If Robert Zemeckis isn't too big for streaming, who is?

THE WITCHES and BORAT 2 really shake things up

It’s Friday, October 2! Let’s have a Free-For-All!

If you’ve been reading since we started this newsletter, you’ve heard me talk about how much I use Plex as a daily tool.

It’s confusing if you don’t get what it is. Plex itself is just an open-source app that you can install on pretty much any machine that plays media. What that app does is it allows you to play media that you have stored on a machine on any other machine you want. This is handy for me because I have Too Much Goddamn Media. It’s a lot. I have it for a reason. I need to have it to be able to do what I do. But it’s a lot.

I started making the migration from physical to digital around the time I started work on ‘80s All Over, and it’s been a real rollercoaster of a process. Part of the problem is that, because it’s not a big corporation behind the software, it all feels vaguely held together by band-aids. I love the app. I am less fond of the company. They do not make it easy to ask anyone for help, and considering the amount of labor it takes to not only set up a Plex server but keep one running, it seems insane to me that they don’t have a robust customer service department.

You have to buy a machine to run as a Plex server, and I’ve gone through about four or five different machines before finally landing on a TerraMaster NAS server. I set it up almost two years ago and it’s been running just fine since then. Three days ago, I woke up and the machine was in the middle of an automatic software update, and since then, everything’s been profoundly broken. It basically reset me to zero.

The first time this happened, it was upsetting. The second time, even worse. Like I said… I’ve been through a number of machines now. This time, it’s annoying, but it’s become part of the price of using software like this. I am happy 95% of the time and it’s incredibly convenient when it’s working, but when it’s not, it’s catastrophic.

It was one of those weeks where the punches just come fast and furious. Computer problems stink; car problems are even worse. I had to replace my brakes and my rotors all at once, never a fun thing. It’s the kind of stuff that eats away at time and attention and morale in a way that keeps you from productivity. It’s background noise, though, in the long run, and that’s easy to forget.

I think we’re all guilty these days of letting background noise keep us from the things that are important, and I’m working on finding the right amount of attention to give things. After all, there’s too much I’d like to get done. I’m about to send you guys a new issue of FOR CONTEXT, and I’m really happy with the first act of this new script I’m writing, and I’m on the hunt right now for a book agent to help me get the various books set up so I can push forward on those. Hopefully all of this energy can be well-spent and these annoyances can be pushed to the background, to the low-grade hum they should be.

It feels like there’s a lot of news right now, and one of the ways companies can surprise us and then stay in the conversation is by announcing something that’s only a few weeks away, something that’s not even on the radar yet. This morning’s announcement that Robert Zemeckis is heading straight to HBO Max with The Witches is a genuine shock. He is by far the highest-profile filmmaker to make this choice so far, and The Witches is an expensive movie to premiere this way.

Here’s the trailer from this morning:

I’m sure HBO Max will watch to see how many new subscriptions there are in the next few weeks, and I am not one to disparage the subscription model (hello again to those of you who just joined the paid ranks this week) at all. I love the subscription model. But it’s hard to be sure exactly why someone subscribes or unsubscribes at any given moment, even with all the data HBO is pulling down. One movie isn’t going to make or break them, and they aren’t doing this to turn The Witches into bait the way Disney+ is using The Mandalorian this month.

It is, however, an interesting signal they’re sending. The digital slate is heating up in the last few days, while the theatrical slate is drying up completely. The Witches was a theatrical release until this morning. There was no indication they were considering it as anything but a theatrical release. Right now, there are very few theatrical release still aiming at 2020, and those that still hold firm dates seem to have plans for digital support for those releases very quickly in most cases.

As of today, there are only twelve major releases still set for release in theaters this year:

Spontaneous (October 2)
Fatale (October 30)
Freaky (November 13)
Pixar’s Soul (November 20)
The Croods: A New Age (November 25)
Nomadland (December 4)
Free Guy (December 11)
Dune (December 18)
Death on the Nile (December 18)
Coming To America 2 (December 18)
One Night In Miami (December 25)
Wonder Woman 1984 (December 25)

Anyone want to lay odds on Dune, Death on the Nile, and Wonder Woman 1984 sticking to those dates? I can’t imagine any scenario where they come out while international markets are the only markets open. If those dates do hold though, I’m not sure our pop culture can handle three big films on one day after months and months of no movies at all. Clearly they’re hoping for a holiday season and that kind of big business energy that goes with one, but that’s not happening. Not in theaters. Not in 2020.

But wait! James Bond! James Bond is still coming out in theaters, right? After all, Billie Ellish just released the video for the theme song! That’s a clear sign they’re about to finally release the movie!

Oh, wait. Nope. April 2, 2021. James Bond blinked.

And good for them. They should. That’s significant. And so is a brand-new Robert Zemeckis film heading home. None of it means anything by itself but it all means something when you look at it together. It’s all part of a rapidly shifting media landscape, and one of the reasons I’m going to rebuild my Plex server again is because of the control it gives me over where my media lives. I’m going to be able to keep myself plenty occupied while they sort all of this out, and I’ve got no reason to head to theaters any time soon. I still haven’t even seen Tenet. I’m not sure I’m going to bother with the one-hour drive to see it. Nothing I’ve heard or read convinced me that it was something I had to rush out for, and the same was true of The New Mutants.

