Have We Reached the Tipping Point Where Movies Will Stop Being Movies?

The first moment in my life when people began to talk about movies as if they could go away tomorrow was right after the pandemic struck. At that point, no one knew which end was up, but with America’s movie theaters having closed down, movies had gone away — at least temporarily. We all wondered: For how long? Theater chains were facing the kind of crippling debt that can hollow out an industry; they still are. And even after the theaters reopened, and moviegoers (or some of them, anyway) returned, the seemingly permanent erosion of the box office reflected a much larger story: the transition of audiences from the movie theater to the home theater, a technology-driven development that was also a cultural evolution. Call it The Cocooning of America.

Of course, movies didn’t go away. They took a major hit, one they’ve never fully recovered from. Yet where some surveyed the cinema landscape and saw vulnerability and weakness, and maybe the end of a dream (that is, the end of the movie culture we’d known for 100 years), I saw faith and resilience. I saw the part of the glass that was full (more than half of it, by a long shot). I saw the stubborn persistence of the belief in the mass religion that movies had always been. In the end, audiences did return to movie theaters; they kept on coming. The dream was, and still is, alive.

But now, suddenly, for the first time since the dawn of the pandemic, the ground has shifted. The paradigm is bucking and lurching under our feet. Seemingly overnight, things are happening that have the potential to result in an extinction-level event for movies as we’ve known them.

Netflix’s looming purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery is not yet a done deal, but with the WBD board having rejected Paramount’s counteroffer to buy the company, Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, appears to be moving toward his big victory. So let’s be clear about what that would portend. What a Netflix-WBD…