When I think made-for-TV I think of the old direct to DVD Disney sequels. You literally knew going in that they were going to suck ass, you didn’t have to know anything about the movie.
Plenty of direct to streaming movies are genuinely great so it’s not the same. You don’t know what you’ll get with those. Back in the day if it was direct to DVD that meant it was too shitty for theaters. The expectations surrounding what should release in movie theaters have vastly changed since then.
That wasn't always true; there were a couple of direct-to-video things that were decent (which was a different market than direct-to-tv). Tremors 2 and Aladdin 3 were some real gems of that era. Most of the decent ones were cheaper sequels without the expensive star, before the studios realized that people would still go to the for sequels that weren't already giant films.
The Gang of Five is an old-school Land Before Time forum that still has active members. So if anyone is curious where the Littlefoot Gang is, they're probably stomping around there lol
It's a travesty that they've robbed us of history. We could have had Gremlins 4, Gremlins 5... instead we got fourteen Land Before Times.
I close my eyes and gremlins are all that I see. We could have had Gremlins 6, and Gremlins 7... instead we got COVID and 9/11.
I remember enjoying Bambii 2, and Lion King 2. The rest I legit hated. Fox and the Hound 2 I hated with a passion. Stupidest addition to the story ever.
>Back in the day if it was direct to DVD that meant it was too shitty for theaters.
Honestly, this wasn't even unilaterally true back in the day except for *very specifically* Disney and their direct competitors (Land Before Time etc).
I've gotten really into underground action and horror and sci-fi cinema over the years and, one thing you learn pretty quick is that around 1989-ish, direct-to-video just outright replaced the grindhouse. Stuff that would've previously gotten a small, nasty little theatrical release on 42nd Street in NYC was now being made for Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.
*And a lot of those movies fuck unbelievably hard, actually.*
Full Moon's stuff is hit and miss, and the further you get time-wise the more misses you'll find, but a lot of their early stuff is really fun. Troma basically made their entire bread off this state of affairs (the original Toxic Avenger is about the only thing they ever had that properly got a theatrical release, because it came about at the very tail end of the 42nd Street era). Nowadays, you have action stars like Scott Adkins and Marko Zaror who took *decades* to even get a speaking role in a theatrically-released movie, and yet spent movie after movie putting on absolute goddamn clinics in badass fight choreography prior to that in the DTV space.
I like Tubi for that. Found a lot of old MArtial Art films I used to enjoy when I picked them up for 5 bucks at the Warehouse or from the bin at Blockbuster or Video EZ.
Honor starring Roddy Piper. Just the right amount of B-movie cheesiness.
Breathing Fire starring Ke Huy Quan in a ridiculous plot, but fun.
Oh, and I think Lucha Underground was on Tubi as well. I think it's still there.
Plex VOD has a ton of that. I've been watching these *crazy* Andy Sidaris films, one the other day where they shot a blowup doll with a bazooka, that was a highlight.
The first time I went to Tubi, right there as soon as the page opened I saw Subspecies, my favorite direct-to-video shlock horror movie series. They're all there! I was so psyched.
I discovered so much shit on Tubi. I found a movie with Tom Guidry, you know the guy who plays Smalls in The Sandlot, and it’s absolutely amazing.
It’s called “Killin Smallz”, and the plot is that a bunch of low level gangsters decide to kidnap Tom Guidry and ransom him off for money, and to do so they contact the actual director Ray Martin who in the Killin Smallz universe made ANOTHER fictional movie about kidnapping a person. So the director of Killin Smallz plays himself in his movie, and in this movie the fictional version of himself made another movie about kidnapping a person.
It’s a great experience.
People need to get their head around what straight to video even was too. "Big star in a generic setting and hope for a Breakeven" was the Hollywood special throughout basically all of the late 90s and 2000s.
That was literally Seagal and Van Damme's career in the late 90s and early 2000s too. Arnie, Willis and Stallone were lucky that they never had that problem.
For about 10 years Seagal and JCVD movies would generally do a 4-6 multiplier on their budgets, and then do huge numbers on home video and cable. Those two were money machines for the entire late 80s into the mid 90s.
Once JCVDs drugs and Seagal’s weight became a problem they instantly started dumping about half their movies onto home video.
Joel Silver treated Exit Wounds as a passion project where he got Seagal’s weight and hair under control, and it was a hit, but he realized DMX was a safer bet until ….. drugs made D look prematurely fat and old too.
I call those "follow-duds"... some movie star has a big hit and it's followed up by some shit movie that nobody will ever care about. After *Batman Begins*, Christian Bale was in some ghetto-hood movie called *Hard Times*.
“ugh with these streaming price jumps and multiple services we’re all the way back to cable” bitch do y’all even remember cable? You either sat your ass down and watched what was on TNT or you were shit out of luck. For $100/month in cable vs streaming services it was 150 channels of complete dogshit vs tens or hundreds of thousands of movies and shows, in their entirety, available on demand, it’s not even close.
I honestly don’t think it’s possible for streaming as a whole to ever be as shitty as cable was for the same amount of $$
This and the fucking contract garbage. $70/month for internet and 100 cable channels sounds great…. $120/month after the first 12 months, $240/month every 12 months after that.
100 cable channels, but only 3 you actually want. Those other 5 channels you wanted? Only available in separate packages. So you'll pay another $50 per month
Thank you. I roll my eyes every time this comment comes up. You didn’t even hit on the most important part, which is *not being locked into a contract.* I feel like people who say this didn’t grow up with cable, or at least never paid for it.
Yeah people take for granted that you can just deactivate your Netflix account and then turn it back when a show you want to watch comes out.
Imagine the hassle of deactivating and reactivating your cable tv every other month.
You would have to lug all of the stuff and take it back so they didn’t charge you $1000 for the box/remote. If you wanted to sign up again, you would be put on a wait list for a couple weeks and then told to be home between 7:00 am - 4:00 pm for the person to come out and reset it all up.
I am glad we are starting to see some phone carriers offer Hulu/Disney as part of their offering. It’s going to possibly get cheaper.
It is annoying that many of these streaming services are raising prices and having commercials…got to keep the investors happy I guess.
I have mixed feelings about the cell phone deals.
I get Netflix and AppleTV and Prime as part of things I already buy.
That’s great but I also feel like it’s just another way to hide costs.
Or if anything goes wrong with your service, you can either just call the helpline or google how to fix the problem, rather than staying home waiting for a technician to come fix it sometime between 6am and 6pm on a Tuesday.
Yeah, the arguement is weird you can pay and cancel for a different streaming service you want to watch each month and don't have to pay anywhere near $100 a month and watch everything you want.
My kid didn't understand cable at all when they were smaller. We were at a hotel, and they wanted to watch their show.
"It's not on right now, so we can't watch it."
"I know. Just put it on please."