Technically, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is now playing in theaters right now. As much as anything is. It’ll be streaming on Netflix on October 16, and I’m excited to check out an advanced copy this weekend. I look forward to this one, and I don’t think I could be any more excited about Mank, which Netflix also has coming sometime soon. I’m itching for them to release footage from the movie, and so far, I think a handful of photos, including this one, might be the full extent of what people have seen from it, which seems wild to me.

Everyone’s so focused on what they’re not getting this year that they seem to be missing the things we are getting. I love that Sacha Baron Cohen, who is already having a big month thanks to Chicago 7, not only shot a new Borat film in secrecy but that he almost made it to release without anyone knowing it exists. We’ll see it in a few weeks on Amazon, and I think that’s the perfect way for it to be released. We’ll all have a shot at seeing it at the same time, and it looks like, love it or hate it, it’s going to be a conversation starter.

Earlier this week, Cohen fired his first official shot in the marketing campaign, releasing the following tweet about an hour before the Presidential debate even began:

Republic of Kazakhstan 🇰🇿 @KazakhstanGovt

Congratulation to great friend of the Kazakh people @realDonaldTrump for winning debate today! Impressive and amazing result for a strong premier who always put America and Kazakhstan first!

Oh, Borat. Welcome back. The trailer, which just dropped, is even more exciting:

It feels like everyone’s starting to adjust to the idea of another season spent indoors. If it has to happen, why not make it fucking spectacular? Start giving us some genuinely thrilling stuff, some stuff worth talking about, something that will keep us from tearing each other apart right now. Part of the reason everything feels so heightened for everyone is that things are genuinely just that important, but part of it is also because we’ve been

I’m just as excited by the news that Alex Winter’s documentary Zappa is set for a November release. Winter’s having a good year already with the release of Bill & Ted Face The Music emerging as one of the few pop culture experiences this year that it seemed like people really enjoyed as a group. He also released a smart, empathetic documentary called Showbiz Kids and another documentary called The Panama Papers, which took this big complicated story and told it in the cleanest manner possible, not just leaning on the outrage button but actually exploring the implications of the event. He’s a terrific filmmaker, and Frank Zappa is a subject that offers him unlimited storytelling potential. I am dying to see what he’s come up with. I’ve gone through various Zappa phases in my life as a music fan, and I have boundless respect for the unbridled creative energy that Zappa embodied. To me, that’s as big a release as any of the things the studios are still releasing this year.

It’s clear that Disney made some big decisions based on the returns for Mulan, and it’s also clear that things did not go as well as they’d hoped. They pushed all their films to 2021 except for Soul and Death on the Nile, and we’ll see what happens with those. I still say Soul is the strongest candidate for a shift to Disney+ and the Premier Access idea, or even a straight-up Disney+ debut. Now that The Witches has made that move, I think anything’s possible. I really do. This wasn’t a cheap film. This wasn’t an easy shift for Warner to make. But they did it without months of public flip-flopping, and it makes it look less like damaged goods or a concession of some kind as a result. Instead, the conversation today is about the trailer for the film, as it should be, and not the release date. People can see it for themselves in a few weeks, and now they can just focus on the thing itself.

I hope Disney’s paying attention. Mulan flopped. There’s no other way to put it. It flopped by any standard. It was rejected soundly by China, when the entire reason Disney made it the way they did was to try to appease China. When we look back at this era in the future and they write the story of the way Hollywood studios bent over backwards to court China even as the country was committing massive human rights violations and cranking up the machinery for a genocide, it will be a story of profound shame. It’s too bad the executives making these choices can’t feel a little bit of that shame right now when it might actually do some good.

One of the things that has always baffled me about box-office reporting is how none of it factors in one of the key variables: people just weren’t excited about the movie. It’s not terrible, but it’s certainly not great, and it never seems to matter. It’s all just widgets. It’s got a ton of muscle behind it because that’s what the Disney machine does, but it doesn’t matter sometimes. You can’t make people talk about something if they just don’t give a shit. Trust me… I am well aware of this as I try to get people excited about paying $7 a month to read movie conversation. People either care or they don’t, and all you can do is let the people who might care know that something exists. The better you are at getting that message across to enough of the right people, the better chance you have of hitting, but if no one really cares, it doesn’t matter how loud you are or how efficient the machine.

My sincerest wish for these pandemic times is that studios will walk away realizing that the “safe” IP bet doesn’t really exist. Just because people recognize something does not mean they will buy it or that they will like it. There’s no such thing as a lazy slam dunk. Even with the most well-known property, you have to have the right execution, and it has to be the right moment, and people have to want it. You can’t get past any of those three things. Part of me wonders if they’re letting The Witches premiere on HBO Max is because they aren’t sure what else to do with it. There are some huge names involved, to be sure, but that doesn’t make it a safe bet. It looks broad and cartoony, and Zemeckis hasn’t really had a hit like that in a while. Maybe this is a great way to take the pressure off whether or not they can get people in theaters and now we can just see the movie and talk about the movie.

