Audrey Fox
Maybe time has ceased to have any meaning, with months feeling like an eternity but also going by in the blink of an eye, but it’s been five whole years since the COVID-19 pandemic turned the film industry – and the entire world – upside down. 2020 started out like any other year, and then bam: March rolled around, and suddenly the mysterious, spiky coronavirus was everywhere. As soon as America’s dad Tom Hanks caught it, the writing was on the wall. Theaters closed, and studios spent the next year trying to decide on a distribution model that would cost them the least amount of money at a time when there was by no means a clear answer as to when audiences would feel comfortable going back to the movies.
As a result, we lost a lot of films. Well, not lost, in the silent era sense of the word (except in the case of David Zaslav metaphorically setting unreleased movies on fire to pad Warner Bros’ bottom line). They’re still out there, technically. But as a result of being buried on streaming services, pushed out on Video-on-Demand (VOD), or sent to failing theaters to die, their cultural impact has been muted. Like much that happened in 2020, these films seem to have a hazy cloud of mist around them, as though we can’t quite remember if they actually came out or if it was just a dream.
The films that came out earliest in the year naturally were impacted the least in terms of being memory-holed. Although they took a financial hit amidst uncertainty over COVID-19 and audience anxiety over going to the movies, in our minds, they exist in a pre-COVID world. Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Johnny Flynn, for example, was released in the United States on February 21, giving it a few weeks before its theatrical run was unceremoniously cut short when US cinemas were closed on March 17. We also got Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) on February 7 and The Invisible Man on February 28 as the last gasps of pre-COVID cinema. Then the game changed.
Although there were films that premiered during the first week of March, their unfortunate timing lumps them in with the next swath of films released in 2020: The hastily-launched VOD victims. The thought behind this from the studios was that by charging rental prices for these films to be watched at home instead of shipping them off to theaters, they would at least be recouping some of their expenses. After all, Americans had more time than ever to sit around and watch movies, since so many workers had been either laid off or transitioned to a work from home arrangement. But with the glut of films suddenly available on VOD, viewers had too many options, and while plenty of movies were rented, few were mentally retained. Only a handful managed to carve out a place for themselves in the minds of audiences or make much of an impact at the virtual box office.
During the first year and a half after COVID-19 reared its ugly head, studios were attempting to make the best of a bad situation. But this often led them to embrace a dual theatrical/streaming release strategy, in which films were either released in theaters and on streaming simultaneously, or sent to streamers only a week or two after their in-person premiere. In theory, it seems like a sound strategy, but it ended up undercutting both of their primary objectives. Even with the funds brought in from VOD and streaming agreements, big-budget films could never hope to earn back what it cost to make them. And without a theatrical release, most movies just joined a big pool of already available streaming content without ever making much of a splash. This mostly applies to films that came out in 2021 and 2022, as studios pushed back the majority of their bigger releases (and in some cases, pushed them back two or three times). But it certainly happened in 2020, as we saw with Bill and Ted Face the Music that August, when what should have been a most triumphant return to the screen for a beloved duo ended up just … existing.
And if these well-known properties weren’t making an impact with audiences, what hope did smaller, independent films have – especially those with darker or more introspective narratives that didn’t make them particularly well-suited to watch at home while folding laundry? If even Disney’s 2020 and 2021 output was left out in the cold, despite films like Luca, Onward, Soul, and Raya and the Last Dragon being solid, original productions, where would movies without the backing of the Mouse stand? Something like Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a raw, devastating drama about a high school student traveling from Pennsylvania to New York City to get an abortion, never had a chance, as much as critics championed it. The same is true for worthwhile but underseen films like The Nest, The Kid Detective, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, Miss Juneteenth, and Sylvie’s Love.
In an industry that was already struggling with how to get audiences to view films as event entertainment when they already had streaming services at their fingertips, COVID-19 delivered a devastating punch to the theatrical release model with ramifications still felt today. But what’s more, the confused and often counterproductive distribution approach that emphasized dumping all of their non-blockbuster content directly to VOD or streaming contributed to a cinematic landscape where interesting, creative, exciting new films disappeared into the abyss. And our 2020 brains were certainly not helping matters – living with constant low-grade anxiety tends to make audiences seek out old, comforting favorites, rather than squandering much-needed mental power on new films. Whether it was the studios’ decisions, our own preferences, or a combination of the two, we suspect that in another five years, we’ll still be rediscovering some of the films we missed out on back in 2020.