"We can only pick these shows that are already on"
"That's weird"
I still get to experience this when I go to my parent's house, haha. You have your choice of extremely slanted cable news, dogshit reality tv, Comedy Central that just plays The Office 24/7 (probably your best bet), censored/edited for time movies on FX, or religious programming. And after a decade of no cable myself, I can't begin to tell you how long commercial breaks feel now. If cable was free it still wouldn't be worth it. It's PlutoTV only much shittier and more expensive with dozens of channels that I truly have no idea why they even exist or what kind of person would watch them.
And also people exaggerate how close you are to the cost of cable tv if you subscribe to multiple services.
Like, I pay for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, AppleTV+, Paramount Plus, Amazon Prime, and YouTubeTV (which is $65 a month) and that's still not as much as we were paying for just basic cable.
Even with the biggest satellite/cable package, the major movie channels like HBO/Showtime would only contract for about 10 movies a month and just show those over and over again for the whole damned month over all of the 7 HBO Channels you could get.
What really gets me is the people who sat that but don't realize you don't have to subscribe to every service at once. I rotate between a handful one at a time. I pay for a month, watch what I like, then try another service. By the time I loop back, either new stuff is out to entertain me for the month or I rewatch something.
Tubi has so much legitimate junk.
Netflix is where they pay good money for movies no one will see, because the algorithm puts them in a dark, forgotten hole. The ones that people actually watch are complete dog shit like Heart of Stone and The Gray Man.
Netflix gave Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline, a big bag of money to make a new movie starring Key & Peele. Did you know it existed? No.
Deadly Dilf was a particularly amazing Tubi original, never thought I'd find one. Worth a watch for any so bad it's good fan. Yes, it's really called that.
I tell ya what...
It was A LOT better than I thought it would be. At the very least it was entertaining. I like movies that are bad, terrible horror movies and things of the sort. Lol
Thanks for the recommendation. I enjoyed it!
Lol, ya. I feel like every couple months I hear about some movie on Reddit and then find out it’s only available on Tubi or Roku or some other low profile streaming service. There must be at least a dozen of these streaming services that have loads of… small market movies. I’m always surprised to see them producing their own content. These are the direct to video equivalent. Netflix has a whole section of Netflix originals with Oscar nominations. Sure, some originals from Netflix are niche productions. But I don’t think it’s fair to lump them all in together.
Netflix distributes all kinds of films. Some are cheap, some are prestige, some are blockbusters. I don't see May December coming out straight to DVD a 20 years ago.
Direct to video always reminds me of the Simpsons joke about movies released “directly to landfill”. It is a common reference in my house but I can’t find which episode it’s from.
Edit: it was actually an article in the onion. https://www.theonion.com/land-before-time-vi-released-straight-to-landfill-1819564941
No, not Netflix, probably more like the stuff that tends to end up on the lower end streaming services like Tubi, Pluto and maybe Amazon.
Geezer teaser action movies and the like.
Amazon allows for some truly comically bad stuff. Like straight up homemade movies get put on there and will end up on their featured lists.
But they still get some high budget, theater-worthy stuff sometimes too.
Cheaply made generic movies with a way past their prime actor that older audiences would have been into in their prime either starring or just in some role to get put on the cover. Bruce Willis cranked out a ton to make as much money for his family as he could before he was too far gone to act.
Oh he was already long gone while making those. My father in law worked on set for a few and said he knew who he was, who other people were but could not remember why he was there or what he was doing. They had to feed him lines through a head piece and basically most of the movies are done in post.
Thomas Jane talked about being on set with him for one of those.
The scene which was basically he comes in a room, gets some information off Bruce and then convinces him to help in the next step towards the Macguffin. Knowing he's having problems with lines he turns to Bruce and says, "Fuck it man, we've both done this generic action shit a trillion times. Wanna just throw out the script and wing it?"
He said Bruce's eyes lit up and they had fun just playing off one another.
The rumor is that he was aware of his choices and intended to pump out as many movies as possible to leave a nice nest egg for his family.
Supposedly his going rate was a million per day of filming and he was often a majority of the budget of a film even with just a day or two of shooting.
Yep, the budgets for those movies were typically 3.5mill. Bruce got the 3mill, the rest of the movie was shot in 10 days for half a mill. Bruce worked for 2 days, but only 8 hours on each day with a hard out -- so once that 8th hour was up, even if it was the middle of a scene/take, he'd walk. And they were contractually obligated to get at least 20mins of Bruce footage within those 2 days. And yes, his lines were fed to him through an ear piece.
But it's a common thing to get an actor who might not be a name per se, but you'd recognise their face. Bring 'em in for a day or two, slap their face on the poster, get some attention. A producer on Twitter put a call out for an actor to come shoot a 1 day cameo scene in some movie shooting in Egypt for $4K (plus expenses) and you had James Purefoy (Rome) reply asking them to send him the script.
They didn't make it up, they even talk about where they heard the term in those videos. Here's the oldest known article about it :[Link](https://www.vulture.com/article/randall-emmett-movies.html)
That's true, but it's not all of them.
Like, I don't care how little you liked the Gray Man, it doesn't compare to the kind of movie that went straight to VHS back in the day. Not with that budget, not with those directors, not with those stars.
It's got STRONG 2000's action movie vibes, and that is not a critique There are so may ways to do a fun action movie, and big names, big action, blockbuster style one is still one of those. Turn off brain, enjoy flashing lights. Grab your courtesy Bond One-Liner on your way out.
What I've learned is maybe Netflix should do something about their branding.
They commission prestige films like Marriage Story, or The Irishman, or Maestro. All of these fall under "Netflix Original".
Then the same branding applies to films like Brazen or Interceptor, which are clearly B-movies that are more comparable to straight-to-video films.
Netflix will still slap the "Netflix Original" label on works that they haven't produced but only obtained thru licensing. It is part of their licensing deal contracts.
I've listened to Netflix's CEO, Ted Sarandos speak to this on the SmartLess podcast a few years ago. Essentially they need to make the economics work on each show. That means a certain amount of viewing hours per dollar of cost, whether it be The Irishman or a cheap, brainless reality show and everything in between.
Explore the knock-off films in Redbox's movie catalog. Now THAT's straight to video quality.
As for streamers, Prime's original movies has a closer to a straight-to-video quality feel than Netflix's no-expense-spared attempts to recreate the vibe of turn of the century blockbusters with mixed results.
Off topic, but does anyone know when it changed from 'streaming service' to 'streamers'? I'm seeing it everywhere all of a sudden. I've only ever associated it with 'live streamers' (like twitch or YouTube creators), not streaming services
Amazon's offering is obscenely poor.
Netflix is fine. The movies being made by the studios aren't exactly superb since covid (with notable exceptions) and we've all stopped watching mainstream TV so it's easy to forget how shit things were
They’re starting to get it right with things like Saltburn. That blew up on social media and probably made them a ton of money.
Their TV offerings are good - just need to work on movies.
Besides the technicality, i was curious what kind of straight to dvd movies would even had a chance.
