Week-to-Week: Seasonal Screams and the State of Streaming-Exclusive Movies

The scarily fine line between "not good enough for theaters" and "better-suited to home viewing"

Week-to-Week is the mostly weekly newsletter of Episodic Medium, where I—Myles McNutt—offer reflections on television and the broader media industries. To receive future newsletters and get updates on the shows we are reviewing weekly, check out our About Page, our Fall Schedule, and become a free subscriber for more.

---

In one of my first newsletters here at Episodic Medium, I wrote about the lingering stigma attached to streaming-only releases, specifically tied to the debut of Pixar’s Turning Red on Disney+ last spring. I mentioned a few smaller straight-to-streaming releases in the newsletter, but it does seem important to acknowledge that Turning Red was a very particular type of streaming release: a film originally intended to be released in theaters that made its way to streaming for business reasons.

There’s no question that this particular genre of film confused the question of whether a streaming-only release signifies a lack of quality, amplified by a pandemic where an increasing number of films made their way to streaming alongside a theatrical release. But as the pandemic fades as a matter of industry concern, there’s been a conscious retreat from blockbuster streaming releases from Disney and Warner Bros., in particular. After releasing a selection of live-action remakes of their animated films (Pinocchio, Peter Pan & Wendy) on the platform over the past year or so, Disney has no further big-budget films confirmed to launch on Disney+ for the next year or more.¹ And part of the whole Max debacle surrounding canceling and writing off Batgirl was that Zaslav and Warner Bros.’ new owners at Discovery were not interested in putting big budget movies on the platform, and were unwilling to pay for reshoots necessary to make the movie “theatrical” enough for a formal release (or so they claim).

Ultimately, I would argue that it doesn’t make sense for these companies to prioritize big-budget streaming films in a time of 45-day theatrical windows. Disney will still be perceived by its users as a service that gives them access to blockbuster movies when their big Marvel releases are arriving a month and a half after they open in theaters, and HBO’s access to pay cable windows means that even the company’s removal from the Max brand name won’t erase the value that brings to potential subscribers. Netflix is an asterisk in this whole conversation, committed to releasing big-budget movies with little to no fanfare that quickly fade from memory no matter how many times the pattern repeats itself. But if you’re not Netflix, streaming-exclusive films are a bad investment unless they’re scaled to the actual value they bring to your service.

One of those sources of value, I argue, is allowing streaming services to slot into the seasonal viewing habits of their subscribers. This has long been a primary function of basic cable channels like Freeform that license a large amount of movies: that channel’s 31 Days of Halloween and 25 Days of Christmas are now arguably among cable's most well-branded programming initiatives. However, as made clear when Disney allowed Freeform to be dropped from Spectrum cable packages after their September carriage dispute, the industry is increasingly of the belief that the viewing habits that previously supported seasonal cable movie marathons are now firmly planted in streaming, especially for the millenial/Gen Y audiences Freeform targets with their original programming they now primarily watch next-day on Hulu.

And we can see this across streaming services this “spooky season,” as both licensed and original content has been reorganized to match the “vibe” of the current moment. Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched no less than three streaming-only films aiming to make their respective streaming services feel like they’re responding to the demand for horror/thriller content. But while one of those films embodies the struggle of streaming-exclusive films that register as failed theatrical releases, the other two embrace the potential for adjustments in scale that make streaming a place for fun diversions that may not have a home in the contemporary theatrical marketplace.

Paramount+’s Pet Sematary: Bloodlines was actually never intended to be released theatrically: the project, a prequel to the 2019 film that was a moderate box office success, was instead an effort from Paramount to demonstrate the long-term viability of its streaming platform to shareholders. Hailing from their Paramount Players shingle designed for smaller-scale genre films like last year’s hugely successful Smile and moderately successful Orphan: First Kill, Bloodlines was announced in 2021 alongside news of a shortened theatrical window for Paramount’s big budget offerings and a similar franchise-extension effort for Paranormal Activity (which became Next of Kin, and debuted on Paramount+ in October 2021).

However, there is just no way for a streaming extension of an existing franchise not to seem like it’s bound to be compromised in some way, as though it wasn’t capable of delivering on a theatrical level. And while those expectations could sometimes work in a film’s favor if it’s better than expected, Bloodlines is just a bad movie. I appreciate. a briskly paced film, but this movie’s 84 minutes manages to go by incredibly slowly. The movie lacks any meaningful substance, with thin characters, a predictable plot, and some downright silly production design choices (like the world’s clearest swamp water) that suggest either a problematically small budget or a lack of quality control from all parties involved. Am I saying this as someone who never saw the 2019 original, and who has a noted history of distrust in writer-director Lindsay Beer after the gobsmackingly dumb Sierra Burgess is a Loser on Netflix? Yes. But Bloodlines’ lack of luster embodies what people find questionable about streaming-only releases, and will make it much harder to sell franchise fans that a streaming extension is going to serve their interests moving forward.

