When Ben Affleck predicted the future of cinema with terrifying accuracy: “They figured it out”
Say what you want about Timothée Chalamet, but the relentless marketing of his upcoming film Marty Supreme feels like exactly what the movie industry needs. The perennial fear of cinema’s drying up seems to be actualising itself with every year, and if it takes Chalamet standing atop the Las Vegas Sphere, shamelessly plugging the film, then so be it.
The writing has been on the wall for a while, though, and all mediums of art are falling victim to streaming platforms, be it music or film. While it has really expedited in the past decade, it was way back in 2003 when Ben Affleck offered his diagnosis of the problem that was eerily accurate. This was a year that preceded the advent of Spotify by five years and Netflix by four.
Spotting the shifting tides of culture, Affleck boldly said, “I believe that the industry has been too slow to embrace and adopt these paradigms. If you look historically at consumer-based technologies, you have basically shareware that introduces the consumer to it at no cost,” Affleck started in a clip that has resurfaced. “At which point, the consumer is on the hook. They figured it out, they worked out the kinks, they figured out how to interact with it and how to exploit.”
Adding, “And then you charge a fee, and the consumer is willing to pay that fee. I think an annual subscription-based system is one that works.”
He continued, however, using music as an example, which in 2003 was riding the crest of the digital wave under the stewardship of Apple. At that point, iTunes was the primary platform for music listening, but it still required users to pay for a full record before downloading. At that time, the idea of a digital library of content felt fair and easily accessible.
So Affleck continued, “We have the music business, which is a $3.4billion dollar-a-year business, which is largely about 1.7million people in the country spending $200 a year. Those same people would spend those $200 each year to have access to basically the entire library of existing music, and of course, you re-up your subscription because you continue to pay for new music.”
He elaborated, “Royalties would be paid more directly to the artists. You have less overhead, you have less shipping, less packaging, and you pay no mammoth amount of executives at music companies that are glomming off a lot of that money.”
Affleck’s observation was positively astute in 2003 and sought to encourage a genuine and sustainable solution for movies’ rapid evolution into the digital world. But reality has proven that tech companies and money-hungry CEOs have weaponised this new digital platform to make the product far too cheap for the consumer, and thus leaving musicians and cinemas empty-handed.
According to Forbes, Netflix now has a market cap of $143.7billion, boasting more than 230million subscribers worldwide. Meanwhile, UK cinemas in 2024 boasted nearly half that number, with a record admission of 126.5m.