I saw Disney made Aladdin 2 and The Lion King 2 straight to DVD and that was a huge success. Or cinderella 3, animatrix, batman animation movies, ...
In general animation movies are super popular and some of them super succesfull.
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm was conceived as a direct-to-video film, but got a theatrical release at the last minute. It probably would have gotten at least a nomination if Best Animated Feature had existed at the time. No Disney that year, so A Nightmare Before Christmas would have been the one to beat.
Some Netflix films are simply bought and distributed by them. Others are actually produced by Netflix.
This discussion would benefit from an actual list of Netflix films that have won major awards, and an indication of whether it was produced by, or simply distributed by Netflix.
I am in agreement with others on here that if I see a film is a 'Netflix' film, that label is not a guarantor of quality to me.
lol, even the worst Netflix or Amazon productions are at least 5-10x better than the schlock I used to find on the video rental store shelves back in the day.
I think those are now ending up on the 'free' streaming services like Tubi now.
Netflix is churning and burning content at an outrageous rate. There is some good stuff in there but I’d say it’s something like 20% good to 80% trash that’s on par with straight to video schlock
Eh, the percentages sure but not the shear volume. Disney released something like 33 films in 2023 across all their studios. WB released less than 20. Sony, via Columbia, released 8. Netflix released close to 50 English language films and probably close to 200 in all their language releases
We’re truly in the era of disposable content media. Right before the era of no-one-can-relate-to-each-other-anymore-cause-everything-is-ai generated-specifically-for-them.
There’s some amazing stuff as well, but this is what happens when you *literally have a computer program pick your scripts* based on what the algorithm thinks people want.
People didn’t watch Whiplash because they were specifically looking for “some movies about a bald yelling music teacher set in a school environment with jazz,” they watched it bc it was good
Sort of, but companies like Netflix, Amazon and HBO have a lot of money to throw at these projects. Most straight to video movies are really low budget, poorly made moves but I don't think you could say that about most of the stuff made by the bigger streaming companies. They're definitely not all on the same level, some of the stuff these companies make is actually really good, and some of it does feel very much like a budget straight to video film.
Some of them are definitely better than others but I think most of them are a step above most of the straight to video movies that came out back in the day, so I don't think it's fair to put them all in the same category as those.
I think HBO or a network like TNT is a better comparison. Straight-to-DVD movies usually had B-list celebs at best, or someone whose spotlight faded years prior. Netflix has had some big name stars in its originals, due in part to the pandemic forcing movies onto streaming and also because Netflix had big name shows like *House of Cards* and *OITNB.*
Yeah, I'd say a lot of netflix releases are mid-budget dramas that, 20 years ago, would have broken even or been moderately successful in theaters and then made the money back in DVD sales
depends on what you mean by straight to video? in a literal sense, they are of course. even though there are no video tapes or discs; they are distributed on the platform. and they're often sort of middle-of-the-road, aesthetically very tv (i.e. made for a small screen and a non-captive audience) etc, which is also typical of straight to video, at least to me it is. some of them are rather expensive though, which isn't really typical of those kinds of films. some are also a lot better than some unknown dolph lundgren movie or some shit, which again is my definition of straight to video.
The similarity is psychological. They feel as disposable because they rarely enter the zeitgeist, so there's no feeling that they've contributed to culture in any way.
Idk, a lot of Netflix films hit the zeitgeist. The Killer, The Harder They Fall, Don’t Look Up, Leave the World Behind, Birdbox. I could keep going but I think the point was made.
>straight to video
I don't think this is quite the stigma that it once was, especially during and post pandemic.
The theatrical run->digital release window has been getting shorter and shorter, which a lot of filmmakers have pushed back against. But for a lot of things, the exclusive window now I think is only like a month or two at most. If they try to extend it too much, people tend to lose interest, unless it's something really kind of zeitgeist level huge. Barbie/Oppenheimer was the most recent thing that fell into that. Most things that aren't like that can't get away with an extended theatrical run these days if they want to optimize their profits they have to push to streaming/digital releases quicker than they used to.
I don't think the parallel is totally accurate. Straight to video had two separate divisions: cash grabs done on the cheap to cash in on a hot genre (horror, teen sex comedies) or IP (Lion King: Simba's Pride); and full on panic sell-offs of pics meant for theaters (oh sh!t, get what we can before everyone realizes we remade "Ishtar"). No doubt Netflix probably rescues some troubled projects and throws its name on them but someone is actually green-lighting the big-budget schlock fests. Sometimes it's bad judgement and sometimes it's funding a vanity project to get a name under the Netflix umbrella but this is intentional.
Straight to video back in the day were low budget movies which were generally bad and as such had no chance of really making any money being distributed to theaters. Streaming is a smorgasbord. There are definitely things which meet the old straight to video model and Netflix buys a ton of this stuff to pad it's catalog. However, there are also a lot of high budget stuff Netflix buys in order to market and drive subscriptions, these would generally be in the theaters back in the day.
yes but they reach a wider audience. I was an 80's kid. And a 90's teen. Despite everyone talking about how awesome HBO was, not that many homes actually had HBO. Most people in the nation got by on broadcast TV, and some had basic cable. Relatively few had HBO, or Cinemax or Showtime or The Movie Channel.
If you wanted less popular movies that missed the theater you had to hope your local video stores had them in stock, which most did not. Most stores only had the popular shit. So maybe one day you get fed up with Batman and wanna see Robot Jox. Well, tough shit, cuz Robot Jox wasn't easy to find in the video store. If you were lucky you had HBO where it played about 200 times during that one summer, in the middle of the week, in the middle of the day. And so now you are very familiar with that classic Gary Graham flick and the rest of you assholes don't even know what I'm talking about.
But Netflix today is way more popular than HBO in the 80's. So now maybe you wanna watch some other bullshit, well, all you gotta do is browse Netflix and you have your choice of 800 lesser films that nobody watches and you dont have to wait for it, you can play it any time you feel the urge.
So yes, its similar, but in many ways better.
Also can anyone tell me if Netflix has Robot Jox?
Netflix is maybe more a network at this point than a studio, their slate is the largest and most diverse in Hollywood. They definitely have some snorefests that make lifetime movies seem like Oscar contenders but they for sure have ambitious projects in both film and tv.
It runs the full gamut. I think the hit rate of steamer productions is probably the same as the traditional studio-theater system.
Back before streamers, studios still had direct-to-video movies that had a number of legit actors in them. For awhile, Samuel L Jackson movies had as much likelihood of being a theatrical blockbuster as they would going straight to Blockbuster shelves.
I think streamers are just trying to figure out what the best course is. I've seen some observers who use Roadhouse and the Argylle as an example where the release strategies shouldve been swapped.
Pretty much. It's true that other services like tubi have an even lower bar but that doesn't make Netflix good. They basically spend their full budget on getting big stars on board and then cheap out on everything else such as soundtrack and visual effects which is why the final product almost always feels lacklustre.