I can’t imagine we’ll see a lot of $200 million films getting made in 2021. Or 2022. Or really any year again for a while. I think the industry is about to bleed in a way it hasn’t bled in a long while. Longer than anyone working right now remembers, certainly. The executives who have to meet this challenge may be the least imagination-driven batch of executives in Hollywood history, and the studios as they exist right now don’t have any of the strong corporate identity that the great studios had when they met these challenges in the past. Frankly, the way most of them have been doing business for a while now is impossible to sustain, arrogant, and downright dumb.

For now, the great release date square dance continues. I count a full 40 films they’ve got scheduled between January and July of 2021, a landslide of titles, and I can’t imagine how the theatrical industry can sustain that, even if it starts to creep back to life in the US. It’s not going to be business as usual for a long time. No one wants to be the movie that isn’t “big enough” to wait forever for theaters to open up again, but there are going to have to be plenty of movies that aren’t “big enough.” Whatever that means. These ideas are all baked into the way we think of the things we watch, but these lines between things are largely arbitrary.

All that matters, in the end, is the conversation. Can you get people talking? Can you make a mark when everything’s so transitive right now?

A great example of this is Cobra Kai, a show that originally made its premiere as part of YouTube Red, the paid version of YouTube. I watched it during that run, but not many people did, even though it seemed like everyone who tried it liked it. This summer, they moved season one and two of the show to Netflix, where they instantly caught fire. My own kids didn’t get around to watching the show until it moved to Netflix, even though I talked to them about it, and as soon as they did watch it, they devoured it.

Now there’s a trailer for season three that teases production on a season four. They’re making it clear to viewers that they can invest in this show because they’re getting a whole bunch more of it, and that’s smart. The show ended its second season on a particularly ripe cliffhanger, and it’s going to be interesting to see how they build from here with a much more active and engaged fanbase.

I feel like the show’s endgame is pretty clear. Eventually, Daniel and Johnny are going to have to open and operate a dojo together. That’s got to be where the series ends. It’s such a smart piece of writing about the way we cast people in certain roles in life and we can’t see past our own programming. We are who are made to be, and sometimes all that separates from someone we loathe is a matter of opportunity and circumstance. It can be incredibly uncomfortable to look into a mirror sometimes because we see all of our flaws and weaknesses. Taking the events of the Karate Kid films and recasting them into something that works both as a show about what we hand down to a new generation and a show about how we are haunted by the people we were as teenagers is no easy trick, but they pulled it off, and I am excited to see them play out whatever their larger plan is.

The show they’re making now is the same show they made when no one was watching on YouTube, and the only real difference is the ease with which people can find it. I hate to say this, because I want to believe people will find good work wherever it is, but I’m starting to worry that Ted Lasso isn’t going to get the attention it deserves on Apple TV+. I hope they can get people to see it, and I certainly think word of mouth is doing its part, but it just plain comes down to how many people can easily can easily watch it. Netflix continues to own a huge portion of this space not only because of what they have but also because of how easy it is to use.

I love the Criterion Channel, for example. I’ve written before here about some of their programming. I think it offers the most great films at one time of any of the streaming services, and it’s one of the best values out of all of them. They’ve got a whole bunch of ‘70s horror films this month, and this trailer is just grrrrrrrrreat…

Criterion Collection @Criterion

Bringing together some of the decade’s most iconic slashers, chillers, & killer thrillers, this tour through the '70s nightmare realm is a veritable blood feast of perverse pleasures from a time when gore, grime, & sleaze found a permanent home in horror. criterionchannel.com/70s-horror

But using it as an actual streaming service? It kind of stinks. It’s not a very user-friendly app. The same is true of Amazon Prime, which might be great if I could ever figure out what they actually have and what’s just for rental and how to search it without getting these misleading results that just confuse and irritate me.

And to bring this all back to The Witches and HBO Max, I might use the app a hell of a lot more often if they’d ever get their shit worked out with Roku so I could use the app through the device I most prefer using for my media. Convenience is king in the world where none of us can leave our houses, and the companies that get that through their heads first are going to win this thing.

Since this is the Friday Free-For-All (which is, ironically, only going to be free once a month starting today, since I want to start really emphasizing value for the paid subscribers), I want to leave you with a question. You can talk about anything you want today, and I want to know what you’re watching and how you’re coping and what’s on your mind, but first, since I’m going to be wrestling my Plex server to the ground all weekend, here’s my question for you:

What app or piece of software has most changed the way you operate on a daily basis? Give me both a positive and a negative example.

Today’s newsletter is free. Please share it with folks if you love it. If you want to join the club and get access to every issue as well as the archives here, it’s only $7 a month and it’s even less if you buy a full year up front.

Image courtesy of Netflix
Image courtesy of HBO Max