Why’d That Movie Disappear? Welcome to Streaming’s Memory Hole Era - Hollywood Reporter

Or: A new generation realizes that an endless stream of film titles can easily vanish into the online ether.

A reminder of how inaccessible the motion picture legacy might be — and how dependent it is on the whims of a corporate mogul — arrived on Aug.

2 when two related news items hit the entertainment trade sites with the force of mallet between the eyes: Batgirl, the latest entry in the DC Universe pipeline, a film that was basically in the can (to use the dated analog term), was not to receive a commercial release — either theatrical, streamed, or straight-to-video — but instead be peremptorily shelved (ditto) by its underwriters at Warner Bros.

The decision to entomb Batgirl — not to mention Scoob.

Suddenly, a generation weaned on instant access and limitless options learned that the corporate entities who own the films — sorry, “content” — can dispose of them as they see fit.

For the X through Z generations, the realization that the endless stream of film titles can be cut off at the source might be a useful life lesson.

Finally, in the early part of the twenty-first century, the presumptive culmination of the relationship occurred when high-definition digital streaming opened up a virtual library, in both senses.

 If you’re under 30, you probably never knew an entertainment environment in which you were not empowered to summon down from the clouds almost any motion picture you desired.

Motion picture archives as such did not exist and no civilian could enter the vaults of the major studios.

The unequal arrangement began to change in 1935 with the establishment of the Film Library at the Museum of Modern Art.

Like Truffaut, they made the apt comparison: “The situation is very much as though no novels were available to the public excepting the current year’s output.” You couldn’t check out the films from the library, but the range of possibilities expanded exponentially, as far back as the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès.

Given the cavalier manner in which the studios took care of their inventory, the motion picture industry certainly needed a reliable curator of its heritage.

Fields, Mae West, and Marx Brothers films proving consistently popular.  In 1977, the critic and programmer Arthur Knight scanned a circuit of revival houses and declared in The Hollywood Reporter that “the interest in old movies has reached an unprecedented high” with many audiences preferring “the oldies to the newies.”.

For the studios, the cassettes and disks were ancillary revenue streams, but for motion picture fans, they meant property rights

Of course, the revolution wrought by high resolution streaming was the decisive factor in placing the motion picture archives at your fingertips

The streaming generations may never give “physical media” a full-on embrace, but a few fans must be thinking of buying back-up copies of their treasured titles as a hedge against the caprices of the digital overlords

Films — whether analog or digital — are hard to suppress when there is an extant print and waiting audience.  Eventually, I suspect, it will be viewable on the dark web, or a bootleg video, or, best of all, at a secret screening known only to the cool kids