Say, did I ever tell you about my cool psychic powers? No, really, they're awesome, I'll prove it!
Go look up your favorite independent streaming service, like Amazon Prime. Or HuluPlus. Or PlutoTV. Or free Vudu Movies on Us. Now without looking at the catalog, I'll guess which major-studio movies are on it this month:
(hominahominahomina....)
...Aha! I'm guessing that Prime or Hulu is currently showing the complete collection of 007 movies!
And no, no wait--I'm seeing....kids cartoons! Your service has All Dogs Go To Heaven 2, and the Care Bears Movie, and Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue!
And...I'm getting a color....pink! Does a Pink Panther have any significance?: A Trail? A Curse? A lost Son, perhaps? And a number is coming in clear now..."1984"!--Was that a significant date, like a birthdate? Was it your big brother? I see you going on a long journey, with a friend, and...driving off a cliff?--Oops, sorry, that's "Thelma & Louise". And...no, so much pain...oh, wait, that's just "Troll 2".
Okay, you got me: It was a trick. Whatever service you picked, they were probably all playing there.
And I'll make another guess--Right now your most immediate question is not why someone would guess them, but why four or five or six major streaming services would all happen to be showing the EXACT SAME MOVIES at the EXACT SAME TIME!
But that's not really the question to ask. The important questions to ask are A) why those exact same movies all happen to come from the same studio, and B) why four or five or six major streaming services don't quite seem to be showing movies on a regular basis from any other studio.
If you're one of the Kids Today who grew up with streaming, it's something you probably don't notice at first. (Unless you happen to have Amazon Prime, and then, you'll happen to notice it.)
But for us old vets of three Format Wars growing up, it's a pretty common sight of the postwar reconstruction and one we've gotten used to by now--Create any new home-theater business, and the first rushers-in through the door, who don't really understand the format before trying to cash in on it, will believe that any movie is a "classic" if they can get their hands on it and sell it. In a word, Public Domain. It's the stuff you can sell a hundred times, and never have to pay anyone back for, because ownership troubles due to age or copyright loopholes let you use it for free.
When studios were slow to jump onto DVD in the late 90's, but eager bottom-feeders were quick, we struggling DVD adopters could look at a box of "50 Greatest Movie Classics On three-disk set!" at Suncoast or Wal-mart, and pretty much rattle off the public-domain titles ahead of time from rote memory.
Can I still do it?--Let's see: (takes deep breath) A Little Princess Royal Wedding D.O.A. Charade Suddenly It's a Wonderful Life Beyond Tomorrow When the Clouds Roll By Night of the Living Dead This is the Army Carnival of Souls House On Haunted Hill Little Shop of Horrors Africa Screams Jack & the Beanstalk My Man Godfrey His Girl Friday The Lady Vanishes The 39 Steps Meet John Doe Nothing Sacred Cyrano Algiers Stage Door Canteen(exhale) Whoosh...Gimme a second. The list's gotten longer in those last twenty years.
We learned these from sheer repetition whether we wanted to or not. EVERY company thought they were the first to sell them, and didn't particularly care whether they weren't the only ones. As you can expect from the title, they weren't big on restoration-for-disk either, and if you got a silent movie (which was often, especially if they put "Wizard of Oz" on the cover and hoped you wouldn't notice it was in B/W and Judy Garland wasn't in it), you were lucky if you got an organ score that fit it, or at all. Oh, and colorized of course--Any old B/W movie is always New-to-You if it's been colorized.
Later on in 2009-10, when rumors of vapor-ware said that Netflix and Amazon were planning to invent this new Internet gizmo where you could watch movies on your cellphone or computer--just like YouTube, only with real movies!--other entrepreneurs tried to race to the start too. Hulu, which wasn't Plus yet, rushed in its new desktop service, on a shoestring startup budget. Betcha can't guess what most of the available new movie titles were.
Of course, once the industry got going, we started to get movies from real studios--Like MGM/UA for instance.
MGM's catalogue happens to have a lot of diverse miscellanea in it: For one thing, they became MGM/UA when they merged with United Artists, an independent release company you might remember for vintage James Bond, the Inspector Clouseau series, most of Woody Allen's 80's post-Funny classics and Heaven's Gate. Orion Pictures came and went during the 80's, bringing us Robocop, Silence of the Lambs, Bill & Ted and Dances With Wolves, before becoming a distribution label that bought up many of the defunct little release companies, like the American International B-movies, Samuel Goldwyn's arthouse classics, and the 80's catalog of Golan & Globus's Cannon Pictures.
That's a lot of watchable library for one holding company to own. Be a shame if anything happened to it.
And for MGM, UA and Orion, just about anything did. Long story short: Sold off in the 70's, their classic 30's-60's library bought up by Ted Turner and Warner, and the new production division changing a variety of hands throughout the early 80's, to be revived as brand new labels in the 90's. A string of disappointments in the 00's, however, and MGM finally folded in 2010, taking "Hot Tub Time Machine" on the way out with them.