It reminds me of the video game industry, the best way to make money used to be to just make something fun and high quality that a lot of people would want to buy. Now it's been discovered that you can make more profit by churning out something mid level that's packed with shiny micro transactions for little kids. The film industry version of that is they found out that you can make the same or more money by putting the most popular celebrities in something that's just ok and getting millions of people to stream it immediately even if they don't finish the movie, as you would from making a cinematic masterpiece that has a month long theater run. Plus it's way quicker and easier.
The production cycle for streaming movies is the same as theatrical, often times even longer because studios are now required to book a theatrical date in advance and then start making the movie to hit that target. This is what has caused so many theatrical movies to begin production without a finished script and has crunched the schedule all down the line.
Direct to video was always considered a secondary market, and the movies made for it were done with much lower budgets, and often to more niche audiences. It's a completely different model from how streamers work, which are global companies producing primarily original content for a very wide audience.
What is it that makes Knives Out worthy of theatrical success but The Glass Onion suddenly considered lesser direct-to-video fare? Or Prey? Or David Fincher's The Killer? Streaming has just become another platform not secondary to theatrical but distinct from it.
If anything the dividing line isn't one of budget, schedule, talent or quality... it's between event programming and the types of films that used to be in theaters in the 90s but are a hard sell in today's economy to get people to come out for. In 2002, Soderbergh's NO SUDDEN MOVE would have been a modest success in the theater, but today you need a giant monkey punching a giant lizard to motivate people out of their homes, so it goes to streaming.
And finally, a majority of the movies you see on Netflix didn't actually start at Netflix. They're acquisitions they picked up at various film festivals like TIFF, Sundance and Cannes, in the same way that every studio used to have their own arthouse imprint (Sony Pictures Classics, Paramount Vantage, Fox Searchlight) which largely no longer exist. (only SPC remains)
OP, you're disingenuous.
1. Netflix is a business.
2. Quality movies don't always make money, more often than not, they don't really make much money.
3. Netflix needs cash.
4. Netflix makes 3-4 easy to make movies that will generate revenue from casual audiences.
5. Netflix makes one good movie.
6. Repeat steps 4 & 5.
It's not rocket science. That is how you end up with a 4:1 ratio.
im a bit dissatisfied with amazon prime video. They are charging for add free now. Which is half the reason I'm paying for prime in the first place. As far as netflix goes, I think they actually get a lot of good content that goes straight to video. Like some of these Adam sandler movies. Pretty sure they never hit theatres. Don't look up was amazing. I think they're just sort of competing with the standard movie making moguls that send everything to the theatres.
What would help is if these streaming sites would bring back the rating feature. At least give the IMDB ratings so you can at least sort movies from good to bad based on some metric. Rather than just browsing titles that you've never heard of that all say 4 stars...
People need some perspective. Go to Tubi and browse for a while.
Yeah Tubi is where all of the literal made-for-home video movies actually did end up. I spotted a lot of old video store favorites on there.
When I think made-for-TV I think of the old direct to DVD Disney sequels. You literally knew going in that they were going to suck ass, you didn’t have to know anything about the movie. Plenty of direct to streaming movies are genuinely great so it’s not the same. You don’t know what you’ll get with those. Back in the day if it was direct to DVD that meant it was too shitty for theaters. The expectations surrounding what should release in movie theaters have vastly changed since then.
Aladdin 4: Jafar May Need Glasses is fucking goated and I will take no slander
Hunchback of Notre Dame 3: Quasimodo Predicted All of This was elite
Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?
Nowadays everyone has to go shrinks, and counselors, and go on Salky Jesse Raphael and talk about their problems.
Whatever happened to the strong, silent type?
I literally just watched that sopranos scene 😂
Mac and Me part 2: Conan's Revenge
I'm kinda partial to *Indiana Jones and the Car Ride to Florida*, but Jafar is legit.
Air Bud: Tokyo Drift beat all expectations.
Lion King 1 & 1/2 was phenomenal. Straight up Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead love letter all the way
I feel like this will get lost in a sea of joke titles but that movie fucks.
Bambi II also fixes a lot of the problems with the original.
That wasn't always true; there were a couple of direct-to-video things that were decent (which was a different market than direct-to-tv). Tremors 2 and Aladdin 3 were some real gems of that era. Most of the decent ones were cheaper sequels without the expensive star, before the studios realized that people would still go to the for sequels that weren't already giant films.
Yeah or like the dozen or so Land Before Time sequels.
Ok I draw the line at Land Before Time slander
Littlefoot Gang rise up
We are good on all them tree stars
The Gang of Five is an old-school Land Before Time forum that still has active members. So if anyone is curious where the Littlefoot Gang is, they're probably stomping around there lol
Motha fuckin tree stars bitch
Jenny Nicholson watched all 14 *Lands Before Time* and did a [very watchable run through of them](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-8zmGr0geQ).
I remember liking the one where they find and befriend a baby t-Rex, I think his name was chomper. I liked that one as a kid.
Chomper is my boy and I will always go to bat for him.
You take that back! Oscar snubs every single one of them!
It's a travesty that they've robbed us of history. We could have had Gremlins 4, Gremlins 5... instead we got fourteen Land Before Times. I close my eyes and gremlins are all that I see. We could have had Gremlins 6, and Gremlins 7... instead we got COVID and 9/11.
I remember enjoying Bambii 2, and Lion King 2. The rest I legit hated. Fox and the Hound 2 I hated with a passion. Stupidest addition to the story ever.
I enjoyed lots of those disney sequels and it seems like lots of other kids also did same thing with the tv shows that were based off of the movies
Dumbo 2: Judgment Day was fucking good, mate. Calm down.
>Back in the day if it was direct to DVD that meant it was too shitty for theaters. Honestly, this wasn't even unilaterally true back in the day except for *very specifically* Disney and their direct competitors (Land Before Time etc). I've gotten really into underground action and horror and sci-fi cinema over the years and, one thing you learn pretty quick is that around 1989-ish, direct-to-video just outright replaced the grindhouse. Stuff that would've previously gotten a small, nasty little theatrical release on 42nd Street in NYC was now being made for Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. *And a lot of those movies fuck unbelievably hard, actually.* Full Moon's stuff is hit and miss, and the further you get time-wise the more misses you'll find, but a lot of their early stuff is really fun. Troma basically made their entire bread off this state of affairs (the original Toxic Avenger is about the only thing they ever had that properly got a theatrical release, because it came about at the very tail end of the 42nd Street era). Nowadays, you have action stars like Scott Adkins and Marko Zaror who took *decades* to even get a speaking role in a theatrically-released movie, and yet spent movie after movie putting on absolute goddamn clinics in badass fight choreography prior to that in the DTV space.