By comparison, Amazon and Blumhouse’s Totally Killer feels like it’s engineered to fit into the streaming ecosystem. I’m admittedly a sucker for any time travel film, but it’s a great cross-section of teen comedy, slasher horror, and genre which feels like it’s meant to be consumed off-handedly while browsing through streaming options on a lazy weekend night (complimentary). Kiernan Shipka stars as Jamie, a teenager who quarrels with her mother and then ends up back in 1987, which just happens to be when a serial killer murdered three of her mother’s friends in a bloody killing spree. She then has to try to solve the crime before her phone battery—arbitrarily tied to the time machine for “science!” reasons—runs out.

I don’t know that the mystery elements of the film ever fully coalesce into a compelling story on their own, but Shipka is a charming presence as Jamie, and more importantly the film uses the freedom of streaming to embrace its ability to sit outside of historical patterns. On Twitter, Sean Doherty referred to it as “an R-rated Disney Channel original,” and that’s a spot-on articulation and something that industry logics would historically push back against. There’s no question that in a theatrical context, this would have become a PG-13 film; it’s not especially gory or lewd, but if it was going to be an R-rated film it would have lost some of its charm (since it’s not a full comedy horror take, in the end). The film doesn’t have a theatrical scale, but it never acts like it’s missing one, accepting its made-for-streaming fate and articulating accordingly.

The third—and best—of these films is sort of trapped across these discourses. On the one hand, as a 20th Century Studios film, No One Will Save You is part of the same contractual brouhaha that led to Dan Trachtenberg’s now Emmy-nominated Prey being released on Hulu last year: because that studio had a pay cable window deal with HBO that predated the Disney-Fox merger, Disney was forced to share streaming rights to any theatrical releases (like Avatar: The Way of Water), but the same didn’t apply to streaming exclusives. However, writer-director Brian Duffield has revealed he always knew the film was heading for Hulu, meaning that it was produced with full awareness that it would be connecting to viewers in their homes.

And while I’ll accept the contention that any well-made film, especially in the horror/thriller genre, would be best seen on a big screen with an audience, the intimacy of Duffield’s dialogue-free film about an isolated young woman (the always great Kaitlyn Dever) surviving an alien invasion feels particularly well-suited to the streaming environment. It’s an inherently small-scale take on the premise, which allows it to be somewhat unassuming in the way that a theatrical release can’t be. It’s an example of a film that sneaks up on you, where the somewhat low expectations afforded streaming-only releases can actually help create a bigger impact when the story expands beyond its established boundaries or when details like the lack of dialogue can sneak up on you (I didn’t know about it going in, and honestly didn’t even fully register it until the film was over based on the effectiveness of Dever’s performance).

Most importantly, however, the single best quality about a streaming film is that it’s immensely easy to recommend it to other people. You’re not asking someone to organize a trip to a theater, navigating the logistics and costs that entails—you’re simply asking them to navigate to a particular app the next time they’re sitting down to watch something and then taking on the opportunity cost of following your recommendation. And given those parameters, sharp genre filmmaking under two hours in length is pretty much the platonic ideal of what someone—including, perhaps, the readers of this newsletter—is looking for in the month of October. And while there remains plenty of examples—read: Pet Sematary: Bloodlines—of bad movies that go straight to streaming, each passing year creates a longer list of excellent films that avoid theaters for reasons beyond their quality, pushing us one step closer to the stigma fading away until the next weak outing raises the specter all over again.

Episodic Observations

• Fans of short-lived Netflix teen-oriented programming have some extra incentive to check out some of these projects: The Society’s Jack Mulhern appears as the (spoiler alert) resurrected Vietnam veteran in Pet Semetary: Bloodlines, while Julie and the Phantoms’ Charlie Gillespie plays Jamie’s dad circa 1987 in Totally Killer. Mulhern is definitely emaciated and in ways unrecognizable from his time as Grizz, but Gillespie is basically just playing Luke but shirtless.

• Watching David Duchovony sleep walk through Bloodlines was particularly rough: Pam Greer at least has a pretty thin role that doesn’t really ask much of her, but Duchovony is supposed to be the emotional lynchpin of the film, and there’s just zero scene-to-scene continuity of performance to reflect that.

• Totally Killer is notable for leaving a pretty huge detail about its plot out of the trailer, so I’ll make a note that the stakes of the film are actually slightly higher (and more convoluted) than it suggests. It still works, but it adds an extra dimension that doesn’t necessarily track through the film’s tone as it progresses.

• As someone who—despite having also recently chaotically seen Saw X having never seen previous films in the franchise, in addition to these films—gravitate toward horror, I’d ultimately argue that none of these three films were particularly scary. No One Will Save You is definitely unnerving at points, but Totally Killer keeps things pretty light, and Bloodlines is just not competently made enough to create legitimate terror given how little you care about anyone involved.

• I’ve had some work commitments that have made checking out screeners time prohibitive, but word out of my conversations with other critics is that the third episode of Apple TV+’s Brie Larson period drama Lessons in Chemistry (which debuts Friday) is divisive, so if you’re looking for someone to enter the discourse about, tune in then!

1. Technically, a casting call for the upcoming Lilo & Stitch live-action film designated it as a streaming release, but Disney has never officially confirmed this, and with the film’s production delated by the SAG-AFTRA strike it seems increasingly likely it won’t release until 2025 anyway, creating a long break between blockbuster releases on the platform.