Casual Viewing | Will Tavlin

Blockbuster’s own research showed that customers usually had to visit stores for five weekends in a row to get what they wanted

U ntil recently no Hollywood studio had ever released two movies with the same name at the same time. At most studios, such a strategy would be unthinkable. Audiences might accidentally buy tickets to the wrong film, and the PR fallout would be disastrous: snipes from trade-magazine writers; angry calls from investors questioning the studios’ busin... See more

Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings

In 2000, near the company’s peak, Blockbuster collected nearly $800 million in late fees, accounting for 16 percent of its annual revenue

Netflix would charge customers a fixed monthly fee to rent up to four movies at a time. (This was soon reduced to three.) Customers could keep the discs as long as they wanted—no more late fees—but could only rent new movies after they mailed back the old ones

The difference between Blockbuster and Netflix was this: Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful; Netflix rewarded them for being mindless.

Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful; Netflix rewarded them for being mindless.

But the studios overlooked that streaming was more convenient than cable, as Netflix beamed images directly onto viewers’ laptops—and, soon enough, televisions and smartphones—with no annual contracts, cancelable at any time. Above all, there were no ads

Thierry Frémaux, head of the Cannes Film Festival and a vocal critic of streamers, understood this well when he presented the dilemma at a Cannes press conference in 2021. “What directors have been discovered by [streaming] platforms?” he asked. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Frémaux began calling on journalists to name an auteur whose career had... See more