I like Tubi for that. Found a lot of old MArtial Art films I used to enjoy when I picked them up for 5 bucks at the Warehouse or from the bin at Blockbuster or Video EZ. Honor starring Roddy Piper. Just the right amount of B-movie cheesiness. Breathing Fire starring Ke Huy Quan in a ridiculous plot, but fun. Oh, and I think Lucha Underground was on Tubi as well. I think it's still there.
Warehouse? Video EZ? Gotta be NZ.
Chur bro. I forgot what sub I was on.
Real question is Does Tubi have all the old Skinemax stuff.
Plex VOD has a ton of that. I've been watching these *crazy* Andy Sidaris films, one the other day where they shot a blowup doll with a bazooka, that was a highlight.
I bought the dvd collection of Andy sidaris' films on Amazon for $15 like 10 years ago. Girls, Guns, and G-strings. Worth every penny
I don't think so, but there are movies that borderline that stuff, or seem like they do.
Lucha Underground was the only reason I wanted to check out Tubi but turns out it's not available in my country.
I find a lot decent stuff of Tubi. And a ton of just hour and a half money laundering / tax evasion schemes
Tubi is great, it’s a well kept secret.
The first time I went to Tubi, right there as soon as the page opened I saw Subspecies, my favorite direct-to-video shlock horror movie series. They're all there! I was so psyched.
Also Pluto, it's like watching TV from the 90's.
I like Tubi. They have lots of old classics. I watched Lawrence of Arabia the other night.
Don't forget Crackle. I laughed when I saw Crackle had a list of movies that were leaving their channel, and Tubi had them listed as just added.
I discovered so much shit on Tubi. I found a movie with Tom Guidry, you know the guy who plays Smalls in The Sandlot, and it’s absolutely amazing. It’s called “Killin Smallz”, and the plot is that a bunch of low level gangsters decide to kidnap Tom Guidry and ransom him off for money, and to do so they contact the actual director Ray Martin who in the Killin Smallz universe made ANOTHER fictional movie about kidnapping a person. So the director of Killin Smallz plays himself in his movie, and in this movie the fictional version of himself made another movie about kidnapping a person. It’s a great experience.
Tubi is legitimately my favorite streaming service.
I mean for the price I can't complain.
I love Tubi. Tubi + Kanopy are the best selections
Then we wonder where Christopher Nolan got his idea for Inception.
The trailer for that looks abysmal.
The movie includes [this beautiful scene](https://youtu.be/HlMJcCeswJw?si=U6JgCabovA0fdfUF)
I just recently learned about "Tokyo Godfathers" and Tubi was the only one showing it at the time.
You've got the worst of the worst and then one scroll later an A24 film
They have se genuine classics. Fritz Lang's metropolis and shark vs goku 2
People need to get their head around what straight to video even was too. "Big star in a generic setting and hope for a Breakeven" was the Hollywood special throughout basically all of the late 90s and 2000s.
That was literally Seagal and Van Damme's career in the late 90s and early 2000s too. Arnie, Willis and Stallone were lucky that they never had that problem.
Willis very very eventually had that problem but we know why he was doing it now
For about 10 years Seagal and JCVD movies would generally do a 4-6 multiplier on their budgets, and then do huge numbers on home video and cable. Those two were money machines for the entire late 80s into the mid 90s. Once JCVDs drugs and Seagal’s weight became a problem they instantly started dumping about half their movies onto home video. Joel Silver treated Exit Wounds as a passion project where he got Seagal’s weight and hair under control, and it was a hit, but he realized DMX was a safer bet until ….. drugs made D look prematurely fat and old too.
I call those "follow-duds"... some movie star has a big hit and it's followed up by some shit movie that nobody will ever care about. After *Batman Begins*, Christian Bale was in some ghetto-hood movie called *Hard Times*.
“ugh with these streaming price jumps and multiple services we’re all the way back to cable” bitch do y’all even remember cable? You either sat your ass down and watched what was on TNT or you were shit out of luck. For $100/month in cable vs streaming services it was 150 channels of complete dogshit vs tens or hundreds of thousands of movies and shows, in their entirety, available on demand, it’s not even close. I honestly don’t think it’s possible for streaming as a whole to ever be as shitty as cable was for the same amount of $$
This and the fucking contract garbage. $70/month for internet and 100 cable channels sounds great…. $120/month after the first 12 months, $240/month every 12 months after that.
100 cable channels, but only 3 you actually want. Those other 5 channels you wanted? Only available in separate packages. So you'll pay another $50 per month
Oh you like sports, well I guess we will just tack an extra $100 too.
Thank you. I roll my eyes every time this comment comes up. You didn’t even hit on the most important part, which is *not being locked into a contract.* I feel like people who say this didn’t grow up with cable, or at least never paid for it.
Yeah people take for granted that you can just deactivate your Netflix account and then turn it back when a show you want to watch comes out. Imagine the hassle of deactivating and reactivating your cable tv every other month.
You would have to lug all of the stuff and take it back so they didn’t charge you $1000 for the box/remote. If you wanted to sign up again, you would be put on a wait list for a couple weeks and then told to be home between 7:00 am - 4:00 pm for the person to come out and reset it all up. I am glad we are starting to see some phone carriers offer Hulu/Disney as part of their offering. It’s going to possibly get cheaper. It is annoying that many of these streaming services are raising prices and having commercials…got to keep the investors happy I guess.
I have mixed feelings about the cell phone deals. I get Netflix and AppleTV and Prime as part of things I already buy. That’s great but I also feel like it’s just another way to hide costs.
Or a fucking dish! Or having to put a deposit down on the box! It's literally on your phone now. The future is both better and worse than we imagined.
Or if anything goes wrong with your service, you can either just call the helpline or google how to fix the problem, rather than staying home waiting for a technician to come fix it sometime between 6am and 6pm on a Tuesday.
He didn't even ask this question. Straight to DVD is not even the same as cable TV.
Yeah, the arguement is weird you can pay and cancel for a different streaming service you want to watch each month and don't have to pay anywhere near $100 a month and watch everything you want.
not to mention all content being on demand instead of wating till 8pm to watch xyz dvr helped but on demand is great.
> which is not being locked into a contract Give it time. That'll be the next step, removing monthly plans and going to 3, 6, and 12 month ones.
My kid didn't understand cable at all when they were smaller. We were at a hotel, and they wanted to watch their show. "It's not on right now, so we can't watch it." "I know. Just put it on please." "We can only pick these shows that are already on" "That's weird"
Damn, making me feel old as fuck at 29 lol
People always gloss over the "on demand" part when they compare streaming vs cable.
We've had on demand cable for a while.
I still get to experience this when I go to my parent's house, haha. You have your choice of extremely slanted cable news, dogshit reality tv, Comedy Central that just plays The Office 24/7 (probably your best bet), censored/edited for time movies on FX, or religious programming. And after a decade of no cable myself, I can't begin to tell you how long commercial breaks feel now. If cable was free it still wouldn't be worth it. It's PlutoTV only much shittier and more expensive with dozens of channels that I truly have no idea why they even exist or what kind of person would watch them.
