![Oscar nominee, Quentin Tarantino arrives on the red carpet of The 92nd Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, CA on Sunday, February 9, 2020.](https://solzyatthemovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/92_AR_0476-scaled.jpg)
Oscar-winning filmmaker Quentin Tarantino has opened up about how the business of Hollywood has changed since the end of 2019.
It’s no secret in saying that Hollywood has changed so much since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Numerous studios changed their release strategies in an effort to not just stay afloat but appeal directly to consumers. One of the most noticeable changes coming out of the pandemic is the exclusive theatrical window. What used to be no less than 90 days in theaters is now anywhere from 17 days to who knows when, depending on the film and studio. Some studios chose to send their films directly to streaming services, bypassing the theaters altogether. Suffice it to say, it makes for bad morale. Filmmakers are making films to be seen on the big screen, not to get lost somewhere in the algorithm.
Tarantino’s comments–by way of Variety–came in conversation during a panel with Elvis Mitchell at the Sundance Film Festival. He’s currently writing a play that could be come his last movie if it ends up being a “smash hit.”
“That’s a big f***ing deal pulling [a play] off, and I don’t know if I can. So here we go. That’s a challenge, a genuine challenge, but making movies? Well, what the f**k is a movie now? What — something that plays in theaters for a token release for four f***ing weeks? All right, and by the second week you can watch it on television. I didn’t get into all this for diminishing returns. I mean, it was bad enough in ’97. It was bad enough in 2019, and that was the last f***ing year of movies. That was a shit deal, as far as I was concerned, the fact that it’s gotten drastically worse? And that it’s just it’s a show pony exercise. Now the theatrical release, you know, and then like yeah, in two weeks, you can watch it on this [streamer] and that one. Okay. Theater? You can’t do that. It’s the final frontier.”
I don’t think Quentin is wrong about this. I think back to Glass Onion in 2022. A film that should have played for weeks in a movie theaters ended up playing for one week only. Netflix left so much money on the table because of this but they were mainly doing it to push the streaming service. If you do not see a film during its initial 7-day run, there is no guarantee that it’ll still be playing on the 8th day. Sadly, this message is not getting across, at least not to some of the audience out there. After the whole Warner Bros. announced their entire 2021 slate was going day-and-date, Christopher Nolan left his longtime home for Universal. Oppenheimer and Barbie made so much bank in revitalizing the box office but two films can only do so much.
We’ve already seen how some studios have regretted their big streaming push. Disney is one of them. This is a company with a huge catalog but their big strategy was to make as much new content from Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar as possible. The thing about this is that at some point, it’s going to cause franchise fatigue. They’ve scaled down a bit in their release schedule but what we’ve seen by now is that some shows are working better than others. For every Andor, you get shows that just don’t work in the right way.
It’s not an understatement to say that there is so much fracturing with streaming audiences these days. Not everyone has the same streaming services. Netflix is releasing new stuff every week but it is practically impossible to cover everything. But even then, the titles you think would get an audience…end up not making as much of a dent in traffic. Covering new releases doesn’t even guarantee readership when people are watching comfort television programming for the upteenth time. I get it–I frequently turn to Jurassic Park, Captain America, Indiana Jones, Dr. Strangelove, Blazing Saddles, and Airplane for comfort. I’m not sure what it says about me that both Jurassic Park and Dr. Strangelove are among the films I watch for comfort or trying to crack a depression. Bad Shabbos will join this list whenever the Daniel Robbins ensemble comedy arrives on home video.
In as much as the Hollywood box office is a current problem, there are other things to worry about. Covid slowed down the production side of things for live-action. But almost as soon as things started looking better, the writers and actors both went on strike. And now with the fires, rebuilding Los Angeles is going to probably take a priority over production and rightfully so. It won’t stop films from playing briefly in theaters before getting lost in the algorithm. Unfortunately, getting lost in the algorithm is here to say.
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