Up Yours, Ted Sarandos, Movie Theaters Are Back!

Last week, speaking at the Time100 summit in New York City, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos said that moviegoing is an “outmoded idea for most people.” He added, “we deliver the program to you in a way you want to watch it.”

Not so fast, Ted Sarandos!

This weekend was the best box-office weekend that Hollywood has delivered since the pandemic. Four movies made more than $20 million, the most movies to gross that much in the same weekend in years. And it was a diverse slate of offerings: The smash hit A Minecraft Movie for kids; The Accountant 2, a sequel to a franchise with a surprisingly large fanbase; the 25th anniversary re-release of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, and the Ryan Coogler-directed vampire blues musical ‘Sinners,’ which has incredible word-of-mouth and came within a hair of being the first theatrical release to earn more its second weekend of release since Titanic. This doesn’t sound like an outmoded idea. It sounds like an idea whose time has come again.

A number of factors have converged at once to create this box-office bonanza. COVID and industry-crippling strikes created a production bottleneck, so that all we saw in theaters were franchise blockbusters that no act of God could stop, indie films with a limited audience that found workarounds, and mid-budget horror movies that somehow found a bridge to release. But even then, movies released one at a time, a drip, not a spigot.

Meanwhile, Netflix has been releasing some of the worst movies of our generation. The streaming service is fine for serialized genre TV like Stranger Things, Squid Game, or Wednesday, or if you want to watch dating shows about autistic people or Hallmark Channel-style movies about cowboys falling in love. But its sense of at-home cinema is crap. While the much-maligned Jeffrey Zaslav was greenlighting Sinners at Warner Brothers, Ted Sarandos presided over the release of steaming garbage like Red Notice and The Electric State, or Zack Snyder’s two-part Rebel Moon franchise, historically bad movies that no one wants to see. If those had come out in theaters, they’d be featured chapters in books about Hollywood flops for a generation. Instead, Netflix just absorbs them into the slipstream.

“Movies are back” will not go away, either, with a new Marvel movie this week, another one later this summer, a Superman movie coming, and a Mission: Impossible sequel from Tom Cruise, the ultimate champion of in-person filmgoing. In-person movies still have their problems. Crowds are rude, theaters are dated and dirty, prices are too high. But for those of us who never stopped going to the movies, even in cinemagoing (and the world’s) darkest hour, this weekend was sweet redemption. Despite what Ted Sarandos might say, movies are not dead. Like the vampires in Sinners, cinephiles have been waiting for you in the dark the whole time. Turn off that terrible Netflix stream and join us at the movies.

But please, no talking, and keep your devices silent and out of sight.