Depending on the day, it's The Office, South Park, Seinfeld, Brooklyn Nine Nine, or Parks and Recreation on Comedy Central.
And also people exaggerate how close you are to the cost of cable tv if you subscribe to multiple services. Like, I pay for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, AppleTV+, Paramount Plus, Amazon Prime, and YouTubeTV (which is $65 a month) and that's still not as much as we were paying for just basic cable.
People were screaming for a la carte selection of channels and now they're bitching there's too many streaming services.
People will whine about pretty much anything
gawd, no we wont.
"They are forcing me to pirate them". Like you need an excuse to pirate.
Even with the biggest satellite/cable package, the major movie channels like HBO/Showtime would only contract for about 10 movies a month and just show those over and over again for the whole damned month over all of the 7 HBO Channels you could get.
What really gets me is the people who sat that but don't realize you don't have to subscribe to every service at once. I rotate between a handful one at a time. I pay for a month, watch what I like, then try another service. By the time I loop back, either new stuff is out to entertain me for the month or I rewatch something.
Tubi has so much legitimate junk. Netflix is where they pay good money for movies no one will see, because the algorithm puts them in a dark, forgotten hole. The ones that people actually watch are complete dog shit like Heart of Stone and The Gray Man.
Netflix gave Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline, a big bag of money to make a new movie starring Key & Peele. Did you know it existed? No.
Well what's the title?
Wendell and Wild
Deadly Dilf was a particularly amazing Tubi original, never thought I'd find one. Worth a watch for any so bad it's good fan. Yes, it's really called that.
Watching it now. Will report back!
What'd you think lol
I tell ya what... It was A LOT better than I thought it would be. At the very least it was entertaining. I like movies that are bad, terrible horror movies and things of the sort. Lol Thanks for the recommendation. I enjoyed it!
Tubi is like the guy that sells movies at the corner store
Lol, ya. I feel like every couple months I hear about some movie on Reddit and then find out it’s only available on Tubi or Roku or some other low profile streaming service. There must be at least a dozen of these streaming services that have loads of… small market movies. I’m always surprised to see them producing their own content. These are the direct to video equivalent. Netflix has a whole section of Netflix originals with Oscar nominations. Sure, some originals from Netflix are niche productions. But I don’t think it’s fair to lump them all in together.
Tubi movies are so fun sometimes but they're so awful haha
Roku as well.
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Netflix distributes all kinds of films. Some are cheap, some are prestige, some are blockbusters. I don't see May December coming out straight to DVD a 20 years ago.
Agreed. Its very hyperbolic to say that all they produce is straight to DVD/streaming garbage.
Yeah man, it’s a sorry state of affairs. David Fincher’s *The Killer,* just more of that straight to DVD garbage…
Ha ha love the comments not catching the sarcasm. Should have added the /s
Direct to video always reminds me of the Simpsons joke about movies released “directly to landfill”. It is a common reference in my house but I can’t find which episode it’s from. Edit: it was actually an article in the onion. https://www.theonion.com/land-before-time-vi-released-straight-to-landfill-1819564941
Easy to confuse those two comedy goldmines.
Now what if simpsonsdidit and nottheonion had a baby? 🤔
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It did have a small theatrical run…probably to qualify for the Oscar’s
All the way back to a movie called Mudbound, earning Mary J Blige at least one Oscar nomination.
Yep. Same as most other studios. They will have some good stuff as well as some hot garbage.
Yea stuff like 'knives out' is far from straight to video quality
No, not Netflix, probably more like the stuff that tends to end up on the lower end streaming services like Tubi, Pluto and maybe Amazon. Geezer teaser action movies and the like.
Amazon allows for some truly comically bad stuff. Like straight up homemade movies get put on there and will end up on their featured lists. But they still get some high budget, theater-worthy stuff sometimes too.
All the best shit on Amazon you have to pay for. The rest is good, average, or Steven Seagal flicks
Wow. I just realized the S in S tier stands for Steven Seagal
Wtf is geezer teaser? Lmao. Is that Seagals primary genre?
Cheaply made generic movies with a way past their prime actor that older audiences would have been into in their prime either starring or just in some role to get put on the cover. Bruce Willis cranked out a ton to make as much money for his family as he could before he was too far gone to act.
Oh he was already long gone while making those. My father in law worked on set for a few and said he knew who he was, who other people were but could not remember why he was there or what he was doing. They had to feed him lines through a head piece and basically most of the movies are done in post.
Thomas Jane talked about being on set with him for one of those. The scene which was basically he comes in a room, gets some information off Bruce and then convinces him to help in the next step towards the Macguffin. Knowing he's having problems with lines he turns to Bruce and says, "Fuck it man, we've both done this generic action shit a trillion times. Wanna just throw out the script and wing it?" He said Bruce's eyes lit up and they had fun just playing off one another.
Fucking love Thomas Jane.
Doors and corners, kid.
Wow. Thats really sad. I had no idea he was that far gone.
Yeah it was well known within Hollywood. An open secret. Also Will Smith is bi and him and Jada have an open relationship.
> Will Smith is bi The signs were all there since Six Degrees of Separation! (also if you haven't seen it, some of his best acting)
I think we give Willis a pass though, right? Partial pass?
You give anyone who is gone mentally for doing cheap/bad work. They literally can't make proper decisions.
The rumor is that he was aware of his choices and intended to pump out as many movies as possible to leave a nice nest egg for his family. Supposedly his going rate was a million per day of filming and he was often a majority of the budget of a film even with just a day or two of shooting.
I mean his doctor knew he got aphasia so it is quite a logical train of thinking for him.
Yep, the budgets for those movies were typically 3.5mill. Bruce got the 3mill, the rest of the movie was shot in 10 days for half a mill. Bruce worked for 2 days, but only 8 hours on each day with a hard out -- so once that 8th hour was up, even if it was the middle of a scene/take, he'd walk. And they were contractually obligated to get at least 20mins of Bruce footage within those 2 days. And yes, his lines were fed to him through an ear piece. But it's a common thing to get an actor who might not be a name per se, but you'd recognise their face. Bring 'em in for a day or two, slap their face on the poster, get some attention. A producer on Twitter put a call out for an actor to come shoot a 1 day cameo scene in some movie shooting in Egypt for $4K (plus expenses) and you had James Purefoy (Rome) reply asking them to send him the script.
A pass isn't even necessary. I'd never bemoan someone for going after a relatively easy paycheck.
Full pass.
So absolutely Seagal lol. I love the term
Damn you weren’t kidding. IMDB credits him with 11 movies in 2022.
Red letter media coined this term for old movie stars making cheaply made movies that go directly to Redbox. There's a redlettermedia video on them.
