What was the first movie made to be watched online?
When the Netflix co-CEO, Ted Sarandos, hit the headlines after claiming that cinemas are “outdated” and “not for everybody”, most movie lovers were outraged.
The Netflix boss added cunningly that streaming platforms are “saving Hollywood”. Of course, he insisted, most people prefer to kick back in the comfort of their own home with a cup of tea, the sound of roadworks and crying children and infinite other domestic distractions sullying the form, rather than supporting their local independent cinemas to watch a story unfold on the big screen.
How could this even be a debate, let alone one necessitated by one of the most influential men in the industry? When was the last time that the art form was pure and good, and not tainted by late-stage capitalism?
We might trace the timeline back to the first-ever movie made exclusively for online viewing. Importantly, internet culture doesn’t always spell the death of an industry, and is host to thousands of fruitful, imaginative subcultures, but with the rise in algorithmic thinking and the monotonous Netflix slop effect, it might give us some good scale on which to measure our woes.
So, what was the first movie made for online?
The answer, at least, is more charming than Sarandos’ slimy comments on streaming culture: Richard III was a 1996 pop art-inspired version of the Shakespeare classic, which was hailed by Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) as the first movie ever created specifically for the internet.
The film consists of 20 actors, mostly working for free, who donated an entire weekend to making the project. The group, helmed by Australian director Philippe Mora, had chosen Shakespeare because they believed schools and universities would be the only types of groups able to watch the medium. Funny how fast things change.
In fact, Mora’s viewpoint on the then-nascent technology shares a lot of the same befuddlement and rhetoric that our reaction to the rise of generative AI does now: “The internet cat is out of the bag and the major players really have no choice but to embrace it because it is here to stay,” he told Apple at the time, as per The Guardian.
Much like huge conglomerates hiring AI specialists as soon as the dial started to shift last year, the big banks wanted in on the internet: “There was money flying around like crazy in Los Angeles and elsewhere on start-ups that were nonsensical but turned out to be incredible,” Mora added.
“Money was being thrown around for any idea on the net.”
Philippe Mora
This is how the home-video-esque Richard III came about; it cost $50,000 to make, mostly down to the requirement of expensive pro-internet equipment, which was funded by Peter Sterling, a New Zealand mining expert and internet entrepreneur.
The one-hour extravaganza focuses only on Act One of the play, accounting for the fact that the first full version was too long to screen on the internet at that time.
Mora explained, “The film shows some Third Reich footage intercut with Aleks Shaklin as Richard prancing around on a rooftop in West Hollywood doing a great Richard. God knows what NASA, the CIA or whoever else thought was going on.”
Check out some of the footage below, and, to our well-travelled, digitised eyes, the film is as good as prehistoric, edited poorly into random technicolour, sizzling harshly, and acted poorly. It’s, for lack of a better word, absolutely genius.
