Ankler Preview: A Goodbye To Team Window
Earth, Window and Fire
Having so much free time on our hands these days, one's mind turns to the future, and the basic question: Will there be one?
Since I started this little project, I have strived against the current to make The Ankler a cozy welcoming home for the last vestiges of Team Windows—a place where the bedraggled freedom fighters, the outcasts of the Great Streaming War, could find shelter, comfort, and a sympathetic voice, while we kept the flame of our cause gently burning.
Over time, I noted how the inexorable streaming Borg were gaining momentum, how the argument increasingly ran against the tides, and more to the point, I flogged the case that the rush to streaming was a mindless leap off a cliff. We were throwing away the golden goose for a tech-utopian fantasy world based on unproven valuations.
Among my arguments:
Movies drive the world's cultural conversation.
They are routinely the Big Events of our civilization.
These events then become the hub of the massive flywheel of revenue that a company can bank on for eons to come.
Movies are where you forge the eternal IP, cornerstone of an entertainment empire.
Friends and Magnum PI may be affectionately remembered and people might well want to watch them for decades to come. Winnie the Pooh, thanks to a movie 50 years ago, is an empire, and the amount of revenue it throws off in a thousand directions is endless.
Even talking pure box office, it takes an awful lot of subscriptions to match the hundreds of millions, not to say billions, that a hit movie can generate.
The communal, out-of-your-house, nature of cinema-going offers a larger cultural and entertainment experience that the world has a need for and for which there are few replacements. Watching a movie on TV does not replace the experience of going to see a movie with others; they live in different cultural silos.
Damage to the window risks destroying all of the above.
All of these things I still believe. And yet, many have noticed a change in tone in recent months. A few weeks ago, I went so far as to approvingly print a friend's comment suggesting that the studios release all their stored up films on streaming.
Not exactly the sentiment one likes to hear from a loyal citizen of Team Window.
As I say, all of the above still feels completely true to me. So what's changed?
* * *
Well, there's that one big thing: the entire film industry being shut down on *both* the production and distribution sides for potentially multiple years.
Oh right, that.
But as much as a cataclysm as that is, even that is not a reason for wholesale reevaluation. Eventually, we will get past this. The urge to leave the house will be greater than ever. As I've written before, after a year-plus held captive in our homes, the thought of looking at one's Roku hub ever again might produce involuntary fits of retching.
Movies, I do believe, will come back. But what this moment has done is give us a chance to take a look at the entire machinery of the film industry and see not only how bloated, bureaucratic, and unresponsive it is, but more important, what the inherent forces are that have caused this center of gravity to shift to the Great Streaming Wars—and why.
Here's the real thing: I'm now resigned to the fact that that drift is unstoppable and that anyone who wants to be part of the future had best figure out a way to get to the front of the parade, pronto.
There, I said it.
But let's take a step back. I had a talk with an Ankler friend, who like all great Ankler friends must remain nameless, who helped me put in perspective what is going on here, and my thanks to him for much of what follows.
There is a reason why whatever developments come in technology or finance that change how we make and view entertainment, whatever the new wave, come to Hollywood to see it brought to life. That's because Hollywood isn't the movie business, or the TV business. Hollywood is a conglomeration of talent, maybe the greatest and most enduring assemblage of creative talent the world has ever known. You can find a cheap place to shoot in Topeka, and maybe get some tax breaks with it. But the people who fill it will come to you by way of Hollywood.
Not only the actors, directors, and writers, but the gaffers, the editors, the makeup artists, the marketing directors—this is where the world keeps most and the best of them. So you wanna go into entertainment, this is where you've got to come.
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