Calling All Caretakers

Last year, audiences got a shock to the system when they learned that studios sometimes decided that some films and TV shows were better dead than alive. While studios have never balked at canceling an unsuccessful TV show or dumping a movie to make least amount of noise, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav took a hatchet to his own company’s property by taking a tax write-off on the nearly completed Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt. The studio then proceeded to outright remove HBO Max films like An American Pickle and Locked Down, shuttling them off into the ether. Other studios have followed suit, switching their promise of streaming platforms filled with forever shows and movies to a threat of “Watch this the day it comes out or it may be gone forever in a few months.”

Some may argue that these deletions are simply the marketplace making its voice known. If these shows and movies had been good and popular, then the studio wouldn’t remove them.

However, if you think quality has ever factored into a studio’s decision for anything, that’s adorable. The reason they put their films in front of test audiences and focus group the hell out of everything is that they don’t trust their own instincts and it’s easier to point to some vague sense of “data,” as if art’s value could be determined by consensus. As for popularity, it’s not exactly fair to the audience to hit them with a deluge of shows and movies at a nonstop clip and expect them to somehow elevate anything. It’s like trying to plant a garden in the face of a tsunami. I’m sure those tomatoes would have been delicious, but oops, they’ve been washed away, and onto the next.

To be fair, it’s tough to blame the studios for embracing an ephemeral model of entertainment. After all, social media is where people go now for entertainment, and while we used to believe that the Internet was written in ink, social media platforms and even websites are now more akin to trying to write a message in the sand before the waves wash it away. Is it any wonder that Hollywood, which has now adopted a Silicon Valley mindset, would rather adopt a model of “here-today, gone-tomorrow?”

But a film that people spend months making is not the same as a TikTok that took a few days. And maybe I’m stuck in the past if I’m arguing that films and TV shows deserve greater preservation than a TikTok. But most social output is the work of a single person, and the function of the platform is you put it out into the world and see what happens. You can grow your channel or account into a business with more operators (and some YouTubers have found success there), but it still needs to be a smaller operation than your typical movie or TV show. Also, if your work gets lost in the shuffle of the platform, that’s typically not the platform singling you out because your latest video didn’t get enough views.

To apply this ephemeral thinking to a collaborative artwork like film or television is, to my mind, madness.

Last October, Hulu released the charming comedy, Rosaline starring Kaitlyn Dever. Screenwriters Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber ((500) Days of Summer) handled the adaptation of Rebecca Serle’s 2012 young adult novel When You Were Mine. Making movies is hard, and Rosaline languished in development hell for almost a decade, but it finally got to exist. And then in May 2023, it didn’t anymore. Disney removed it as a cost-saving measure, and it’s unknown whether or not Rosaline will ever see the light of day again.

Now what?

It’s possible Disney will send it to another streamer in a licensing deal or it may appear as part of a FAST (Free Ad-Supported TV) channel. But for the foreseeable future, Rosaline is, like many other movies and shows, gone.

Some may argue that this is not that big of a deal. It’s not like Disney erased Beauty and the Beast or Fantasia. But that’s beside the point. This framing forces a test on any new movie or show that arrives on TV. The first is one of commercial success, which we can’t know because streamers keep that information locked up tight.1 The second is that not everything that’s a success was a success from the moment of its release. That’s why we have cult classics that studios now find are staples of their overall library. If you only give a film or show less than a year to find an audience, you’ve basically cut off the long tail that made an online strategy appealing in the first place.

Instead, I’d argue that we’re oddly going back to the days of VHS tapes at conventions. In those days, if a show were short-lived or a movie had vanished into the ether, some intrepid collector would basically sell a bootleg. This was, to be clear, illegal. Just because a show was off the air or a movie not available for rental, that didn’t mean that some person was now allowed to sell it. But, there was still a market for that material, and people were going to take advantage of that market while hoping to fly under the radar of litigious studios.

It’s here that I must make a full disclaimer: I do not condone piracy. I believe that art has value, and when you pirate it by not paying for it, you’re basically saying that while you value it enough to possess it, you do not value it enough to give any kind of monetary benefit to those involved in creating that work.

However, we’ve now arrived at a weird spot where studios don’t seem to believe the work has any monetary value at all. In a sensible business model, you create something and people buy it. Due to the vagaries of the U.S. corporate tax code, studios have decided that sometimes it’s more profitable to be an arsonist than work in construction. So where does that leave artwork that needs a home? Where does that leave all the artists who devoted their time and resources to work that no longer will see the light of day?

It has to fall on someone, somewhere to make this material available so that it simply doesn’t evaporate or exist as some blank spot on someone’s resume. I don’t think Rosaline is the greatest movie ever made, but it’s got a terrific performance from Dever at its center. What happens to that now? Every actor only gets so many films, and a rising star like Dever needs those starring credits because it can lead to other projects. Disney has effectively kneecapped her by taking away a piece of work that she may have in her reel, but she can’t use it to build buzz. With no cult classics or way to build a following, Dever can’t point to Rosaline and a new following she amassed with that film. Now apply to that to everyone who worked on that movie. Some may not mind and they’ll move on to the next thing, but others may wish they had something to show because it’s useful to their career in the long term. And maybe, just on a basic level, they were proud of their work, and it’s not great to have the person who bought it not even bother to try to resell it but simply burn it for the insurance money.

This is what’s happening on a grand scale, and there’s no sign it will abate. Studios simply cannot be trusted to protect the things they’ve created. It only has value to them as far as numbers on a spreadsheet, but to artists and audiences, it means so much more. Again, these don’t have to be the greatest works of art ever created, but you never know what piece of art will mean something to someone down the line. I’m not a big fan of the movie Hocus Pocus, and it was only the 34th highest grossing film of 1993 behind a re-release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And yet over time, that movie became dear to people and something they held on to, and it was enough that last year Disney finally released a Hocus Pocus sequel, albeit on Disney+. If Disney thought that only movies and TV shows that were immediate hits had any value, then why make a sequel to Hocus Pocus?

Studios rise and fall. Their CEOs jump out with golden parachutes and are replaced by another MBA who thinks he knows everything and refuses to heed William Goldman’s famous maxim about the business, “Nobody knows anything.” But artists and audiences know better. Were the people at the conventions trying to turn a quick buck with their bootlegs? Sure. But they also knew they had something and if the studios weren’t going to take advantage of it, someone else would. There would be those who knew these shows and movies had value even if they failed to hit an arbitrary number of viewers within their first two weeks of release. These are the caretakers, and while studios may call them pirates, it’s hard to see them as brigands for recovering booty that was tossed overboard.