The Death of FilmStruck Is a Dark Day in the History of Movies

Author: Joanna Scutts / Source: Slate Magazine

On a Friday dominated by the dramatic arrest of a domestic terrorism suspect, it might seem trivial to care about the summary execution of FilmStruck, the 2-year-old classic film streaming service, which curated films from the archives of Warner Bros.

and the Criterion Collection, along with art-house distributors like Kino and Flicker Alley. WarnerMedia, formed when AT&T received approval to acquire Time Warner Inc. in June, announced Friday that FilmStruck will be shutting down at the end of November, a victim of corporate impatience with “niche services” that included already-shuttered production service Super Deluxe and the Korean film site DramaFever. The strangled corporate newspeak of the memo announcing the closure, with its reference to the “learnings” to be gleaned from the FilmStruck experiment, engenders the same kind of helpless rage as the tortured syntax of Donald Trump’s tweets—it’s so painfully revealing of the kind of grandiose carelessness that is the hallmark of power right now.

As Warner gears up to face down Disney with its direct-to-consumer streaming service, launching next year, it’s clear that the company has no interest in catering to passionate fans of its back catalog, only in chasing the largest possible audience for its new releases. What’s not clear is why it has to be a zero-sum game, and why efforts at preservation and education have to be eliminated in order to chase the biggest possible audience and present them with a library far broader than it is deep.

As the screenwriter John August recently pointed out, there are still hundreds of movies from the home-video era that are not available to stream, and the availability of older titles is even more of a patchwork. This is a slow erosion of cultural heritage under the guise of infinite availability. Titles that are not available to stream will be harder to assign in classes, will cease to bubble up into the cultural awareness, and will eventually cease to matter.

Conversations about gatekeeping and elitism tend to equate cultural capital with actual capital, and assume that critics, artists, professors, and the kinds of people who make up film-festival audiences are able not only to persuade and educate but also to limit and exclude (hence the enduring power of attacks on “elites” making $40,000 a year). More…

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