COVID-19 Has All But Erased the Line Between Movies and TV

Today sees the Netflix release of Da 5 Bloods, Spike Lee's follow-up to BlacKkKlansman, the 2018 film that won him his first Academy Award, for Best Adapted Screenplay. The new film follows four black Vietnam veterans who return to the country decades later, in order to search for the remains of a fellow soldier and also seek out a hidden treasure. It promises to be a compelling look at history, both personal and political, with a cast that includes Chadwick Boseman, Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Paul Walter Hauser, and Clarke Peters. And while it's no longer all that surprising that an Oscar-winning auteur would turn to Netflix for his next project — not after the back-to-back Oscar successes of Roma and The Irishman — it was still expected that the film would follow some kind of awards-season rollout, including a premiere at a major festival (perhaps Cannes, as BlacKkKlansman did) before dropping on Netflix.

That's not what's happening, though. Because of pandemic-related shutdowns, Da 5 Bloods won't play at any film festivals or play any cursory theatrical runs to qualify for awards. Instead, it's making its world premiere on Netflix. The rules have changed in coronavirus times, sometimes literally. For this year, the Academy has waived its requirements that films play theatrically in order for films to be Oscar-eligible, long a sticking point for streaming platforms. And with no film-festival rollouts to herald the year's major awards-season releases, a good number of them are debuting directly streaming or VOD. The major studios haven't given up the ghost on theatrical distribution for the year quite yet, but it's increasingly hard to imagine anything but the biggest blockbusters attempting to play theaters in 2020. Which means, for at least this season, streaming will be the terrain upon which the awards season will be fought.

The implications of this shift are wide-ranging and unpredictable, particularly if the goal is to swing the pendulum back once we're on the other side of the pandemic, but the consequence — at least for the time being — is a further erasing of the already blurred line between film and television. Said blurring has been happening ever since Netflix became a player in the realm of original programming. After their early success with multi-episode TV seasons, Netflix got into the feature film game, and by largely bypassing theatrical distribution, suddenly the definitions of television and film needed to be redefined. What separated "Beasts of No Nation," the Idris Elba-starring 2015 film that marked Netflix's first attempt at awards-season success, from any other TV movie? What separates Marriage Story from any of the beautiful, well-made original films on HBO? With fatter budgets and feature-film directors and stars migrating to TV more and more, "production quality" has long since ceased to serve as a differentiator between movies from TV. With the method of delivery largely a moot consideration, the last barricade seemed to be the Oscars and their perhaps-arcane insistence on theatrical distribution. And now, for the moment anyway, that's gone too.

Waiting on the other side of that barricade is a wave of movies and even more platforms ready to launch them. Netflix is armed with a deluge of upcoming feature films, including the latest from David Fincher (Mank), Ron Howard (Hillbilly Elegy), Charlie Kaufman (I'm Thinking of Ending Things), George Clooney (The Midnight Sky), and Andrew Dominik (Blonde). Apple TV+ has no shortage of major talent relationships with projects in the hopper, and this year will have the much-anticipated reteaming of Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray with On the Rocks. HBO Max recently made headlines when it announced it will release the infamously-bad, fan-demanded Zack Snyder cut of 2017's Justice League, which won't necessarily be new or awards-eligible (pause for laughter), but which does help put the brand new platform on the map for future original features like Let Them All Talk, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Meryl Streep.

The changes to the film industry brought on by COVID-19 won't all be permanent, and there will likely be a concerted effort to re-establish theatrical distribution as soon as possible. But this has become an increasingly slippery slope over the course of many years. Netflix makes feature films because they're anywhere from 80 to 210 minutes long and, more or less, because they say so. HBO Max and Apple TV Plus will soon do the same. And couch-bound audiences will continue to watch them, for now because they have to, but in the future perhaps because they want to. Da 5 Bloods is far from the first movie to occupy this middle ground, but it's debuting at a time when that middle ground is starting to just look like… the ground.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.