Netflix made "The Irishman," but Martin Scorsese didn't want people to watch "The Irishman" on Netflix.
On November 29, the nearly 3.5-hour "The Irishman" went live on Netflix. Directed by Martin Scorsese, who recently made headlines for saying that Marvel movies are not "cinema", Netflix invested. According to reports, the film cost about $200 million, and as of its launch on Netflix, the film has grossed $167,900 worldwide.
The box office is less than one thousandth of the cost. It's not because the Irishman is of poor quality, as of now, the film has a freshness rating of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and an average of 8.6 for critics. Media ratings depend on the quality of the film, but box office depends on its theatrical opportunities.
Rating information for The Irishman on Rotten Tomatoes | Rotten Tomatoes
After premiering at the 57th New York Film Festival on September 27, The Irishman did not run until November 1 in some theaters in the two major cities of New York and Los Angeles. And this kind of on-demand screening is not for the box office and movie-watching experience, but to participate in the award.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences stipulates that all films registered to compete for the Oscars must be screened at a commercial theater for at least seven consecutive days, at least three times a day, and must be scheduled for one time between 6 and 10 p.m. The film festival premiered, then screened on a small scale in selected theaters, and launched on Netflix nearly four weeks later, which is almost the same process as the film "Roma" invested by Netflix last year, which also adopted a similar strategy to enter the Oscar nominations.
For 28 days, this is Netflix's final compromise in the face of theaters, awards, and traditional film distribution.
<h1>Disruptors or spoilers</h1>
Since Netflix produced and released its first original film, Beast of No Bounds, in 2015, Netflix has ventured into the film industry. At that time, due to copyright restrictions, Netflix either renewed or signed a new copyright, or sat still, watching the film library become less and less, so it resolutely stepped into the film industry.
Released only in the United States, Beast of No Bounds grossed less than $100,000, while the film cost $6 million. Netflix doesn't care about box office performance, it aims to keep viewers on the platform. To date, the film has an iMDB rating of 7.7, a Rotten Tomatoes freshness rating of 92%, and a media review of 79 points on Metacritic, and the film has been selected for the main competition unit of the 72nd Venice Film Festival. Netflix's first attempt at a movie was arguably very successful.
In 2016, Netflix launched 18 original movies, but the splash was flat. In 2017, Netflix launched 41 original films and brought Bong Joon-ho's "Jade" and Noah Baumbach's "The Story of Meyerrowitz" to Cannes, France. However, in France, the home of European film culture, Netflix encountered for the first time a "distribution conflict" that was difficult to bridge.
The 70th Cannes Film Festival attended by the "Jade" team | Visual China
First screened in theaters, after the box office tends to be saturated, and then landed on the streaming media platform, which is a common way of film distribution in the current era of streaming media. The period from landing in theaters to launching streaming platforms is known as the release window period, whether in the United States or China, unless individual films will continue to be released, the default release window in the industry is about four weeks, but this figure is 36 months in France.
This is unacceptable for Netflix. While Netflix's purpose of making movies is to attract and retain audiences, French rules require it to wait three years before it can be shown on its own platform. The paradox is that if it is not screened in French theaters, the film cannot participate in the Cannes Film Festival.
In 2017, the Cannes Film Festival encountered this situation for the first time, on the one hand, Netflix with high-quality films actively participating, on the other hand, veteran filmmakers and critics, the Cannes committee decided to retain the qualification of "Jade" and "The Story of Meyerrowitz" after the compromise between the two sides, but required Netflix to comply with French theater regulations from 2018. Although the film was released as scheduled, during the screening, both films were booed by the live media.
In 2018, the Cannes Committee added a new regulation requiring all feature films in the main competition unit to be commercially screened in French cinemas and comply with French laws on the media. Netflix then announced its withdrawal from the cannes film festival and withdrew five films originally intended to be screened at the festival, including "Roma", which Netflix took to Venice in August and won the Golden Lion. This year, Netflix has 72 original movies, but it didn't go to the Cannes Film Festival.
The conflict between Cannes and Netflix in the past three years is actually a microcosm of the conflict between traditional film studios and distributors and Netflix in recent years.
<h1>The Paramount Act</h1>
On November 18, the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust division said it was working to repeal the Paramount Act. The bill, which once changed the landscape of Hollywood and modern commercial films, has struggled to keep up with the changing times after 71 years of operation.
In 1915, after the federal court ruled that Edison's film patent company was monopolized, it coincided with the emergence of sound films, and Hollywood ushered in its first golden period of development, a period that gave birth to many of the film studios we know today. Before 1938, however, many cinemas showed only films from their studios, which monopolized the three important parts of the film industry: production, distribution, and release. The emerging independent studios were scarce in resources, and eventually they were either acquired by the big studios or given to the big studios in exchange for screening qualifications. The eight major factories account for 17% of the American cinemas, account for 45% of the profits, and include many famous Hollywood actors and producers.
In 1938, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Paramount Pictures for monopolizing the film industry, and jointly accused other prominent Hollywood studios, including MGM, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and Raiden Pictures with independent theater lines, universal pictures, Columbia, and United States without theaters, which were known as the "Hollywood Eight Factories". After the joint protests by these film studios, the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, which, under the Antitrust Act, prohibited film companies from monopolizing the production, distribution, and screening of three major links, and could not own their own theaters, nor could they force small independent theaters to schedule films.