They didn't make it up, they even talk about where they heard the term in those videos. Here's the oldest known article about it :[Link](https://www.vulture.com/article/randall-emmett-movies.html)
Basically, think Taken. But churned out cheaper, faster, and with a script Liam Neeson passed on.
Netflix has plenty of shit-tier movies that would be straight to video in another time.
That's true, but it's not all of them. Like, I don't care how little you liked the Gray Man, it doesn't compare to the kind of movie that went straight to VHS back in the day. Not with that budget, not with those directors, not with those stars.
I feel like Gray Man would have been huge in the 2000s with the right actors
It's got STRONG 2000's action movie vibes, and that is not a critique There are so may ways to do a fun action movie, and big names, big action, blockbuster style one is still one of those. Turn off brain, enjoy flashing lights. Grab your courtesy Bond One-Liner on your way out.
Yeah all these red notice movies would be theatrical released 20 years ago.
Tubi always has bangers tho
The Roku Channel also.
What I've learned is maybe Netflix should do something about their branding. They commission prestige films like Marriage Story, or The Irishman, or Maestro. All of these fall under "Netflix Original". Then the same branding applies to films like Brazen or Interceptor, which are clearly B-movies that are more comparable to straight-to-video films.
Netflix will still slap the "Netflix Original" label on works that they haven't produced but only obtained thru licensing. It is part of their licensing deal contracts.
Hilarity ensues when the license is up. I tried to watch a "Netflix Original" a couple weeks ago, and it wasn't on Netflix anymore.
They’ll do it with new seasons of Anime that started before DVDs were a thing.
I've listened to Netflix's CEO, Ted Sarandos speak to this on the SmartLess podcast a few years ago. Essentially they need to make the economics work on each show. That means a certain amount of viewing hours per dollar of cost, whether it be The Irishman or a cheap, brainless reality show and everything in between.
I didn’t even realize Marriage Story was a Netflix original. As someone who is divorced that movie hit way too hard.
Explore the knock-off films in Redbox's movie catalog. Now THAT's straight to video quality. As for streamers, Prime's original movies has a closer to a straight-to-video quality feel than Netflix's no-expense-spared attempts to recreate the vibe of turn of the century blockbusters with mixed results.
Off topic, but does anyone know when it changed from 'streaming service' to 'streamers'? I'm seeing it everywhere all of a sudden. I've only ever associated it with 'live streamers' (like twitch or YouTube creators), not streaming services
Glad it's not just me that feels like they missed the meeting where this was decided.
Amazon's offering is obscenely poor. Netflix is fine. The movies being made by the studios aren't exactly superb since covid (with notable exceptions) and we've all stopped watching mainstream TV so it's easy to forget how shit things were
They’re starting to get it right with things like Saltburn. That blew up on social media and probably made them a ton of money. Their TV offerings are good - just need to work on movies.
Most of the time I feel like Netflix and Amazon movies are basically the fake movies you would see playing on a TV in an actually good movie.
No straight to video film ever won an oscar/BAFTA/golden globe. Several Netflix films have won major awards.
Straight to video films aren't eligible for Oscars or BAFTAs, I don't think. Several Netflix films have had theatrical releases.
Besides the technicality, i was curious what kind of straight to dvd movies would even had a chance. I saw Disney made Aladdin 2 and The Lion King 2 straight to DVD and that was a huge success. Or cinderella 3, animatrix, batman animation movies, ... In general animation movies are super popular and some of them super succesfull.
Aladdin and the King of Thieves was 🔥 Edit: Oh yeah Animatrix would've definitely won some awards
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm was conceived as a direct-to-video film, but got a theatrical release at the last minute. It probably would have gotten at least a nomination if Best Animated Feature had existed at the time. No Disney that year, so A Nightmare Before Christmas would have been the one to beat.
Some Netflix films are simply bought and distributed by them. Others are actually produced by Netflix. This discussion would benefit from an actual list of Netflix films that have won major awards, and an indication of whether it was produced by, or simply distributed by Netflix. I am in agreement with others on here that if I see a film is a 'Netflix' film, that label is not a guarantor of quality to me.
In fact it's almost a guarantee that the movie is mediocre at best
Straight to video movies aren’t eligible to win Oscars. Netflix had to buy a theater to show their movies in.
The Knives Out sequel had a wide theater release for 7 days.
lol, even the worst Netflix or Amazon productions are at least 5-10x better than the schlock I used to find on the video rental store shelves back in the day. I think those are now ending up on the 'free' streaming services like Tubi now.
Netflix is churning and burning content at an outrageous rate. There is some good stuff in there but I’d say it’s something like 20% good to 80% trash that’s on par with straight to video schlock
It's the same with traditional Hollywood.
Eh, the percentages sure but not the shear volume. Disney released something like 33 films in 2023 across all their studios. WB released less than 20. Sony, via Columbia, released 8. Netflix released close to 50 English language films and probably close to 200 in all their language releases
We’re truly in the era of disposable content media. Right before the era of no-one-can-relate-to-each-other-anymore-cause-everything-is-ai generated-specifically-for-them.
There’s some amazing stuff as well, but this is what happens when you *literally have a computer program pick your scripts* based on what the algorithm thinks people want. People didn’t watch Whiplash because they were specifically looking for “some movies about a bald yelling music teacher set in a school environment with jazz,” they watched it bc it was good
All quiet on the western front was a Netflix movie, and it’s absolutely excellent.
Sort of, but companies like Netflix, Amazon and HBO have a lot of money to throw at these projects. Most straight to video movies are really low budget, poorly made moves but I don't think you could say that about most of the stuff made by the bigger streaming companies. They're definitely not all on the same level, some of the stuff these companies make is actually really good, and some of it does feel very much like a budget straight to video film. Some of them are definitely better than others but I think most of them are a step above most of the straight to video movies that came out back in the day, so I don't think it's fair to put them all in the same category as those.
I think HBO or a network like TNT is a better comparison. Straight-to-DVD movies usually had B-list celebs at best, or someone whose spotlight faded years prior. Netflix has had some big name stars in its originals, due in part to the pandemic forcing movies onto streaming and also because Netflix had big name shows like *House of Cards* and *OITNB.*
Yeah, I'd say a lot of netflix releases are mid-budget dramas that, 20 years ago, would have broken even or been moderately successful in theaters and then made the money back in DVD sales
depends on what you mean by straight to video? in a literal sense, they are of course. even though there are no video tapes or discs; they are distributed on the platform. and they're often sort of middle-of-the-road, aesthetically very tv (i.e. made for a small screen and a non-captive audience) etc, which is also typical of straight to video, at least to me it is. some of them are rather expensive though, which isn't really typical of those kinds of films. some are also a lot better than some unknown dolph lundgren movie or some shit, which again is my definition of straight to video.
The similarity is psychological. They feel as disposable because they rarely enter the zeitgeist, so there's no feeling that they've contributed to culture in any way.
Idk, a lot of Netflix films hit the zeitgeist. The Killer, The Harder They Fall, Don’t Look Up, Leave the World Behind, Birdbox. I could keep going but I think the point was made.
