There was a time, greater than a decade in the past at this level, when Netflix was the best platform on this planet for catching up on traditional movies you at all times meant to see, or discovering one thing incredible. However because the streaming wars bought extra aggressive and crowded, legacy-release movies began exhibiting up in fewer and fewer locations. Fortunately, with the streaming war waning slightly, with firms like Disney and Warner Bros. emphasizing theatrical releases over streaming, Netflix is getting again into the traditional movies recreation.
The streaming service introduced on Wednesday that it’s beginning a brand new sequence referred to as Milestone Movies: The Anniversary Collection, which is able to spotlight traditional movies hitting main anniversaries this 12 months. First up, the positioning has already launched a sequence of 50-year-old movies from 1974, together with Blazing Saddles, Alice Doesn’t Stay Right here Anymore, The Dialog, California Break up, Dying Want, Chinatown, The Parallax View, and extra notable important hits.
New collections will comply with in April, July, and October, with movies from 1984, 1994, and 2004, respectively. Netflix has not but launched the deliberate titles for these later mini-packages.
Netflix hasn’t traditionally been huge on curating its personal content material. It not often packages new additions to its platform round any sort of constant theme, versus utilizing its algorithm to batch movies into specialised subgenre lists like “Cerebral Movies” or “Award Winning Dramas.” It doesn’t even appear like there’s a superb place to seek out the Milestone Movies assortment on the streaming portal itself: It’s important to go to the announcement page for hyperlinks to the complete checklist. Nonetheless, with this new assortment, it’s clear that Netflix is aiming to make itself a vacation spot for traditional film lovers too, not simply followers of Netflix originals.
Clearly, simply because movies like The Dialog weren’t streaming on Netflix for the previous couple of years doesn’t imply they weren’t obtainable wherever. Most mainstream classics are streamable if you happen to seek for them. However simply because a film is on the Criterion Channel, Max, or Paramount Plus doesn’t make it simple to look at: It’s not often value subscribing to a brand new service only for the one film you’re within the temper for.
However as studios like Paramount, Common, and Warner Bros. begin to notice that streaming companies aren’t the piggy banks they had been hoping for, all these classics (and dozens of lesser movies that vary from nice to terrible) are are as soon as again being licensed for streaming on Netflix, still the most popular streaming service worldwide.
And that’s the true worth of nice movies being on Netflix. For all of the issues the service isn’t nice at, like giving shows time to develop or letting its finest movies come to theaters, it’s an amazing instrument for serving to folks uncover movies they in any other case won’t watch. Final week, 2014’s Exodus: Gods and Kings was the fourth hottest film on Netflix. Which means no offense in any respect to Sir Ridley Scott, but it surely’s actually amongst his lesser movies, and extra importantly, it’s one which nobody has thought a lot about because it got here out. However there it’s in 2024, with 1000’s of individuals streaming it on Netflix.
Now that firms are licensing movies to the streaming large again, and Netflix is paying for them, possibly the streamer can convey that sort of consideration to nice movies. In any case, if the abysmal Chilly Pursuit can keep within the Netflix high 10 for a month, why can’t Chinatown?
