Netflix Releases First Feature Length Film
Image courtesy of Flickr
BY LINDSEY MCGINNIS
Netflix released “Beasts of No Nation” to its 60 million members last month, marking its official entry into the film industry. Throughout the past 10 years, Netflix has changed the television landscape, and plans to do the same with Hollywood.
According to the company timeline, Netflix was founded in 1997 as an online DVD rental service, introducing instant streaming in 2007. The popular service kick started what CEO Reed Hastings told Wired Magazine was “the beginning of our great, global expansion.” According to their website, Netflix now releases television shows, season by season, to binge watchers in more than 60 countries across the globe.
The company has also been producing original content since 2012, and now boasts a collection of big name comedies, including Tina Fey’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and Aziz Ansari’s “Master of None.” In 2014, “Orange is the New Black” and “House of Cards” won a total of seven Emmy Awards. Last summer, Netflix debuted their new transnational sci-fi thriller “Sense8,” a complex drama written by J. Michael Straczynski (“Thor,” “Babylon 5”) and the Wachowski siblings (“The Matrix,” “V for Vendetta”).
Like premium channels such as HBO, Netflix offers exclusive creative content. However, Netflix, unlike HBO, does not require a cable subscription or an expensive membership to access.
“I’m going through this phase where I’m trying to catch up on all the shows I’ve never seen,” said film studies liaison Miranda Gontz ’16, “moving towards those digital platforms is just easier as a college student to consume.”
Gontz said that during her summer internship with the Television Academy Foundation, Netflix was a major topic of conversation, because “they are not part of the television group, yet they produce high quality television.”
Now, the company that changed the way people watch television is changing the way people see movies.
Netflix released its first feature length original film, “Beasts of No Nation,” on Oct. 16, 2015. Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, “Beasts” follows the perilous journey of a child soldier in Western Africa.
Wall Street Journal’s Ben Fritz reported that the movie struggled to “find a studio home” and continued production under independent financing until Netflix bought the movie for roughly $12 million. Fritz believes this purchase showed Netflix’s commitment to “making the type of movies that studios no longer do.”
Major theater chains, including AMC and Cinemark, refused to screen “Beasts of No Nation,” telling Variety reporters that Netflix wouldn’t comply with the traditional 90-day waiting period between theatrical release and online release. If “Beasts” could be streamed from home, few theaters would offer their screens.
However, this challenge may be negligible in a modern context, as fewer Americans are going to the movies, the Wall Street Journal reports. Part of this may be explained by the costs associated with visiting a movie theatre. According to Variety, the average cost of a movie ticket in America in 2014 was $8.17, but in metropolitan areas, that price can easily climb to $15 for a standard, 2D film. Netflix is $9 a month.
Gontz defends the theatre experience. “I think that theater experience is what makes movies worthwhile,” she said, “because they are meant for watching in a group to get all those group reactions out of it, so watching it alone in your room I think kind of defeats the original intent of the movies.”
While Gontz rarely visits the Tower Theater in South Hadley Village, where tickets are $8 with the student discount, when she’s at home in L.A. she says she visits the Laemmle Theater at least once a week. “They have more indie releases. They have more international releases,” she said, “any place that really does support the independent movie more I think is the preferable place to go.”
She also argues that, rather than Netflix being more accessible to the average consumer, its entry into the film industry marks a regression in cinematic history.
“In the 1930s and ’40s, all the movies that were being produced [by] Paramount Movies were only distributed at Paramount Theaters, so you could only see things through Paramount … that’s called monopolizing. You shouldn’t do that.” She argues that in order to watch Netflix films, “you have to have a Netflix account and you need to have a computer… versus you need to have access to any theater, which was the progress we were making.”
The “Beasts of No Nation” boycott led to a low $50,699 in box office earnings, according to the Wall Street Journal, but the film has received critical praise and its limited theatrical release qualifies it for Academy Award nomination.
In a July press release, Netflix outlined the rest of their “Original Film Initiative.” The first in a series of Adam Sandler collaborations, “The Ridiculous Six,” is set to premiere on Dec. 11, 2015. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Green Legend,” and “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday,” will both premiere in early 2016. The company announced that Angelina Jolie will direct an adaptation of Loung Ung’s memoir “First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers,” set to premier in late 2016. The New York Times also reported Netflix had agreed to finance Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s newest film “Okja.” In the interview, Mr. Bong, who previously directed “Snowpiercer,” stated Netflix could provide him with not only the budget he needed to produce this film, but also “total creative freedom.”