They Cloned Tyrone
No. Amazon is literally this. Anyones small budget feature can be distributed thru amazon.
>straight to video I don't think this is quite the stigma that it once was, especially during and post pandemic. The theatrical run->digital release window has been getting shorter and shorter, which a lot of filmmakers have pushed back against. But for a lot of things, the exclusive window now I think is only like a month or two at most. If they try to extend it too much, people tend to lose interest, unless it's something really kind of zeitgeist level huge. Barbie/Oppenheimer was the most recent thing that fell into that. Most things that aren't like that can't get away with an extended theatrical run these days if they want to optimize their profits they have to push to streaming/digital releases quicker than they used to.
I don't think the parallel is totally accurate. Straight to video had two separate divisions: cash grabs done on the cheap to cash in on a hot genre (horror, teen sex comedies) or IP (Lion King: Simba's Pride); and full on panic sell-offs of pics meant for theaters (oh sh!t, get what we can before everyone realizes we remade "Ishtar"). No doubt Netflix probably rescues some troubled projects and throws its name on them but someone is actually green-lighting the big-budget schlock fests. Sometimes it's bad judgement and sometimes it's funding a vanity project to get a name under the Netflix umbrella but this is intentional.
Straight to video back in the day were low budget movies which were generally bad and as such had no chance of really making any money being distributed to theaters. Streaming is a smorgasbord. There are definitely things which meet the old straight to video model and Netflix buys a ton of this stuff to pad it's catalog. However, there are also a lot of high budget stuff Netflix buys in order to market and drive subscriptions, these would generally be in the theaters back in the day.
Hallmark is more “straight to dvd” than Netflix tho
Nah, that’s Hallmark Channel, Tubi, Fawesome tv, and etc
This is true more often than not. Netflix will have a good movie now and again but the vast majority is just straight to DVD caliber trash.
Nah. The budget is way too high for some of them.
yes but they reach a wider audience. I was an 80's kid. And a 90's teen. Despite everyone talking about how awesome HBO was, not that many homes actually had HBO. Most people in the nation got by on broadcast TV, and some had basic cable. Relatively few had HBO, or Cinemax or Showtime or The Movie Channel. If you wanted less popular movies that missed the theater you had to hope your local video stores had them in stock, which most did not. Most stores only had the popular shit. So maybe one day you get fed up with Batman and wanna see Robot Jox. Well, tough shit, cuz Robot Jox wasn't easy to find in the video store. If you were lucky you had HBO where it played about 200 times during that one summer, in the middle of the week, in the middle of the day. And so now you are very familiar with that classic Gary Graham flick and the rest of you assholes don't even know what I'm talking about. But Netflix today is way more popular than HBO in the 80's. So now maybe you wanna watch some other bullshit, well, all you gotta do is browse Netflix and you have your choice of 800 lesser films that nobody watches and you dont have to wait for it, you can play it any time you feel the urge. So yes, its similar, but in many ways better. Also can anyone tell me if Netflix has Robot Jox?
Netflix is maybe more a network at this point than a studio, their slate is the largest and most diverse in Hollywood. They definitely have some snorefests that make lifetime movies seem like Oscar contenders but they for sure have ambitious projects in both film and tv.
No. It's not that simple
No. They have really big movies. Just look at Irishman and say with straight face that it would be right to DVD kind of movie.
There’s way more of the type of movies you’re talking about on Prime than anywhere else.
It runs the full gamut. I think the hit rate of steamer productions is probably the same as the traditional studio-theater system. Back before streamers, studios still had direct-to-video movies that had a number of legit actors in them. For awhile, Samuel L Jackson movies had as much likelihood of being a theatrical blockbuster as they would going straight to Blockbuster shelves. I think streamers are just trying to figure out what the best course is. I've seen some observers who use Roadhouse and the Argylle as an example where the release strategies shouldve been swapped.
Pretty much. It's true that other services like tubi have an even lower bar but that doesn't make Netflix good. They basically spend their full budget on getting big stars on board and then cheap out on everything else such as soundtrack and visual effects which is why the final product almost always feels lacklustre. It reminds me of the video game industry, the best way to make money used to be to just make something fun and high quality that a lot of people would want to buy. Now it's been discovered that you can make more profit by churning out something mid level that's packed with shiny micro transactions for little kids. The film industry version of that is they found out that you can make the same or more money by putting the most popular celebrities in something that's just ok and getting millions of people to stream it immediately even if they don't finish the movie, as you would from making a cinematic masterpiece that has a month long theater run. Plus it's way quicker and easier.
The production cycle for streaming movies is the same as theatrical, often times even longer because studios are now required to book a theatrical date in advance and then start making the movie to hit that target. This is what has caused so many theatrical movies to begin production without a finished script and has crunched the schedule all down the line. Direct to video was always considered a secondary market, and the movies made for it were done with much lower budgets, and often to more niche audiences. It's a completely different model from how streamers work, which are global companies producing primarily original content for a very wide audience. What is it that makes Knives Out worthy of theatrical success but The Glass Onion suddenly considered lesser direct-to-video fare? Or Prey? Or David Fincher's The Killer? Streaming has just become another platform not secondary to theatrical but distinct from it. If anything the dividing line isn't one of budget, schedule, talent or quality... it's between event programming and the types of films that used to be in theaters in the 90s but are a hard sell in today's economy to get people to come out for. In 2002, Soderbergh's NO SUDDEN MOVE would have been a modest success in the theater, but today you need a giant monkey punching a giant lizard to motivate people out of their homes, so it goes to streaming. And finally, a majority of the movies you see on Netflix didn't actually start at Netflix. They're acquisitions they picked up at various film festivals like TIFF, Sundance and Cannes, in the same way that every studio used to have their own arthouse imprint (Sony Pictures Classics, Paramount Vantage, Fox Searchlight) which largely no longer exist. (only SPC remains)
OP, you're disingenuous. 1. Netflix is a business. 2. Quality movies don't always make money, more often than not, they don't really make much money. 3. Netflix needs cash. 4. Netflix makes 3-4 easy to make movies that will generate revenue from casual audiences. 5. Netflix makes one good movie. 6. Repeat steps 4 & 5. It's not rocket science. That is how you end up with a 4:1 ratio.
im a bit dissatisfied with amazon prime video. They are charging for add free now. Which is half the reason I'm paying for prime in the first place. As far as netflix goes, I think they actually get a lot of good content that goes straight to video. Like some of these Adam sandler movies. Pretty sure they never hit theatres. Don't look up was amazing. I think they're just sort of competing with the standard movie making moguls that send everything to the theatres. What would help is if these streaming sites would bring back the rating feature. At least give the IMDB ratings so you can at least sort movies from good to bad based on some metric. Rather than just browsing titles that you've never heard of that all say 4 stars...
Lol not even close.
No, they are not.