Flasz On Film

Under six feet of ground, no-one can hear your characters scream for attention. This could be a tagline for the recent purge of content announced by both Disney Plus and HBO Max, which has since renamed itself as simply Max.  

I have already chipped in with my own two cents on the matter of large corporations owning massive chunks of the entertainment industry and the practice of burying movies and TV shows in their vault without giving their audiences a way to access them. Now, we have learned a bit more about which shows exactly were purged on this occasion and what the underlying motivations may have driven Disney and WB to do what they did.  

In all actuality, what I thought would have been my worst fears did not come to pass with this round of decluttering perpetrated by these two streaming giants. I don’t think any substantial titles have been thus far hidden in their vaults and instead a bunch of smaller TV shows and lesser-known movies were taken off these platforms. However, we have to admit that it is still a problem, because what matters in this case is the explanation behind what happened.  

According to an industry insider interviewed by Screen Rant, the logic underpinning the decision making as to what goes and what stays had little to do with residuals, which potentially diminishes (though, it doesn’t remove it completely) the likelihood anyone would be able to effectively accuse Disney, or WB, or any other streamer willing to cleanse their wardrobe of taking a side in the debate about writers’ pay. It’s still about money, though, but it has to do with licencing fees. What seems to have happened is that some people took a long and hard look at how their properties performed and realized they were paying licencing fees for movies and TV shows that quite literally nobody was watching.  

Now, from a purely business perspective, the decision to remove these properties and hence obviate the need to pay these fees to whoever holds the rights to them seems perfectly sound, especially in the context of cutting costs and finding efficiencies across the business. In fact, the savings made in the process could potentially be re-deployed towards producing new movies and TV shows, hopefully ones people would lay their eyes on for long enough to spare them the axe in the near future. So, you could potentially see it as a good move, which is exactly how it is being spinned. But there are at least two problems with this trend, which perhaps even denudes a fundamental flaw with the current entertainment business model, at the receiving end of which there will always be the viewer.  

First of all, the idea of removing terribly underperforming properties is most likely being accompanied by an overall rethink of what should be greenlit instead. And if the primary heuristic through which this decision-making process is filtered is ‘what will get people to watch’, it runs the risk of these streaming platforms – without exception – succumbing to the veritable vicious circle of audience capture. By figuring out what people want to watch, Disney and others will shift their focus to produce more of that content, which then in turn will bring more people who want to watch that content, so they will produce content fitting even better within these parameters, thus spiralling down towards serving more and more red meat to the consumers… all in the hopes of keeping them engaged and subscribed. Apply a cool machine learning algorithm to support this process and you are but two steps away from turning what should have been a collection of convenient places to access your on-screen entertainment into platforms pandering to the average Joe and Jane and effectively disenfranchising anyone seeking anything remotely different or – heavens forbid – refreshing.  

Secondly, content currently being taken off streaming platforms may end up nearly impossible to find elsewhere. Granted, other players on the market might pick the Turner & Hooch show, or maybe take a stab at hosting Willow on their books, but unless the prices are sufficiently low to entice it, they may pass on those severely underperforming properties as well. What then?  

Well, back in the days when physical media weren’t actively fought by online content providers, we always had the bargain bin. You could find any kind of unwatchable schlock somewhere on a DVD for a buck or two. Nowadays, this kind of schlock is often produced for exclusive distribution across subscription-based platforms so having them removed essentially equates taking them behind the shed and blowing their brains out. Once they’re down, they are essentially inaccessible.  

I know, I know. Nobody was watching them anyway. Yes. This is true. But equally, masses were never interested in Carnosaur 2 or any random action thriller starring Lorenzo Lamas or a washed-up wrestler. But because they were available and you could physically walk past them in your local Video Rental store, someone would eventually pick them up. Nowadays, this process continues in an extremely curated format as boutique labels pick up rights to obscure genre classics, remaster them and release them in limited runs on physical media – which is great. But I don’t think Arrow or Shout Factory would be clamouring to snap the rights to whatever got removed recently from Disney Plus and HBO Max. So, chances are that in a few years’ time the world will simply forget these movies and TV shows existed because they never got to develop enough caché to return as cult classics.  

In essence, by shifting our movie-watching preferences away from physical media ownership towards enabling subscription-based platforms which curate what we get to watch, we might have engineered an extinction-level event for the canonical bargain bin movie. They might eventually disappear from the face of the planet, much like the vast majority of the silent era, despite the fact we have all the means in the world to preserve everything we ever produce and store it indefinitely. That is, until Earth is hit with a massive solar flare, but I suppose we’ll have bigger problems to solve than finding the whereabouts of the nearest copy of Disney Fairy Tale Weddings.  

You might laugh at this because you probably don’t care about most, if not all of what’s being removed from these services. I’ll be honest, I don’t care either. What I care about is what it potentially heralds because one day it might be your favourite film that gets taken down and buried beneath six feet of dirt without your say-so. When it does, I think you’d like to be able to have some recourse or an alternative means to access it. And seeing how physical media ownership is dwindling, you might find that once your favourite movie is gone from all online platforms, it will be lost forever.