Hey, Netflix just announced its Milestone Movies: The Anniversary Collection, a new slate of classic movies running on the streamer starting this month. The first batch recognizes films that were released in 1974 and are turning 50 this year, including titles like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive (uh, your definition of “classic” may vary, but man if that movie didn’t traumatize me as a kid). More anniversary collections will follow every few months this year for films released in 1984, 1994, and 2004.
This is great to be sure. Any chance to rewatch – or spread the word on – Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is a win, but the press release announcing the collection also felt like a bit of salt in the wound (or is dust on the negative a better analogy?). After all, we’re talking about a grand total of 14 movies in the roster of 1974 releases. I was going to try to relay how many reality shows are on Netflix by way of comparison, but I lost count somewhere between The Millionaire Matchmaker and Floribama Shore.
This isn’t a new issue, but it remains an alarming one in a landscape where Netflix has approximately 250 million subscribers worldwide. The power of the streamer’s almighty top carousel is clear – if you shove it in their face, they will come – but the utter lack of films from earlier eras is an undeniable gap for one of the biggest purveyors of modern pop culture.
Of course, Netflix doesn’t make it easy to find its older catalogue of films (there is a “classic movies” option, but that includes titles like Jurassic Park and The Blues Brothers which, while great, aren’t the type of classics we’re talking about here). Using the sites Flixable and JustWatch, however, I searched for movies on Netflix released in 1973 or earlier. Flixable came up with 13 titles and JustWatch with 16, and about half of those are documentaries or Indian films (which, again, cool, but not really what we’re talking about here).
The number of films from before 1960? Zero.
Part of the reason Netflix is pushing their Milestone Movies collection is because they’re also going to be screening the films in a few theaters the company owns, the Paris Theater in New York and the Egyptian and the Bay in the Los Angeles area. Revival or repertory screenings are awesome, but a cynic might say that when you own a movie theater, you need to figure out what you’re going to show in that movie theater… Might as well chuck ‘em on the streamer too, in that case.
And hey, it’s not like you can’t find classic movies if you’re willing to pay. The Criterion Channel is awesome with their curated selections of old, new, not very old, and very old classics (check out their current post-apocalypse collection!), as is Turner Classic Movies (some TCM and Criterion titles show up on Max as well). If you’re lucky and your local library is affiliated with the service, you can stream some real treasures through Kanopy. And yes, other streaming services offer a variety of older films, largely because they have the rights to much of the back catalogues of their affiliated studios, like Warner Bros. and Max, Disney/Fox and Disney+, Universal and Peacock, and Paramount and Paramount+. Even then, however, it’s fairly slim pickings the further you go back in years.
But perhaps it’s not a stretch to say that Netflix, with its huge reach, has a certain responsibility to represent the vast and important century-plus lineage of the cinema beyond a measly 14 films here or there. Yes, that would involve making deals with the studios that own those films, but hey, it’s not like they’re not already doing that (see Jurassic Park and The Blues Brothers). The problem is there appears to be no interest at the highest levels of the company to provide its users with such films.
When I was a kid, I had to set my VCR to record, dealer’s choice style, whatever late-night movies were on CBS, NBC, or ABC local television in the wee hours of the evening. Yeah, it’s a whole walking-to-school-in-the-snow-barefoot story, but the fact is even then I had access to classic movies, and I fell in love with them as a result. Everyone from Carole Lombard to George Romero to Jimmy Cagney came to me that way, and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything today.
For many folks these days, that’s not such an easy thing to come by. As physical media wanes and traditional television goes increasingly out of vogue, the curation and preservation of cinema history is at an all-time risk. Netflix could be doing so much more to help preserve that history, and provide an ever-more rare service to its users along the way.
Talk to Executive Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!
