Like casual social hugs and the daily commute to the office cubicle, the platform movie release has been a casualty of the age of COVID. You remember the platform release, don’t you? It used to hap…
”). There are plenty of art films and documentaries that still open on just a few screens, like “Bergman Island” or “The Rescue” or “Titane,” so it’s not as if the limited release has totally disappeared. And just this week, the Joaquin Phoenix awards-bait darling “C’mon C’mon” got a vintage platform opening.
But that’s the rare exception. And looking at the numbers, what strikes me about the wide release of films like “Spencer” or “Belfast” or, this past summer, the edgy knockout “This instant wide-release pattern may be linked to the pandemic . It may also be considered a kind of loss leader for streaming . But it reflects a throw-it-out-there strategic crudity that is not doing these films any favors.
Of course, you might say that I’m just being defensive about the fact that “Spencer,” a movie I adore , isn’t exactly setting the box office on fire. That’s a feeling familiar to me from the platform era. A movie I believed in would break records on a tiny number of screens, and everyone would get stoked. Then it would open wide, and the numbers would be meh. That happened all the time.
I do realize that, due to the pandemic, older audiences for serious adult dramas remain more skittish about returning to the movies. That’s a factor, no doubt. Yet it hasn’t hurt Wes Anderson, whose new film, “The French Dispatch,” after receiving some of the most dyspeptic reviews of his career, is the season’s bona fide breakthrough indie hit.
True confession: Back in the heart of the platform era , I often used to wish that “small films” I loved — God, do I hate the term “small films” — could bypass the platform-release rigmarole and open the same way that a “Resident Evil” movie does. I used to wonder whether all that fussy care and tending was not, in fact, keeping “small films” small. Maybe they needed to open big so as not to beas small. But I think I’m now done wondering that. In other words: Be careful what you wish for.
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