Quentin Tarantino is right: streaming is to blame for the action genre’s blandest offerings
As a devoted lifelong cinephile and one of the most famous filmmakers in the industry, Quentin Tarantino has both the knowledge and experience to voice his opinions on the current complexion of Hollywood.
While he often likes what he sees, sometimes he does not. Although he did allow Netflix to re-edit The Hateful Eight into a miniseries and release it on streaming, there’s not a chance the filmmaker would even consider an offer from an on-demand platform to obtain the exclusive rights to distribute any of his movies, even if he’s only got one left before calling it quits.
Alongside Christopher Nolan and Tom Cruise, Tarantino is among the very few A-list creatives in the business who won’t be found taking their talents to streamers. In an attempt to play the studios at their own game, the various outfits have been mounting a succession of prestige dramas and star-powered blockbusters, with the former proving much more fruitful than the latter.
Netflix has won 23 Academy Awards to date and backed a number of ‘Best Picture’ contenders, while Apple scored 13 nominations at the 2024 edition alone. However, the higher up the budgetary ladder it gets, the more formulaic and forgettable it becomes.
Tarantino singled out Ryan Reynolds as being endemic of the trend, blasting the star’s string of Netflix exclusives. “I don’t know what any of those movies are. I’ve never seen them. Have you?” he asked entirely rhetorically. “But those movies don’t exist in the zeitgeist. It’s almost like they don’t exist.”
Harsh but fair. Reynolds’ 6 Underground, Red Notice, and The Adam Project may have done big numbers in terms of viewership, but they fell out of the conversation within weeks. Gal Gadot’s Heart of Stone, Ghosted with Chris Evans and Ana de Armas, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Road House, The Gray Man from the directors of Avengers: Endgame, Chris Pratt’s The Tomorrow War, Jennifer Lopez’s The Mother, and Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon are just some of the titles to have emerged in the last few years.
All of them boast A-list stars or filmmakers, all of them are touted as having been massively popular, and then in no time at all nobody ever talks about them ever again. The majority of them cost well upwards of $100million, too, but it’s hard to justify that investment when none of them has left anything even remotely resembling a lasting imprint on the action genre.
There are still great action movies being made in Hollywood by major production companies, and there are plenty of top-tier actioners being made exclusively for streaming, but it’s never the ones carrying the heftiest price tags or the most recognisable names. The best blockbusters enjoy lengthy runs in cinemas, generate conversation and debate, and are talked about for years to come.
Realistically, is there so much as a single example from a streaming service that fits that description? No, there is not, but they keep releasing at regular intervals because people watch them when they first premiere, and then it’s quickly onto the next shiny new toy. It’s not going to stop, either, but if any other studio put its name on so many unremarkable and unexceptional epics in such a short space of time, then serious questions would be asked.
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