One of the big stories this week concerned the Jennifer Lawrence/Bradley Cooper period-piece drama Serena, which has languished without a distributer for two years. As of Wednesday, the film will be distributed by Magnolia Pictures, which means in all likelihood most would-be moviegoers will sample the drama not in theaters but on Video On Demand. The film will debut on VOD on February 26th of next year, followed by a limited theatrical run on March 27th. If you think it's odd or unexpected that a Jennifer Lawrence/Bradley Cooper drama couldn't get a major studio distributor, you'd be correct save for the fact that it's a straight period drama that isn't considered Oscar material and is thus considered a commercial risk even with two of the bigger stars around. But Video On Demand distribution network has basically exploded over the last three years, with more and more indie-minded studios using it as a primary revenue stream for the kinds of films that are both explicitly art-house and the kinds of films that would have arguably been mainstream multiplex releases just a decade ago. If you're the kind of moviegoer who complains that Hollywood only makes superhero sequels, dystopian action franchises, youth-skewing comedies, and animated spectaculars, then you are only half-right. Hollywood, or related production companies and distribution companies, still make them. It's just that they often end up premiering on your television or smartphone as opposed to a theater near you.
Magnolia was at the forefront of the pre-theatrical VOD distribution system. Back in 2006, they released Steven Soderbergh's Bubble in theaters, on DVD, and on Magnolia's HDNet cable channel on the same day. For the next five years, Magnolia and IFC released a number of their films prior to theatrical release via Video On Demand, be they star-centric vehicles like Flawless (with Demi Moore and Michael Caine), The Killer Inside Me (with Casey Affleck and Jessica Alba among others), and All Good Things (with Kirsten Dunst). The would-be game changer was the late 2011 release Margin Call, from Roadside Attractions (which often works with Lionsgate). The all-star drama (Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci, Demi Moore, etc.), concerning a fictionalized version of the 2008 financial meltdown, earned strong reviews and a whopping $10 million in revenue from VOD sales. Just as The Matrix legitimized DVD during the format's relative infancy, Margin Call signaled that films debuting on VOD were not "unworthy of theatrical release" but often times the sort of middle-ground movies that seemed to have been swept away in the decade-long obsession with tent poles.
Over the last three years, we've seen a giant boom in the quantity and quality of content on the various VOD platforms (Amazon Prime, iTunes, Google Market, etc.). The films that debut pre-theatrical via VOD, or exclusively on VOD are not presumably racking up blockbuster business, because frankly in most cases the actual sales figures are not released to the public. But the VOD marketplace has become a secondary distribution network for feature films. The films that make up the VOD options, aside from the blockbusters that premiere on VOD before they debut on DVD (an arena where, by the way, the art-house gem Belle that barely cracked $10 million in theaters can be one of the top-rented/viewed movies of last week alongside Divergent and Captain America 2), are precisely the kind of old-school star-driven, adult-skewing films that we all claim have been lost Hollywood's all-blockbusters, all-the-time mentality.
If you were to scroll through the new Video on Demand options on your online store of choice right now, you'd find films are precisely what we say the industry isn't making enough of. You'd find glossy star-driven thrillers like The Two Faces of January (with Viggo Mortsensen, Kirsten Dunst, and Oscar Issac). You'd find mind-blowing puzzle boxes like the trippy romantic comedy The One I Love (with Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass). If you want to know more about that unknown who will be starring in Angelina Jolie's Unbroken this December, you might do well to check out Jack O'Connell in the British prison drama Starred Up. If you like musicals that aren't necessarily star-studded adaptations of the biggest Broadway shows, you might want to check out Stage Fright (a charmingly twisted horror musical set at a theater camp) or God Help the Girl (yes, Emily Browning can sing).
If you want to see Robin Williams's last major starring role, The Angriest Man in Brooklyn premiered on VOD way back in April of this year. And if you want to see an engaging true-life breast cancer drama starring an absolute murderer's row of talent (Helen Hunt, Samantha Morton, Aaron Paul, Corey Stoll, and a bazillion others), rent Decoding Annie Parker. If you're a horror film fan, then VOD is absolute heaven, as there are copious offbeat and original horror titles like Cheap Thrills debuting on the format each and every week. It's not that every VOD release is some kind of would-be critical gem that was cruelly ignored by the major studios. I wasn't a fan of the Clive Owen/Mila Kunis 70's crime drama Blood Ties and Elizabeth Banks's Walk of Shame lives up to the title despite its good intentions. But there is plenty of diamonds in the so-called rough.