Hollywood was once one of the eight major studios
The Paramount Act changed Hollywood, and the modern film industry, and no studio could open up the business line from production to distribution, in this context, Hollywood's traditional studios either lost power or merged.
Looking back at the eight major Hollywood factories of that year, Paramount was acquired by Viacom in 1993. RaidenHua permanently withdrew from the media business in 1991. United States was incorporated into MGM as early as 1981, and MGM was bought by Sony for $5 billion in 2005, and now belongs to Sony with Columbia, filing for bankruptcy protection in 2010 and finally completing the restructuring with 500 million yuan in financing. Warner Bros.'s parent company, Time Warner, was acquired by communications giant AT&T last year, and Warner Bros.'s film and television resources will also be incorporated into HBO's streaming program next year. Twentieth Century Fox, which lasted to the end, was also officially incorporated into Disney on March 20 this year.
After "Paramount Law" broke the distribution privileges of studios, the United States gradually formed four major theater lines: AMC, REGAL, CINEMARK, CINEPLEX and independent theaters distributed in different regions, in 2018, the four major theaters accounted for 57% of the box office, and independent theaters accounted for 43% of the box office. However, Netflix's annual revenue has now exceeded the total box office of the national film. The streaming media represented by Netflix bypasses the time-consuming theatrical distribution link and goes directly from production to launch. Streaming media don't need to worry about box office and attendance like studios and theaters, they don't care about how a film recovers costs, and they don't bet on making blockbuster movies like small independent studios, they just need to enrich the film library, spread word of mouth, attract and retain paying users, and maintain cash flow that can be invested in new films.
Today, monopoly studios sued by the Paramount Act of '71 are either bankrupt, restructured, or acquired by larger entertainment conglomerates. And this bill also with the advent of the streaming media era, has to be updated, than the studio monopoly of the theater, now the traditional filmmakers are more worried about the existence of the theater line.
<h1>Defender of tradition Martin Scorsese</h1>
"I don't watch Marvel Universe movies right now. I've tried to see them, but it's not cinema, I think they're closest to theme parks. Although they are well-made, they are not films in which the creators try to pass on their emotional and psychological experiences to others." Martin Scorsese's remarks in an interview last month sparked widespread controversy.
According to Guinness World Records, the five highest-grossing films in global film history are Avengers 4: Endgame: $2.7902 billion, Avatar: $2.7897 billion, Titanic: $2.2082 billion, Star Wars Episode 7: The Force Awakens: $2.0533 billion, and Avengers: Infinity War: $2.0481 billion. Looking at the top 50 grossing films, 49 of them are IP series or comic book movies.
Of the top 20 grossing films worldwide, only Titanic is a non-IP movie | Wikipedia
The opposite of the blockbuster film that has reaped the global box office is the fate of the film "The Irishman". At first, the distributor of "The Irishman" was Paramount Pictures, and then Paramount gave up the distribution rights, and after Netflix bought the distribution rights for 105 million, it invested another 125 million budget to become the largest producer and distributor of "The Irishman". "The Irishman" landing on Netflix is more like a "helpless move", and Netflix's large-scale investment has also allowed the expensive "frozen age" special effects in the film to be realized in post-production.
On November 27, "The Irishman" went live on Netflix, and on December 1, Martin Scorsese said in an interview: "If you want to see my movie, please don't watch it on your phone, please, at least grab a bigger iPad... Ideally, I recommend viewers to go to the big screen to watch... I don't know how to make movies for mobile phones, I wish I knew, but I don't understand."
The 3-hour, 29-minute film is about Martin Scorsese's lifelong "New York Gangsters" starring seventy-something Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci. Their collaboration has resulted in many film history classics such as "The Godfather" and "Once Upon a Time in America." They were regular rebels in Hollywood in their time, and they succeeded in refreshing Hollywood cinema, Hollywood industry, and Hollywood culture in the 1970s and 1980s, and today they are like defenders of the old traditions.
The film is likely to win this year's Oscar season, and Martin Scorsese did not make any compromises on the way he watched the film, Martin wrote in the New York Times article in response to "Marvel Non-Cinema": "We now have two separate fields: one is audiovisual entertainment on a global scale, and the other is film art." They still overlap from time to time, but this is becoming less and less common. I fear that the economic advantage of one of them will marginalize the other, or even shrink the other's living space."
Netflix, Disney+, HBO, Apple TV+ and more and more high-definition large-screen mobile phones and tablets and dozens of inches of large-screen TVs constitute this audiovisual entertainment system, viewers can watch what they want to watch anytime, anywhere, viewers do not need to be in the dark and do not need to keep quiet, can pause can fast-forward can synchronize the progress bar. Theaters welcomed state-of-the-art visual effects blockbusters, with studios happy to see the three-hour Avengers but reluctant to bet on the three-and-a-half-hour Irishman.
"Netflix, and only Netflix, allowed us to make 'The Irishman' the way we needed it, and I'm forever grateful for that." We had a window to the cinema which was very nice. Do I want this movie to run longer on a bigger screen? Absolutely. However, no matter who you work with to make a movie, the truth is that most multiplex screens are still full of blockbuster series." "Blockbusters" and "movies", theaters and online, studios and streaming, martin scorsese is like a microcosm of the revolution in the film industry at a time when the 71-year-old Paramount Act is about to be abolished.
This article is written by Moonshot
Editor: Song Desheng
Caption: Poster of the Irishman movie