reruns and classics. As they grow, they’ll compete with the ad-supported tiers of bigger services: why pay five dollars per month for six minutes of ads when one can pay nothing for a several more minutes? One should note that FAST and ad-supported tiers rely on being complimentary services to the biggest services. They’re the final, seemingly vital for some, drips of a squeezed orange.
The ageing gray wolf of streaming has shown weakness, it’s only a matter of time until the herd reorganizes the pack around a new alpha.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) ★★½
Spoilers ahead. I certainly should've watched, or at least read the summary, of what happened in “WandaVision,” which is the predecessor of this film more than the first Doctor Strange. I also realized that Marvel films exist in this paradoxical world between being sensory, in-the-moment experiences without a shelf life—I dare you to recall what happened in any Marvel film before Endgame; I’m still waiting—and pieces of a puzzle that rely on two dozen other pieces to finish.
A Night at the Marvel Release
It was during the opening credits that I knew I was in for a fun ride. The exclusive IMAX preview of Top Gun: Maverick received some oohs and the (even more) exclusive IMAX 3D preview of Avatar: The Way of Water received louder and more guttural oohs. The air of the 318-seat room was seasoned with the perfect amount of fandom as we all donned our 3D glasses.
I could tell the young Millennial to my left would be trouble. She had been making grunts throughout the previews with comments in-between — “so funny” “oh my god” and “was that necessary” were her catchphrases. What I didn’t expect, along with the third-act zombie Dr. Strange, was the uncontrollable nervous twitching of the gentleman, wearing a suit, to my right. He was with his girlfriend, wife, or daughter, and kept kicking the poor girl’s seat in front of him.
The greatest moments of the night were the character introductions, which involved the support of my side comrades. When Wanda appeared, the women both writhed their arms around. When John Krasinski appeared, the Millennial yelled her second catchphrase and had a meltdown. But when Picard rolled in, everyone in the theater lost their mind. Spoilers, they all died, except Wanda?
The movie was largely forgettable. I found myself strained at remembering what scene went with which piece of exposition, made worse by Marvel's attempt, once again, at going in the multiverse because of their bankruptcy of ideas since Endgame. Sam Raimi tried his best to soften the muddled plot, giving his best Spider-Man try in the first half with a delightfully surprising Evil Dead in the second half. That’s about as far as one can go in complimenting this ghoulash.
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) ★★½
This film shows the creative rot at post-Endgame Marvel. When Sony began developing this film in fall 2019, they did so without a production agreement with Marvel. In exchange for 5% of the revenue, Kevin Feige and Marvel had produced the first two Holland Spider-Mans. With their massive success, Sony and Marvel each wanted a better agreement but failed to come together. Within weeks after this announcement, fanboy backlash and Marvel's whining to their parent forced Sony to make a deal with Disney, the latter of course receiving a better deal than before. The deal further integrated the SSU (Sony's Spider-Man Universe) into the MCU.
With Endgame leaving theaters at the time, which pressed the reset button on the MCU, No Way Home was left with the only remaining scrap (Dr. Strange). Rather than go for a somewhat original story with a character that the fans were 100% on board with, the writers lifted the other (better) Spider-Mans' stories and villains and mixed it all together with Dr. Strange's multiverse capability. The multiverse itself was even stolen from the more critically successful and Sony's own Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Sony shamelessly desecrated the one-and-done stories of Norman Osborn and Dr. Otto Octavius, both having finished with the successful completion of a story arc that wouldn't allow for an other-dimensional Spider-Man to butt in. And apart from butchering their timelines/stories (is this canon?), their sole purpose was to play the nostalgia violin to lull all the not-exactly-fans-of-MCU Spider-Man fans. This trick of bringing back more successful content to improve the current project is constantly played by Disney and we should all know better than to fall for that.
There was a noticeable improvement in the pathos between Far From Home and this one but came at a great cost towards one's ability at the suspension of disbelief. Aunt May's death was unnecessary and didn't raise the stakes higher than they already were (due to the fact that everything is at the mercy of Dr. Strange's spells and nothing else matters much). Also, when everybody was supposed to lose their memory that Peter Parker was Spider-Man, why did they also completely forget who Peter Parker was? Did he just re-appear in his world without any backstory? Why would May still be dead? One need only ask a few of these questions until everything crumbles.
(I couldn't help thinking how funny it would be to see the DC/Batman version of this: picture Pattinson, Bale, Affleck, Keaton, Clooney, and Kilmer all brooding and trying to one up each other while the skeletons of Lewis Wilson, Robert Lowery, and Adam West are rotting in the corner.)
The Marvel films are purely contemporary phenomena that rely on word-of-mouth to spread it throughout the Millennial/Gen Z culture via the most successful commercial distribution network ever in media. Re-watching these films in a decade will show how poorly they are beyond being zeitgeist fruit gushers.
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