You might say that a $5 million action comedy starring Patrick Wilson, Jessica Alba, and Chris Pine and directed by Joe Carnahan (The Grey, The A-Team) is the kind of pulpy genre entry that would qualify as a low-cost/low-risk Saturday night at the movies too, but Universal (Comcast Corporation) disagreed. Stretch was scheduled to be released this past March, only for Universal to pull the film in January, claiming that it would cost $20m-$40m to market the picture. As of now, the Blumhouse production will debut on Video On Demand on October 14th. I saw the film last night, and it's a delightfully goofy After Hours-type romp, one with decent production values and strong performances by recognizable actors.
It's also, quality aside, exactly the kind of film that would have been a wide theatrical release ten years ago, or in this case ten months ago. That Universal chose not to put it in theaters may say less about the studio's priorities (especially in a period when they will go well-over 12 months without a conventional tent pole) and more about the sheer cost of advertising a wide studio release in an environment where frontloaded box office has made the opening weekend the all-important goal. But the end result is that audiences nationwide will get the chance to rent or purchase Stretch in a relatively high quality presentation on October 14th of this year.
At this point, it's merely a matter of which artier distribution companies (IFC, Magnolia, Roadside Attraction, etc.) use VOD as a date-and-date or pre-theatrical exhibition platform and which distribution companies (Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics, etc.) do not. We can all debate the reasons why Weinstein Company dropped Snowpeircer onto VOD three weeks into its limited theatrical run (where it earned $11m on VOD alone, as Dorothy Pomerantz covered in much detail two weeks ago), or why their period drama The Immigrant (with Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jeremy Renner) ended up on Netflix in mid-summer in the middle of its limited theatrical run, or why Magnolia decided to take their theaters-only release Frank and release it onto VOD a few weeks into its run. But the end result is that millions of moviegoers who otherwise would not have had access to said films prior to their eventual VOD/DVD release many months from now got to enjoy said films right alongside the film critics and LA/NY moviegoers.
The fluid nature of Snowpiercer's swift theaters-to-VOD journey (it remained in limited theatrical release after its VOD premiere), as well as the limited theatrical run of Lionsgate's Leprechaun: Origins five days prior to the film's VOD release, is arguably changing the very nature of what constitutes a theatrical release. It also raises a question of for how long, and for what kinds of movies, will theatrical distribution remain the preeminent mode of exhibition. And there is a dark side to the streaming revolution, as physical media is somewhat forcibly removed as an option and older and more obscure films are threatened with glorified extinction. But for the moment, film lovers living well outside the conventional art-house districts are being given access, at pretty much the same time as critics and big-city film nerds, to the very kinds of films that they claim Hollywood won't deliver to their local multiplex.
The vast majority of moviegoers who want to see Jennifer Lawrence's Serena, Shailene Woodley's White Bird In A Blizzard (debuting next Thursday on VOD and in limited theatrical release on October 24th), or Kristen Stewart's Camp X-Ray (October 17th) will find what they seek not at a theater, but on a television or a smart phone or a laptop. As a champion of the theatrical experience, I will admit that this breaks my heart a little bit, as the multiplex that I so love threatens to become the exclusive domain of so-called event pictures during much of the year. But as a film fan who champions the notion of a more diverse marketplace, as well as the means for audiences nationwide to see said films in a timely manner, the emergence of Video on Demand as a major distribution platform may be what we've been waiting for. The more that audiences catch on to this option and seek out the kinds of films they desire alongside the conventional blockbuster fare, the more attractive said films will become to the producers who fund them and the studios that might distribute them.
I'm not thrilled at the notion of a future where my ten-best list is filled with films that I watched on my smart phone or my television, or where the newest Martin Scorsese film premieres on Amazon Prime instead of a national theater chain, but that's a highly plausible future. Come what may, Video On Demand has quickly lost much of its stigma. The films that we claim to crave are being made and they are being offered nationwide to anyone with a decent internet connection and a credit card. I don't know how this will all end. But having the option of watching Guardians of the Galaxy on a Friday night and then staying home on Saturday and watching The One I Love on your HDTV sounds like a pretty terrific place to start.
