Did you know that Cameron Diaz came out of a 10 year retirement? Did you know that the movie featuring her return to acting came out a month ago at time of writing? Of course you didn’t. Because it’s a Netflix Original and Netflix hates it when people know those exist.
This doesn’t even have anything to do with the abysmal quality of most of these films. That’s a completely separate post I could make. The fact is, it doesn’t matter if it’s one of the many low-effort, made for goldfish, slop that these streaming services put out, or one of the handful of genuinely good films they make. No one knows they exist, no one cares they exist and no one will remember them in a month, let alone in a decade. Films are made to be remembered and preserved but streaming services never got the memo.
Even bad movies that had theatrical releases have their place in history. “Bad movies” is obviously a subjective term so before you start yelling at your screen inside of Starbucks like a psycho let me specify. When I say, “bad movies” I mean movies where the general consensus was negative. But even those movies are remembered long after their release has faded. They get released on home video, air on cable, and are placed on streaming services. They make their way to people. Some new people who had never seen them and end up liking them, some people who rewatch and reevaluate their original opinion. Some people rewatch and dislike them just as much if not more than the first time they saw it. Through all of that, those movies are in the public consciousness just as much as the good movies.
Movies that get released to streaming services though, get forgotten. Good or bad, they fade away like a Looney Tunes project on David Zaslav’s desk. Sure, some of them get lucky. Some of them are made by famous auteur filmmakers and get nominated for major awards. Some can break through the streaming ghostyard to find a sizable enough audience to be remembered. But for every The Irishman or Extraction, there are two dozen Ghosteds and Red Notices.
Do you remember Ghosted and Red Notice? Why would you? These are hundred-million-dollar movies starring A-list (or at least what counts for A-list in an A-listless world) actors that have little to no marketing, are dropped on streaming services, and are given the front page for maybe two days before they’re buried by the algorithm. Even the people who watched them probably don’t remember them.
This is by design. These services don’t care if you remember these movies. They don’t even care if you know they exist. They only exist so give the appearance that these companies are making big movies worthy of your subscription. They don’t care if you watch, they don’t even need you to watch. If you watch 2 seconds of the autoplay then that’s enough for them. They can now claim you as a view to tell their shareholders they make movies that people watch and now the executives can get their bonus.
Movies used to be made so people could watch them. People wanted to make movies that people watched so that’s what they did. And guess what, people watched them. They told their friends and family about them, and then those people also watched. Do you know what happens when people watch a movie and talk to others about it? It gets remembered. It lives on. It finds new audiences.
Do you know what happens when people make a movie just to say they have more “content”? Nothing. Nobody knows it exists. Nobody remembers it. Because it’s not made as a movie to be watched. It’s made as a thing to show customers that you have “more stuff”. It’s made as something that can be viewed just long enough to count as a view. It’s made as something to have on in the background while you do laundry or get freaky with someone. So even the people who actually did watch it don’t remember it, because it has no distinct features, nothing that ever would be remembered. It blurs together with everything else you’ve ever watched, including commercials because somehow so many of these “films” look like Tide commercials.
This phenomenon isn’t just reserved for the bad movies on this service. The bad movies may outweigh the good ones tenfold but they do actually make some (or at least buy the distribution rights) good ones. But those still struggle with the same problems. They aren’t meant to be watched. They’re meant to bolster a library so the algorithm can bombard you with choices. Sometimes the good ones fare even worse. A lot of the time they don’t even get the opportunity to be on the front page. They’re just plopped on the service and left there in the hopes that some soul scrolling through everything will see it.
It doesn’t matter to these companies that almost nothing they put out will make any kind of cultural dent. It doesn’t matter to them that most of these films will ever be remembered for more than a weekend. No one is ever going to talk about Red Notice, one of the most expensive movies ever made (which has to be a money laundering scheme because it looks like it was made for the price of a Costco Hot Dog Combo) ever again because no one remembers it exists. No one is going to remember Ghosted in a decade because no one remembers it now. And it’s not because it’s bad, people remember Jack & Jill for god sake. Because even though it’s so abysmal that its mere existence proves there is no god or meaning to life, it was still made a movie to be watched and released as such.
Cameron Diaz, one of the most beloved actresses of her generation came out of a 10-year retirement for a movie that people forgot existed a month after it came out. A real movie studio would never allow that to happen. Even if the movie quality was the same as it is now, a real movie studio would have made sure that Cameron Diaz coming out of retirement was an event. But Netflix is not a real movie studio. They are a streaming service so it doesn’t matter that this is Cameron Diaz’s first movie in 10 years. This movie was designed to be forgotten. Forever stranded in the algorithmic abyss. A piece of content they can say they have available to subscribers.