Modern Cinema: Catastrophic

The quality of modern movies hardly compares to movies in the pre-streaming era, and the main culprits of why are the decrease in independent production studios and the streaming era making the need for physical media obsolete.

In the past 5 years alone, movies have decreased in both quantity and originality. This phenomenon isn’t just a result of us reminiscing about the movies of our childhood, but a real thing that is playing into what seems to be the impending death of Hollywood.

There has been a significant decrease in movie production studios, especially independent movie production studios. Top film studios have been acquiring and merging with others, leading the top few to run basically the whole film industry. With the size of these companies, it seems the thing they care about most is how much money each movie is raking in, rather than the actual artistic value of the movie itself.

Adding onto that, the streaming industry has been taking a toll on what movies are being made as well. In most cases, when streaming services buy movies to add to their library, they pay the producer a fixed licensing fee for the rights to stream the film. This is a one time payment that doesn’t account for how many times the film will be streamed by users of that service, which is different than how it was with DVDs and other physical media, where people would buy the movie if they wanted to watch it.

With the film industry being somewhat unpredictable at times, it’s not guarenteed that a smaller, indie movie with an original plot will take off and become mainstream, so to be safe and get as much money as possible, today’s production companies are making movies as palatable and appealing to the masses as possible. This ensures that a streaming service will pick it up and pay to add it to their library, increasing their revenue with streaming being one of the most important ways movies make profit these days.

This is why it’s getting increasingly harder to find smaller, less funded and less commercialized movies on some of the biggest streaming services, unless the service itself produced, or helped to fund the production of the movie.

Film as an artform is being lost in the grasp of capitalism, and is no longer and probably never again will be the risky, imaginative industry that it once was at its peak.