It’s been a long time coming. Like Jack Nicholson’s Col. Nathan R. Jessup in “A Few Good Men,” finally admitting that he ordered the Code Red (“You’re goddamn right I did!”), Ted Sarandos, the visionary co-CEO of Netflix, recently outed himself as someone who believes that the experience of going to see a movie in a movie theater is an antiquated idea. In an interview with Time magazine editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs at the Time100 Summit on April 23, Sarandos said, “Folks grew up thinking, ‘I want to make movies on a gigantic screen and have strangers watch them play in the theater for two months, and people cry and [there are] sold-out shows.’ It just doesn’t happen very much anymore.”
Asked by Jacobs if the movie-theater experience is “outdated,” Sarandos said he thought it was. And asked if the desire to make movies “for movie theaters, for the communal experience” is “an outmoded idea,” Sarandos replied, “I think it is — for most people, not for everybody. If you’re fortunate enough to live in Manhattan, and you can walk to a multiplex and see a movie, that’s fantastic. Most of the country cannot.”
The first thing you want to say to him is: Tell that to director Ryan Coogler and the millions of people who have gone to see “Sinners” in a movie theater and made it the motion-picture phenomenon of the year. Question: Has a movie on Netflix ever generated that level of buzz and excitement and cultural heat? The answer is no, because the reality is that you can’t do that on Netflix. Streaming, while it’s now an integral part of our lives as entertainment consumers, is a hermetic experience that doesn’t breed movie buzz. (For a small-screen series like “Adolescence” or “Squid Game,” the situation is quite different.) There are movies that become streaming hits, of course. But they don’t get out into the ether. They don’t catch fire the way that “Sinners” has. The very essence of that film’s excitement has been experiencing it on the big screen, where its monumental quality can take hold.
The second thing you want to say to Sarandos is that his comment about how the movie-theater experience still lives in Manhattan — but not, I guess, anywhere else — doesn’t quite make sense. I live in Manhattan, and yes, I sometimes walk to the multiplex. But let’s say, instead, that you live in Denver or Atlanta or Pittsburgh or Tucson or St. Louis or Providence or Cleveland or Dallas, or in a suburb or an exurb. In those places, they have these things called cars that people get into to drive themselves to destinations. They go to work, they go to a shopping mall, they go to a restaurant, they go to a multiplex. Ted Sarandos knows this, but what his “Manhattan” line is really about is taking a passive-aggressive swipe at the “East Coast elites” who are now, in his propagandistic formulation, the only people who still love movie theaters. The real folks, the ones in the heartland, have moved on!
This is demagogic thinking, and what it reveals is that Sarandos’s whole theory about the movie-theater experience being done, over, finished, outmoded, a relic that only Manhattan eggheads are clinging to is not so much a description of what’s happening as it is a desire. He’s describing the world he wants to see, one in which we all sit at home watching Netflix and the carcasses of multiplexes sit there empty and abandoned, like sets from “Escape from the Planet of the Apes.” To Ted Sarandos, that’s a feel-good dream. It’s the business model he’s living for.
But you might well ask: Hasn’t he said all this before? Not quite. Not really. Not in so many words. Sarandos is a very smart and compelling figure, and part of how he’s worked the public-relations angle on his metaphysical cultural strategy of going to war against movie theaters is to play up, with a kind of mischievous sincerity, his own love of cinema. He presents himself as a devoted cinephile and talks a good game about digging the theater experience. His company has bought and renovated several legendary movie theaters (the Paris in New York, the Bay Theater and Grauman’s Egyptian Theater in L.A.), using those venues as a flagship advertisement for Netflix’s devotion to cinema. But it’s all smoke and mirrors. What these refurbished theaters signify is that they are museums of cinema, mere icons of the faded past.
In the present, Sarandos has wooed directors like David Fincher and Rian Johnson and Greta Gerwig over to Netflix, and that’s all part of a double-barrelled strategy. He throws zillions of dollars their way (for both budgets and salary). At the same time, he promises them that their films will receive a theatrical release. Technically, that needs to happen for awards consideration. But depending on the movie in question, the release will range from token to nominal to blink-and-you’ll-miss-it.
Here’s where the Manhattan idea actually proves relevant. If you live in New York (or Los Angeles), as most of America’s national entertainment journalists do, when a Netflix movie opens “in theaters” it might literally be playing at a theater near you. But not if you live…anywhere else. Rian Johnson, the director of the “Knives Out” films, which are now Netflix productions, recently gave an interview in which he seemed a little confused about all this. He said that he wanted the next “Knives Out” movie, entitled “Wake Up Dead Man,” “in as many theaters for as long as possible,” adding, “I want as many people as possible to see it in that form.”
If that’s the case, then he’s working for the wrong boss. Three years ago, Netflix allowed “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” to play on 600 screens for one week, a month before its streaming launch. During that theatrical blip, it made a total of $13 million. At the time, many asked: Why is Netflix leaving so much money on the table? But the last thing that Ted Sarandos would have wanted is for “Glass Onion” to play in theaters for a month and make $100 million. It would have meant the undercutting of his grand plan. He has promised Greta Gerwig that her upcoming “Chronicles of Narnia” film will play on Imax screens for two weeks before it drops on Netflix on Christmas Day. But when the time arrives, how is Gerwig going to feel about having a potential hit movie…that then gets yanked from theaters so viewers can see it at home and proceed to not buzz about it?
My point isn’t that the streaming revolution has been overhyped. It has, but it’s all too real. More and more people are staying home to watch movies, and that represents a genuine threat to the future of movie theaters. Attendance is down 20 percent (maybe more if you factor in higher ticket prices), and that’s a serious winnowing. But Ted Sarandos, in coming out and saying that the movie-theater experience is “outdated,” as if it were the horse-and-buggy or the compact disc, is doing something beyond simply acknowledging the difficulties the industry faces. He wants to bury movie theaters before their time. He’s trying to turn his wish into your command. I believe that time will prove Ted Sarandos wrong, but to me it’s actually good that he said these things. For anyone in the entertainment industry who cares about the future of movie theaters, it’s important to know who’s on your side…and who isn’t.