Paul Thomas Anderson, Alfonso Cuaron, Barbra Streisand, Guillermo Del Toro, Edgar Wright, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Leonardo DiCaprio, Damien Chazelle, Christopher Nolan Among Directors Appealing To Warner Bros To Save FilmStruck
Date: November 12, 2018 at 8:44:29 PM PST
To: Toby Emmerich
Subject: FilmStruck
Dear Toby,
We know that Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese have been in touch with you and Warners Media Group about the demise of FilmStruck and have urged you guys to keep it going.
While it was not your decision, we would like to loudly echo their sentiments. The FilmStruck service was (IS) the best streaming service for fans of cinema of all kinds: classic studio movies, independent cinema, international treasures. Without it, the landscape for film fans and students of cinema is especially bleak. There’s a reason there was a huge outpouring from artists and fans over it being shuttered, they were doing the Movie God’s work.
We know one of the reasons that it has been shut down is because of an upcoming Warners streaming service, but really FilmStruck shouldn’t be a conflict of interest. In this day and age where there are dozens of platforms, curation of content is really important and FilmStruck was providing a service to both satisfy older fans of cinema and a younger generation of cineastes that will be making amazing movies long after we’re dead.
In an era of huge corporate acquisitions of cinema by communication companies- in a business that may render billions of dollars off a medium like cinema, we believe this is a gesture that is needed- a minuscule show of goodwill towards the preservation and accesibility of a tradition and a rich history that would benefit the public.
So we want to add our names to the petition started by Marty and Steven and want you (and Warners) to know that we feel equally strongly and would do anything to support the service being saved.
Yours,
Paul Thomas Anderson
Ana Lily Amirpour
James Brolin
Damien Chazelle
Alfonso Cuarón
Guillermo Del Toro
Leonardo DiCaprio
James Gray
Alejandro González Iñárritu
Bill Hader
Karyn Kusama
Barry Jenkins
Rian Johnson
Christopher McQuarrie
Reed Morano Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas
Gina Prince-Bythewood
Barbara Streisand
Edgar Wright
Figured this was worth its own thread if this thing actually gets revived. Cool to see Nolan rallying behind this as well.
Last edited by Bacon on April 16th, 2019, 2:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I'll only care if make it available to more regions.
Same. It’s great a service like this used to be available, but there isn’t that much to it if you can’t really use it. It also doesn’t just need petitions and signatures. It needs investments. It needs famous or just rich people to be willing to put money where it counts. It can’t exist just on mere goodwill. And it needs people to be willing to pay, not just sign stuff, as unfortunate as it sounds.
^I was under the impression money was certainly a factor. Read that it only had around 100k subscribers. Of course, it had potential to grow, especially if it expanded, but unfortunately, those aren’t exactly amazing numbers that indicate nice profit.
It’s really sad. Unless you’re willing to shell out for physical copies or individual purchases, and that’s not something everybody’s going to afford to do constantly (especially students), you’re pretty much out of options to watch old movies. Like, you’re almost being cornered to do the second obvious thing lol.
We don't know how much the films cost to stream, though. All I know is that in the statements closing the service, they've made little indication to prove the service was struggling financially. It seemed more like they just didn't want to have to put up with it as a possible obstacle to their up and coming streaming service (even though that service certainly won't be as niche).
I wasn't aware how cheap the service was (or how much was available on it) and now am hoping it returns so I can join it, personally.
The streaming service WarnerMedia plans to introduce next year will launch domestically first, followed by a potential international rollout, and could feature content from outside providers, according to a company insider.
WarnerMedia is hoping that its direct-to-consumer offering will enable it to become a major player in a space currently dominated by Netflix. Unveiling those plans last month, CEO John Stankey said the platform would be in place by the end of 2019. That would pit the company against not just Netflix, Amazon and other existing OTT services but also Disney, which intends to debut its own streaming service, Disney+, late next year.
To compete, WarnerMedia appears to be taking a more expansive view in terms of sourcing its content. The insider said that WarnerMedia would be open to licensing shows and movies from outside the company stable, which currently includes brands such as Warner Bros. and HBO. The goal is for the new streaming service to be a “scaled distribution platform” open to other providers. Speculation has already surfaced of talks between WarnerMedia and Comcast’s NBCUniversal to form some sort of content alliance, but neither company has commented publicly on the possibility.
In terms of in-house WarnerMedia content, only HBO programming has been locked in. Which other brands and kinds of content to include is still under discussion, though one logical candidate would be the catalogue of classic, foreign and independent movies formerly available on FilmStruck, WarnerMedia’s streaming service catering to cinephiles. In one of its first and most controversial moves since Time Warner was sold to AT&T, WarnerMedia decided to shut down FilmStruck by the end of this month.
Subscription plans and prices for the upcoming WarnerMedia streaming service have not been set yet, but the company has said that a subscription would cost more than HBO’s current OTT subscription offering.
“We are committed to launching a compelling and competitive product that will serve as a complement to our existing businesses and help us to expand our reach by offering a new choice for entertainment with the WarnerMedia collection of films, television series, libraries, documentaries and animation,” Stankey said in a statement before last month’s Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit.
TL;DR the Filmstruck movies will most likely be added to Warner's massive streaming service that will most likely become available in the 4th quarter of next year.
However, while you do get a lot more content along with the Filmstruck library, you do lose the curation aspect of it though. That's what made Filmstruck so neat.
We are incredibly touched and encouraged by the flood of support we’ve been receiving since the announcement that FilmStruck will be shutting down on November 29, 2018. Our thanks go out to everyone who signed petitions, wrote letters and newspaper articles, and raised your voices to let the world know how much our mission and these movies matter to you.
Well, if you loved the curated programming we’ve been doing with our friends at FilmStruck, we have good news for you. The Criterion Collection team is going to be carrying on with that mission, launching the Criterion Channel as a freestanding service in spring 2019.
