Nolte: Oscar-Bait Movies are Also Flopping on Streaming Platforms

Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment/Screenshot/YouTube
Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment/Screenshot/YouTube

Americans are so turned off by Hollywood, Oscar-bait, and prestige films that they are not only flopping at the box office; they are being ignored at their respective streaming platforms.

“While prestige films’ woes at the post-pandemic box office have been dissected at length, there’s been much less discussion of another side of the equation,” reports the far-left Variety. “For most such movies, large audiences haven’t been showing up on streaming, either.”

Well, well, well…

Although the Variety article fails to report on what these figures truly mean (because that would require moral courage), after we go through those figures, I will tell you exactly what they mean…

Of the five best picture nominees measured by Showlabs, three managed to crack more than 5 million hours watched and unique viewers in their first 28 days of streaming. However, two of those three were “Elvis” and “Top Gun: Maverick,” both major box-office hits; the third was Netflix’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which never received a wide theatrical release but was heavily promoted on the ubiquitous streamer’s homepage.

Meanwhile, “Everything Everywhere,” a film that did earn substantial gross at the box office, won four out of five of its noms at the SAG awards, exemplifying the inconsistency with which high box-office performance or streaming debuts correlate with the awards circuit.

Only 3 percent of HBO Max users watched “The Banshees of Inisherin” for any length of time in its first four weeks of streaming, while “She Said,” an Oscar hopeful ultimately shut out of the race, attracted just 1.8 percent of Peacock users.

Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans only managed to crack the top ten on iTunes after “a significant price reduction (from $20 to $6).” But this jump didn’t last long. “[I]n the two weeks between the nominations announcement and the price drop, “The Fabelmans” had fallen out of the iTunes chart’s top 10 titles.”

Watch below:

Tár, which I loved, was available to stream on Peackcock just a few days after it won a bunch of Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Nevertheless, it “drew less than 2 percent of active users and fewer than half a million unique viewers in its first week on the platform.”

Other than the Fabelmans, these films are all available on streaming services at no extra charge to the subscribers, and the subscribers — other than the box office hits Elvis and Top Gun: Maverick — are not watching them.

Watch below:

So what does this mean, besides the obvious, besides the fact, no one is interested in anything Hollywood tells us is important? Well, now we come to my favorite part…

Remember all the lies the entertainment told us about why these movies were flopping and flopping in a flat-out humiliating way? Remember the excuses the entertainment media constructed the excuses I told you were BS from the beginning. So here’s their excuse, their lie, their BS these streaming figures proved are lies and BS…

These movies are flopping because everyone is waiting for streaming now. So why go to the theater when you can wait a few weeks and watch the movie at home?

Oh, really?

Well, if that were the case — see if you can follow my logic here — wouldn’t people be watching them…at home?

Because Hollywood and the entertainment media that carries the industry’s water have turned into far-left propagandists, they will never-ever-ever-ever admit that 1) the public is rejecting their fascist, anti-art woketardery, and 2) that the problem is content. The box office problem is not streaming, the China flu, the elderly not wanting to go out, the weather, or anything other than the following… No one, not even when it is available in the comfort of a living room, wants to watch Hollywood’s self-important, preachy, anti-art garbage.

Hollywood has a brand problem, and the brand with the problem is Hollywood. Unfortunately, all this has unfairly tarnished a truly great movie like Tár. Still, it is what it is — and what it is is what I’ve been saying for years: America isn’t buying the conformist, self-important, pedantic, sexless, dishonest garbage the entertainment industry is selling.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNCFollow his Facebook Page here.

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