That put a lot of catalog titles out of the market and up for grabs, and it's not only in the subscription streaming market that we've been seeing a lot of the hopeful grab for them:
- Digital channel ThisTV was an early-10's digital-broadcast splinter-channel that tried to revive the idea of a commercially-supported all-movie TV channel...If you didn't mind that just about every feature movie came from MGM, UA and Orion's indie-acquisition catalog.
- New "Independent label" Blu-ray disk companies like Twilight Time have been picking up the studio slack and releasing vintage catalog on physical-disk that studios had lost interest in--I was glad to finally get my hands on TT's Blu copies of "The Bounty", "Rollerball" and Woody Allen's "Love and Death", until I saw those same movies turn up on the usual streaming suspects, remembered which studios they had come from, and realized..."D'ohh!"
- Ad-supported streamer PlutoTV, trying to spin a hipster parody on Ted Turner's old holiday marathons of "A Christmas Story", last year offered its viewers the "All-day Thanksgiving 24-hour Robocop marathon". Clever, yes, but why "Robocop"?...Take a wild guess and tell me.
There's some minor relief on the horizon, that Paramount seems to have fallen on the dustbin too: Paramount, losing interest in releasing their 80's catalog for disk, sold the rights to Warner back in the late 00's, and no prize for guessing what Warner did with them...Which explains the sudden recent appearance of "Clue", "Clueless", "School of Rock" and "A Clear and Present Danger" among the orphanage of Usual MGM Suspects.
It may not be a solution, but you have to appreciate the problem that if studios won't release their iron grip on their own content--content they still dream we audiences will come to their private websites and pay for, rather than own on respectable formats or enjoy in the mass media--our only hope to enjoy a new resurgence of restored bigscreen 20th-cty. mainstream-studio movies is to hope they'll all be neglected and abandoned into some wider market where people actually have access to them again, from services that don't particularly care how they show them. Rather like the abuse they used to suffer from local TV stations, that just wanted to show them with commercials.
Obviously, that's not THE prime solution to the problem that film buffs hope will come out of this. We're hoping for a few better options than that.
While it took the first few years for a new audience to discover the Wide, Wide World of Streaming, and make a show of spurning our expensive cable companies, it's a hard fact, but one new streaming audiences may have to come to grips with: By the time we took the leap of falling in love with it, the movie sources had dried up, and the party was over by the time we walked in the door. We only think we're watching the movies we want to see, when we're in fact watching the only familiar movies we can FIND.
And while it's nice to turn on a free or ad-supported streaming service on a channel-clicking evening and see them playing "Fiddler on the Roof" or "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" for being a late-60's/early-70's United Artists film, or to see "Teen Wolf", "The French Lieutenant's Woman" or Cannon Pictures' "Runaway Train" show up for being 80's MGM films, when they're the only major-studio films that start showing up every month, one might have reason to harbor suspicions that Something's Up.
It's not so much fun enjoying them when you stop to realize that we're only getting streaming cinematic entertainment in our homes as a result of six or seven starving raccoons all diving the exact same dumpster for free goodies.
If you're one of the Kids Today who grew up with streaming, it's something you probably don't notice at first. (Unless you happen to have Amazon Prime, and then, you'll happen to notice it.)
But for us old vets of three Format Wars growing up, it's a pretty common sight of the postwar reconstruction and one we've gotten used to by now--Create any new home-theater business, and the first rushers-in through the door, who don't really understand the format before trying to cash in on it, will believe that any movie is a "classic" if they can get their hands on it and sell it. In a word, Public Domain. It's the stuff you can sell a hundred times, and never have to pay anyone back for, because ownership troubles due to age or copyright loopholes let you use it for free.
When studios were slow to jump onto DVD in the late 90's, but eager bottom-feeders were quick, we struggling DVD adopters could look at a box of "50 Greatest Movie Classics On three-disk set!" at Suncoast or Wal-mart, and pretty much rattle off the public-domain titles ahead of time from rote memory. Can I still do it?--Let's see: (takes deep breath) A Little Princess Royal Wedding D.O.A. Charade Suddenly It's a Wonderful Life Beyond Tomorrow When the Clouds Roll By Night of the Living Dead This is the Army Carnival of Souls House On Haunted Hill Little Shop of Horrors Africa Screams Jack & the Beanstalk My Man Godfrey His Girl Friday The Lady Vanishes The 39 Steps Meet John Doe Nothing Sacred Cyrano Algiers Stage Door Canteen(exhale) Whoosh...Gimme a second. The list's gotten longer in those last twenty years.
