Does binge cul­ture pose a seri­ous threat to cinema?

The release of the lat­est sea­son of Orange is the New Black on Net­flix pro­vides a time­ly reminder that now more than ever we are an audi­ence of bingers. All 13 episodes were avail­able instan­ta­neous­ly enabling fans of the show to gorge on the entire sea­son in one go. Some­thing has fun­da­men­tal­ly changed in our view­ing habits, but could the way we con­sume visu­al media – whether it’s film or TV – pose a threat to that old­est of insti­tu­tions, the bricks-and-mor­tar cinema?

TV has always dom­i­nat­ed the every­day cul­tur­al con­ver­sa­tion far more than films. Back when sched­uled view­ing was the only way to watch your favourite show it was a com­mu­nal event. Any­one who watched the lat­est episode did so at the same time as every­one else, and water cool­ers every­where became the site for a unique­ly mod­ern rit­u­al. That changed with the advent of VOD ser­vices, which made it eas­i­er to catch up with pop­u­lar pro­grammes, but with the grow­ing demand for instant avail­abil­i­ty the tide is chang­ing once again. Now we are faced with the need to binge-watch entire series with­in days or risk miss­ing out on the con­ver­sa­tion. And when the main­stream con­ver­sa­tion is increas­ing­ly about binge­able series, cin­e­ma becomes an sec­ondary concern.

The aver­age tent­pole block­buster, with huge amounts of mar­ket­ing spend behind it, will be fine; it’s the mid-bud­get films, which already strug­gle for atten­tion, that will be squeezed out. Yet while the out­look may seem bleak for cin­e­ma, the cold, hard stats sug­gest oth­er­wise. In num­bers, if noth­ing else, cin­e­mas are just as strong as ever, with UK admis­sions remain­ing around the £160 mil­lion per year mark through­out the last decade. Atten­dance actu­al­ly increased by £14.5 mil­lion between 2014 and 2015 – the sharpest climb on record.

It seems that a ris­ing tide lifts all boats. Net­flix and Ama­zon Prime and the binge-watch­ing cul­ture they’ve ush­ered in aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly steal­ing pun­ters away from cin­e­mas, but instead mak­ing us all more vora­cious con­sumers. So the ques­tion becomes, why aren’t we full up yet?

One pos­si­ble rea­son is that the film indus­try has adopt­ed the seri­alised for­mat of TV and stream­ing ser­vices. Marvel’s Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse and the Fast and Furi­ous series – to pick out just a few high-pro­file fran­chis­es – now more close­ly resem­ble a col­lec­tion of extend­ed episodes than a bunch of indi­vid­ual films. They’ve tak­en what we love most about long-form tele­vi­sion – the close view­er bond with char­ac­ters, the space for steady devel­op­ment – but kept the bad as well. No one ever real­ly dies, and noth­ing ever real­ly changes. Too much evo­lu­tion, even over the slow-burn of five or six films, kills the cash cow.

We’re also start­ing to see an evo­lu­tion in the way films are being dis­trib­uted. Tra­di­tion­al the­atri­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion – fuelled by months if not years of hype mar­ket­ing – looks out­dat­ed when com­pared with how the music indus­try now oper­ates, for exam­ple. A few years fur­ther down the line in its dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion, many of the biggest artists in the world now release their work with only a few days’ notice for fans. Just look at Beyoncé’s ​‘Lemon­ade’ or Radiohead’s ​‘A Moon Shaped Pool’; with so much con­tent out there a sharp shock of a release could soon be the surest way to get people’s attention.

The VOD indus­try is heav­i­ly reliant on binge watch­ing. Net­flix and Ama­zon may fore­warn view­ers of when their shows will be avail­able, but they still rely on the sheer weight of 10 or 15 episodes drop­ping all at once to cut through the noise in the crowd­ed enter­tain­ment sec­tor. It’s hard to imag­ine the lat­est sea­son of House of Cards or Dare­dev­il hav­ing such an impact if they had been drip-fed over the course of sev­er­al months.

Any­thing that’s not hitched to an exist­ing fran­chise jug­ger­naut may soon have to adopt a sim­i­lar­ly inven­tive approach to suc­ceed at the cin­e­ma. The pub­lic­i­ty machine for those pro­duc­tions is still, by neces­si­ty, a slow-mov­ing fac­to­ry line of teas­er trail­ers, pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als and syn­di­cat­ed inter­views, but there is an oppor­tu­ni­ty for oth­er types of film. Take 10 Clover­field Lane, tech­ni­cal­ly a fran­chise film, but real­ly just an intel­li­gent mid-bud­get thriller that sent shock­waves through the indus­try ear­li­er this year with its sur­prise release. If we’d known about its exis­tence six months ear­li­er, do you think any­one would have cared as much by the time it arrived in cinemas?

Films have to work hard­er than ever to win audi­ences’ atten­tion and they’re becom­ing more like TV series in a bid to ape their suc­cess. But with view­ers not demand­ing quan­ti­ty and qual­i­ty it’s hard­er than ever for mod­est but worth­while films to find an audi­ence. If the num­bers are any­thing to go by, binge cul­ture isn’t going to kill cin­e­ma any time soon, but the change has already begun.