Are there too many movies? Are there too many sequels? Are there too many stories about too many movies? Personally, like the hero of Oliver Twist, I sense a deficit: "Please sir, I want some more."
Not necessarily more of the same, but more. Let's talk about this supposed crisis of overchoice in the film business. In the past couple of years, there have been a lot more movies released. Depending on where you live, there may be twice as many movies being released in theatres each week as there were in 2000. In Toronto, we average about nine films a week (477 films were released theatrically in 2014), up from the five or six from a few years ago. In New York, there are more than 900 theatrical releases a year. Many of these are opening just long enough to get some reviews and then head directly to video-on-demand (VOD) outlets such as Netflix or iTunes.
Newspapers, which used to try to review everything that opened theatrically for a week or more, have been forced to change: Some reviews are shorter, reduced to synopsis and evaluations. Freelancers are called in more often.
This increase in workload has caused some hand-wringing about the role of the entertainment news media. In January, 2014, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, in a pre-Sundance piece, criticized the glut of indie films, many of which were headed direct to VOD: "There are, bluntly, too many lacklustre, forgettable and just plain bad movies pouring into theatres, distracting the entertainment media and, more important, overwhelming the audience. Dumping 'product' into theatres week after week damages an already fragile cinematic ecosystem."
You know, buying decisions have got more complicated. According to the Food Marketing Institute, the average American supermarket in 2013 carried almost 44,000 items, more than five times the number in 1975. There are contrary claims from psychologists whether consumers do get "overwhelmed" or not, but it seems unlikely that too many movies is the main reason theatrical attendance has stagnated. At least part of The Times's gripe was that the distributors were exploiting the paper's policy of reviewing all theatrical releases to get publicity for home-entertainment releases. In May, Variety reported that the Times, following the lead of many other dailies including The Globe and Mail, has surrendered: We can't cover them all.
Also, we can't cover all books or television shows, and don't pretend to try.
None of that seems a good reason to knock how helpful VOD has been. In my experience, movies making a fast trip to video are not, on average, worse than the ones that hang around the multiplexes. Consider a recent indie release from director Noah Buschel, the boxing movie Glass Chin, with Corey Stoll and Billy Crudup, which earned an 83 per cent fresh critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It opened theatrically and simultaneously on VOD on June 26, a bet-hedging strategy for a small indie film without a marketing budget.
With VOD, the distributors don't have to give as big a cut of their revenues to the exhibitors. If a film is suddenly embraced by critics and audiences in its theatrical run, as was the case with the David Robert Mitchell horror film It Follows, the VOD release date can be postponed.
Mostly, services such as Netflix and iTunes have been a boon both to movie lovers and independent filmmakers. Indie filmmaker Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair, Cyrus) in his keynote address to the South by Southwest film festival in May, declared: "God bless VOD. This is a great thing for independent film. Please don't reject VOD. Please don't be afraid of it."
By now, this perspective is almost commonplace. Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, progressively frustrated with the cumbersome studio system, experimented with the direct-to-VOD idea back in 2005 with Bubble, a film that he shot, edited himself and released simultaneously in theatres and on VOD. It wasn't a game changer, but a promise of things to come.
Last year marked a tipping point for VOD. South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's critical hit Snowpiercer, released to VOD two weeks after its theatrical debut, spurred the film to wider theatrical release and opened distributors' eyes to the idea that audiences could enjoy both platforms simultaneously. Seth Rogen's comedy The Interview, withheld from theatres because of threats from hackers presumed to be working for the North Korean government, racked up more than $40-million (U.S.) from downloads before heading to theatres, Netflix and DVD for more sales.
As for the "too many movies" notion, it's all relative: There were more than 936 features and 2,749 shorts produced in the United States in 1917, most of which are forgotten. Back in 2009, Chris Hyams, founder of B-Side, a company devoted to engaging film-festival-goers with the Web, drew gasps from a Tribeca Film Festival audience when he estimated the number of features produced each year in the world was about 50,000 – an estimate based on his analysis of individual entries from the thousands of film festivals.
Of those 477 features released in Toronto last year, there are some obvious gaps. Only about 30 of them (according to the list compiled for the Toronto Film Critics Association) were foreign-language films. And what we lack in geography, we also lack in history. Unlike a good book or video store (there are a few left), the online and theatrical world give a lousy sense of film's past. Of the more than 3,500 films available on Netflix Canada, you'll be hard-pressed to find movies from before 1940, the era of Hollywood's so-called golden age.
There could be an audience for those as well: In a consumer survey on movie-going habits conducted by RBC Capital Markets earlier this spring, 43 per cent of 1,000 respondents said they'd like to see classic movies in a theatre, as well as food, alcohol, premium seating and cheaper prices. That's the thing about us movie consumers: We always want more.