These 2021 releases, augmented by movies postponed from last year, offer exceptional artistry amid the industry’s commercial difficulties, Richard Brody writes.
,” came out in July; it isn’t good, but it’s high on the year’s box-office chart.) The double whammy of overproduced mega-spectacles in theatres and audiovisual snackables at home is a sign that, even if theatrical viewing bounces back, movies’ place in the market is likely to be even more tenuous.
In one sense, this pattern is as old as the movies themselves: for every advance, there’s a reaction. In the earliest years of Hollywood, a century ago, a star-driven system gave way to a director-driven one, which studio executives then quickly clamped down on. What emerged was a top-down system that, ever since, has seemed, absurdly, like a natural and ineluctable state of the art.
Even before the pandemic, it was becoming tougher for artistically ambitious, low-budget features to get any theatrical release, let alone achieve commercial viability. But the economics of streaming services present their own peculiar challenges. With theatrical releases, viewers don’t pay for a ticket unless they want to see a movie.
There’s a danger worse than the studios and their overproduced, over-budgeted methods: a debilitated Hollywood that would relinquish its filmmaking dominance to an even smaller number of giant streaming services. Netflix and Amazon have done respectable jobs of producing and releasing artistically worthy movies, including some that are high on my list.
The economics of any individual movie are irrelevant to the progress of the art form; the pantheon of classics has no connection to the industry’s treasury. Yet the careers of filmmakers are inseparable from their ability to secure access to financing, and the history of cinema is a graveyard of unrealized projects that should serve as a cautionary tale against the squandering of worthy talent.
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