Streaming Has Won the Hollywood Debate. Is Best Picture Next?

The pandemic accelerated the disruption. Conventional studios like Paramount, Common, Sony, Warner Bros. and Disney rerouted dozens of theatrical movies to streaming providers or launched them concurrently in theaters and on-line. For the second yr in a row, the Academy of Movement Image Arts and Sciences, citing the coronavirus risk, allowed movies to skip a theatrical launch fully and nonetheless be eligible for Oscars. The academy had beforehand required not less than a perfunctory theatrical launch of not less than per week in Los Angeles.

That is about greater than Hollywood egotism. The fear is that, as streaming providers proliferate — greater than 300 now function in the USA, in response to the consulting agency Parks Associates — theaters might develop into completely the land of superheroes, sequels and remakes. The venerable Warner Bros. has slashed annual theatrical output by nearly half and constructed a direct-to-streaming movie meeting line. Final week, Amazon boosted its Prime Video service by buying Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the old-line studio behind “Licorice Pizza,” which is nominated for 3 Academy Awards, together with finest image.

In a yr when Hollywood largely didn’t jump-start theatrical moviegoing, streaming providers solidified their maintain on viewers. International ticket gross sales totaled $21.3 billion in 2021, down from $42.3 billion in 2019, in response to the Movement Image Affiliation. (Theaters had been closed for a lot of 2020.) Some theater corporations have gone out of enterprise, others have merged; the world’s greatest theater chain, AMC Leisure, racked up $6 billion in losses over the previous two years and its inventory has dropped 66 p.c since June. On the similar time, the variety of subscriptions to on-line video providers all over the world grew to 1.3 billion, up from 864 million in 2019, the group mentioned.

One movie that struggled on the field workplace was Mr. Spielberg’s “West Facet Story,” which obtained an unique run in theaters (per his needs) of about three months. It collected about $75 million worldwide (towards a manufacturing funds of $100 million and international advertising and marketing prices of roughly $50 million). “West Facet Story” is now out there on not one however two streaming providers, Disney+ and HBO Max, the place it has nearly assuredly been seen extra broadly than in theaters. However the movie was by no means in a position to recuperate — amongst Oscar voters — from being branded a field workplace misfire. It obtained seven nominations, and is poised to win in a single class, for Ariana DeBose as finest supporting actress.

Mr. Spielberg’s also-ran presence within the present Oscar race makes the ascendance of streaming contenders all of the extra hanging: a lion within the battle to maintain the Academy Awards targeted on theatrical movies is pushed apart.

Nonetheless unlikely, it’s doable that “West Facet Story” might come from behind and win the most effective image trophy. So might Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” for that matter. Such an final result can be a bit like 2019, when academy voters, turned off by an over-the-top marketing campaign by Netflix to push “Roma” to finest image glory, as a substitute gave the prize to “Inexperienced E book,” a standard movie from Common Footage.