We learned these from sheer repetition whether we wanted to or not. EVERY company thought they were the first to sell them, and didn't particularly care whether they weren't the only ones. As you can expect from the title, they weren't big on restoration-for-disk either, and if you got a silent movie (which was often, especially if they put "Wizard of Oz" on the cover and hoped you wouldn't notice it was in B/W and Judy Garland wasn't in it), you were lucky if you got an organ score that fit it, or at all. Oh, and colorized of course--Any old B/W movie is always New-to-You if it's been colorized.
Later on in 2009-10, when rumors of vapor-ware said that Netflix and Amazon were planning to invent this new Internet gizmo where you could watch movies on your cellphone or computer--just like YouTube, only with real movies!--other entrepreneurs tried to race to the start too. Hulu, which wasn't Plus yet, rushed in its new desktop service, on a shoestring startup budget. Betcha can't guess what most of the available new movie titles were.
Of course, once the industry got going, we started to get movies from real studios--Like MGM/UA for instance.
MGM's catalogue happens to have a lot of diverse miscellanea in it: For one thing, they became MGM/UA when they merged with United Artists, an independent release company you might remember for vintage James Bond, the Inspector Clouseau series, most of Woody Allen's 80's post-Funny classics and Heaven's Gate. Orion Pictures came and went during the 80's, bringing us Robocop, Silence of the Lambs, Bill & Ted and Dances With Wolves, before becoming a distribution label that bought up many of the defunct little release companies, like the American International B-movies, Samuel Goldwyn's arthouse classics, and the 80's catalog of Golan & Globus's Cannon Pictures. That's a lot of watchable library for one holding company to own. Be a shame if anything happened to it.
And for MGM, UA and Orion, just about anything did. Long story short: Sold off in the 70's, their classic 30's-60's library bought up by Ted Turner and Warner, and the new production division changing a variety of hands throughout the early 80's, to be revived as brand new labels in the 90's. A string of disappointments in the 00's, however, and MGM finally folded in 2010, taking "Hot Tub Time Machine" on the way out with them.
That put a lot of catalog titles out of the market and up for grabs, and it's not only in the subscription streaming market that we've been seeing a lot of the hopeful grab for them:
- Digital channel ThisTV was an early-10's digital-broadcast splinter-channel that tried to revive the idea of a commercially-supported all-movie TV channel...If you didn't mind that just about every feature movie came from MGM, UA and Orion's indie-acquisition catalog.
- New "Independent label" Blu-ray disk companies like Twilight Time have been picking up the studio slack and releasing vintage catalog on physical-disk that studios had lost interest in--I was glad to finally get my hands on TT's Blu copies of "The Bounty", "Rollerball" and Woody Allen's "Love and Death", until I saw those same movies turn up on the usual streaming suspects, remembered which studios they had come from, and realized..."D'ohh!"- Ad-supported streamer PlutoTV, trying to spin a hipster parody on Ted Turner's old holiday marathons of "A Christmas Story", last year offered its viewers the "All-day Thanksgiving 24-hour Robocop marathon". Clever, yes, but why "Robocop"?...Take a wild guess and tell me.
There's some minor relief on the horizon, that Paramount seems to have fallen on the dustbin too: Paramount, losing interest in releasing their 80's catalog for disk, sold the rights to Warner back in the late 00's, and no prize for guessing what Warner did with them...Which explains the sudden recent appearance of "Clue", "Clueless", "School of Rock" and "A Clear and Present Danger" among the orphanage of Usual MGM Suspects.
It may not be a solution, but you have to appreciate the problem that if studios won't release their iron grip on their own content--content they still dream we audiences will come to their private websites and pay for, rather than own on respectable formats or enjoy in the mass media--our only hope to enjoy a new resurgence of restored bigscreen 20th-cty. mainstream-studio movies is to hope they'll all be neglected and abandoned into some wider market where people actually have access to them again, from services that don't particularly care how they show them. Rather like the abuse they used to suffer from local TV stations, that just wanted to show them with commercials.
Obviously, that's not THE prime solution to the problem that film buffs hope will come out of this. We're hoping for a few better options than that.
While it took the first few years for a new audience to discover the Wide, Wide World of Streaming, and make a show of spurning our expensive cable companies, it's a hard fact, but one new streaming audiences may have to come to grips with: By the time we took the leap of falling in love with it, the movie sources had dried up, and the party was over by the time we walked in the door. We only think we're watching the movies we want to see, when we're in fact watching the only familiar movies we can FIND.
And while it's nice to turn on a free or ad-supported streaming service on a channel-clicking evening and see them playing "Fiddler on the Roof" or "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" for being a late-60's/early-70's United Artists film, or to see "Teen Wolf", "The French Lieutenant's Woman" or Cannon Pictures' "Runaway Train" show up for being 80's MGM films, when they're the only major-studio films that start showing up every month, one might have reason to harbor suspicions that Something's Up. It's not so much fun enjoying them when you stop to realize that we're only getting streaming cinematic entertainment in our homes as a result of six or seven starving raccoons all diving the exact same dumpster for free goodies.
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