Ranting On...The End of FilmStruck

The past month of my life has been, to put it bluntly, horrible.  I have had an extraordinarily tough time at work, with it being more stressful than I've remembered it being in years.  On Thursday, the guy I had been seeing ended things with me.  Many of my heroes were attacked this week, and the president (and many people in my real-life) brushed it off as almost nothing.  The election has made me nervous, particularly knowing that the Republicans seem to have gained too much momentum in the Senate (likely defeating my two favorite senators in the process), and that election rigging tactics in Georgia, Indiana, North Dakota, and Kansas will make it even harder for us to beat them in governor and House races.  My health and eating habits have been abysmal, and I'm too busy/depressed to hit the gym.  And now, to cap off an already aggressively bad week, greedy corporations have decided to steal from film fans one of the only new refuges that we have been gifted in the past few years: FilmStruck.

For those who are unfamiliar, and sadly that was clearly a lot of people, FilmStruck is a streaming service that is connected to both Turner Classic Movies and Criterion, which specializes in art house, classic, and foreign cinema.  Unlike Netflix or Hulu, it doesn't focus on original fictional content, instead prioritizing simply the movies and making short, fascinating complimentary content to go with the films.  Seriously-in a world where you're lucky to get even a DVD commentary to go with a recently-released movie, FilmStruck created catered lists of other similar films (truly similar, not "you liked Rashomon so you must love House of Cards" sort of details like Netflix has), recently shot documentaries from contemporary filmmakers and hours of like content.  In honor of the new A Star is Born, they brought all three previous iterations of the film to the big screen and then filmed a new documentary with the fourth film's director Bradley Cooper.  It's the sort of place that a film fan can just dive right in and spend days finding new angles and avenues to love movies.

That it is shut down, that WarnerMedia doesn't see a home devoted to people who truly love its movies, is heartbreaking and proof that corporate greed and sheer stupidity have infiltrated the heart of the movie business, and those who predict its eventual downfall to the world of television feel right.  This is a place that introduced your fans to your back catalog, to wanting to know more about films that don't star someone flying in a cape, but more than that, it gave people a love of cinema that is not nourished in a streaming era.  Do you really think that people will constantly love movies if you keep rehashing, remaking, and recreating the same boring crap?  You need new ideas and to introduce people to why successful filmmakers of today (the Tarantinos, the Nolans, the DuVernays) fell in love with movies in the first place.  Without that, eventually no one will give a crap about who the next Batman is-you can only go to that well so many times before people just stop showing up to the theaters.  A world where Warner doesn't understand the merit of FilmStruck is a world where they don't understand the value of movies themselves.  I don't care what the bottom line was-it's too new for them to given up on it at this point, and this decision smacks of greed and not caring about your most loyal fans.

But from a more distant vantage, it also shows that the streaming era doesn't give a crap about your favorite movies.  For the reality is that FilmStruck is one of the only places, frequently the only place, on a streaming platform that you can see the movies of someone like Alfred Hitchcock or Ingmar Bergman (and sometimes, it even housed movies that have never been released on home video, something theoretically streaming should easily be able to do but has so far ignored).  With it gone, most of the films that it has will not belong to any readily-available streaming platform, and unless you shell out the money for a Blu-Ray or DVD (at $20 a pop, not a feasible solution for most) or chance upon a movie on TCM or at your public library, this is just not an option for you to watch.  Netflix and Hulu have largely killed any cinema made before 1990, as they don't host such films, and with people purging their physical collections, DVD/Blu-Ray may not always be an option.  Even recent movies like last year's 1945 are impossible to find on a physical copy in the United States, and most Netflix movies don't get physical copies.  Netflix disappears, and all of those movies are gone forever.  Even the DVD's that are released are frequently only after begging (witness Wonderstruck) or are cheap prints of the shows rather than something that might be worth celebrating (Jane the Virgin and Bob's Burgers are both hit shows that have cheap DVD's without commentary and making-of documentaries...and you can't tell me that the cast-and-crew of those shows wouldn't love to invest in making something lasting from their decade of work, but greed gets in the way).

You might not care.  I speak to people who want to get rid of their DVD collections and books.  They'll just rely on streaming and Kindle.  And maybe their entertainment tastes are so limited they don't care.  But I'd like to say in a world where Citizen Kane or Casablanca can disappear, you don't think Friends can?  Game of Thrones can?  Stranger Things can?  Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians and Titanic and Mean Girls and The Dark Knight can?  Without sites that steward to film and television preservation, these shows and movies can just as easily get lost.  I have amped up in recent years my physical media collection in part because I don't trust places like Warner anymore, and their elimination of FilmStruck is a good reason.  The only copy I trust to exist is on my shelf, and while there are tons of problems with owning physical media instead (it can be damaged, technology updates don't always agree with it, the environmental impact isn't as clean as streaming), it's still a better insurance policy than relying upon a world where FilmStruck can be snatched up without any notice.  Today was a sad day not only because we lost the best streaming service on the market, but also because it's clear that the studios themselves don't see the value in replacing it.  Film fans of the world mourn because the movie studios themselves want to make it harder for us to love their products.  They worry about making the quickest of dollars, not realizing that there may come a day where we also just give up, not willing to continually be beaten down by an industry that takes us for granted.