Week-to-Week: Do They Know It's A Streaming Film At All?

Turning Red, and the fading—but still present—stigma of streaming-only releases

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When Disney announced that Pixar’s Turning Red would be abandoning a theatrical release in favor of arriving exclusively on Disney+, it told a few stories.

One was about the increasing importance of streaming to industry business models, with Disney pushing as much exclusive content to Disney+ as possible in the buildup to a major crossroads in the fall with three-year discounted subscriptions running out and a likely price hike alongside a cheaper ad-supported tier.

The second is about the fact that Disney has shuttled three straight Pixar films onto Disney+, moving Soul, Luca, and now Turning Red away from theaters. While circumstances were such that Soul’s move to Disney+ made sense, Luca arrived on Disney+ in the blissful window between mass vaccination and the arrival of the Delta variant, while Turning Red comes at a time where—for better or worse—there’s a clear appetite for moviegoing and no options for young kids in the entire month of March.

The thing about these two stories is that they contradict each other. Turning Red moving to Disney+ reinforces how vital streaming is to Disney, with a marquee Pixar release anchoring the service’s offerings. However, because we are conditioned to devalue a streaming-only release, the film’s move to Disney+ makes the film itself less valuable, a “sacrifice” to the necessities of streaming instead of something that Disney was willing to put all its effort behind (to the reported chagrin of Pixar employees). And it’s impossible to ignore that two of the Pixar films Disney+ didn’t send to theaters have been conscious efforts to diversify their storytelling, and the third may well have been whittled down to nothing but subtextual queerness based on Pixar’s recent statement regarding Bob Chapek’s incompetent handling of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Disney would surely say that their decision to push Turning Red directly to Disney+ was not a comment on its quality, or their insecurity over its box office prospects based on its “specificity” being perceived as narrowing its potential audience. But at this moment in time, it is impossible for me to not read this move through that lens, which has me wondering: is that ever going to change?

The way Netflix memory holed this Lifetime release was a peak moment for their branding efforts, which have kind of stagnated since.

In the context of television, streaming has flattened the brand distinctions that used to define our experience of the medium. Shows arrive on Netflix or Hulu without network branding, or with network branding that is increasingly Greek to the people seeing it—I specifically think about how You made a huge splash on Netflix with my students, absolutely none of whom realized they were getting Lifetime’s leftovers. Apple TV aggregates content from across different streaming services into one interface, regularly confusing me when I log in to watch Apple originals and see shows from Starz or Showtime. And while HBO Max hilariously keeps marking a distinction on shows that are “HBO” instead of “HBO Max,” the notion that there is a functional difference between them is absurd, and inscrutable to an average audience member.

But in film, there remains a clear difference between content that appeared in theaters and that which arrives exclusively on streaming services. There’s no question that the view of the latter has evolved over the past few years. Bird Box was not a good movie, but its huge launch helped dispel the notion that Netflix original films were by default the modern equivalent of direct-to-DVD releases even if some still carry that vibe.¹ And HBO Max’s 2021 experimentation with same-day releases for pandemic reasons brought more “big movies” into people’s homes, and the shortened theatrical windows it helped usher in across the industry has absolutely changed how we perceive of “streaming movies.” But none of this actually removed the distinction between the two modes of distribution, at least not for cinema enthusiasts or industry followers.

There’s no question that the more big movies arrive exclusively on streaming platforms, the more this distinction will start to fade. This is especially true for smaller films that would have historically had platform releases, but are now increasingly being pushed directly to streaming: take Hulu’s cannibal comedy Fresh, for example or Paramount+’s Three Months, starring Troye Sivan (which I thought was charming). But a critical piece of the puzzle is simply an average viewer’s awareness that what they’re watching did or did not originate on a streaming platform, which is inherently harder with films than with TV shows given the promotional cycle attached to a theatrical release. 

There’s no question Encanto’s Disney+ release far outperformed its theatrical run, but do people even know the former happened?

But if I step outside of my own bubble, in which it is literally my job to be aware of these things, things become more complicated. If you’re someone who isn’t on social media, and doesn’t watch linear television, and doesn’t live in Los Angeles or New York, how aware are you of what movies are in theaters at any given moment? Although acknowledging the pandemic kind of kills the control sample of this experiment, how many Disney+ subscribers didn’t even know that Encanto had a theatrical release, and thought it was—like Soul and Turning Red—just a Disney+ exclusive? And how many people might presume that, because it’s a Pixar release, they simply missed out on Turning Red’s run in theaters?

For now, in my corner of the internet, Disney is rightfully being held to the light on the optics of pushing another original Pixar film to streaming while retaining theatrical for the I.P.-friendly Lightyear. But I wonder whether we’re reaching a stage where even the most basic distinctions of distribution are completely lost on an average subscriber, and what the implications of that will be for the decisions that lie ahead for every conglomerate committing to the streaming future.

Links-to-Links

I will say that there’s a certain power to Disney+ being able to push the documentary about the women creative leads behind Turning Red to viewers after they finish the movie, which might amplify the film’s inclusiveness in productive ways. But while it offers some good insight, there wasn’t nearly enough about the fictional 4*Town and the film’s relationship with boy bands, so I’m glad Slate’s Dan Kois got the scoop from director Domee Shi:

I remember when we were kicking off those shots to animators, I made sure in my notes to say that we’re not making fun of boy bands…Really treat this like an Oscar-nominated movie. Go deep, go dramatic with the eyes and the face. Really earnestly make me feel like he’s speaking to me. I think the animators did a really good job of that.

In our post-Squid Game world, the perceived ceiling for foreign language programming in the U.S. market is in flux, but it’s unclear which types of shows would be able to break through that limit (in other words, if something without that show’s genre elements can cross borders the same way). But early reviews for Apple TV+’s Pachinko²—like this one from The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg—suggest it’s the next one to watch for:

“Somebody might try telling you that Apple TV+’s new drama Pachinko seems inaccessible for various reasons. Most of the dialogue is in Korean and Japanese. Its historical context is seeded 80+ years in the past. Many of the actors are new to American television. But Pachinko, adapted from the novel by Min Jin Lee, is ultimately only inaccessible if you lack empathy.”

The tight control that CBS has placed on Survivor press means that we’re mostly reliant on the carefully controlled Entertainment Weekly coverage of the show for official word from contestants, which will forever give me pause. But it’s the only insight we have into the decision made to pull Jackson from the game in last week’s premiere (which I wrote about here, and will be continuing to cover for paid subscribers starting this week), and here’s his version of his conversation with medical staff:

They're sitting there with you and the doctor, and she goes, ‘You're on lithium?’ And I was like ‘Yeah, but I've got, like, two doses left,’ and she's like, ‘Oh boy. So we kinda have to be a little careful with it because of dehydration, and we can't send blood out to get tested because of COVID. We'll just see what we can do.’

Announcement

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1. Most, if I’m being honest, but I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt that there will be a Netflix original movie at some point that won’t just feel like A-list talent being overpaid is floating a script someone had sitting in a drawer for a decade.

2. Shoutout to my time on video game forums for making sure I knew what pachinko was going into the recent New York Times crossword puzzle with it as a central theme.