From the theaters that our parents grew up with to derelict cinemas now, streaming services have changed a lot about movies and TV shows. This change is something that I have always talked about with my dad, with him explaining how he sees the differences of how we enjoy film today versus how he enjoyed film as a kid. One of the biggest things he noticed is that, instead of having to go all the way to the movie theaters to watch a movie or wait until the weekend for cartoons, we can just hop on any streaming service and watch whatever we want.
According to a business report by The Numbers, the number of people going to see movies in theaters in the U.S. peaked in the early 2000s, this is when Netflix began to start online streaming, and it eventually took a sudden drop in 2020 due to the pandemic. Movie theaters have not been able to recover since, and I think this is mainly due to the convenience of streaming services. If we know that a movie will eventually make its way to Netflix, Hulu, or Disney+, there is no incentive to go to the theater and watch it.
According to Stephen Follows, a film data researcher, there has also been a huge increase in the amount of movies released to cinemas within the U.S., but the amount of people actually going to the movie theaters to watch those movies has been gradually decreasing. This shows that there may be too many movies out there, and in my experience, the amount of movies makes the viewing of them much less enjoyable.
The creation of streaming services has not only had the effect of keeping people out of movie theaters but this has had a much larger impact on society. One thing is the lack of excitement that we see everywhere today. Every time I hear about when an adult in my life was a kid, they always talk about how everyone was so excited to go and see the newest “Star Wars” movie and talk about it with their friends on the next day at school. While there may be some nostalgia playing into their perception, it doesn’t change the fact that no one gets as excited about films as they used to.
In my own life, I have seen this lack of excitement when it comes to film. Everyone I know watches TV and movies, and sometimes it is the same film, but none of us ever talk about them at school. The last time I talked about a movie with my friends was probably the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” movie, and that is because we all saw it together. Since there are so many shows and movies at our disposal, there is a lot less excitement for films and it is much harder for me and my friends to talk about one movie.
Even with really popular shows like “Arcane” that everyone is talking about online, none of my friends have seemed to watch it or want to talk about it. It’s almost like there is no more conversation over movies and TV, a conversation that seemed to be very prevalent throughout the ‘80s.
The industry itself seems to have also taken a hit from this great shift. Instead of movies taking years to meticulously put together, it is now expected to take a short amount of time for them to be put together, so more of them can be consumed. For example, Marvel has been putting out more series’ straight onto Disney+, and the quality of their movies and shows has been noticeably worse.
Things like the writers’ strike that happened last year were largely impacted by the increased usage of streaming services. According to AP Journal, because releases of shows and movies are more constant and not seasonal, the pay for writers went down, along with the number of writers on shows and the amount of time the writers had. This shows that this streaming phenomenon has sucked the creativity out of TV and has made it this thing to make a quick buck out of.
There are so many more impacts that I believe streaming has had on us, from our attention span to how we now spend our days watching shows on convenient streaming services. The next time a new movie comes out, try catching it in the theater instead of waiting for it to come out on streaming services. It may not change much, but I know whenever I go to a movie theater it makes my life less monotonous and adds so much more value to the movie that I go and watch.
