Netflix films banned from Cannes Film Festival competition.
Netflix has taken a beating from the top echelon of the film industry, being barred from competing at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival and having legnedary director Steven Spielberg lobby to keep the streaming service out of the Oscars race.
Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Fremaux said in an interview with French magazine Le Film Français that Los Gatos-based Netflix and other streamers can show their films out of competition, but they won’t be in the running for a Palme d’Or — the highest prize awarded at the event.
Last year, two Netflix films — Bong Joon-ho’s “Okja” and Noah Baumbach’s “The Meyerowitz Stories” — were allowed in the competition, a decision that Fremaux said “created an enormous controversy that has echoed around the globe.”
The uproar stemmed from a conflict between Netflix wanting to debut films on its streaming service and a law known as French cultural exception, which has specific requirements for when films can move from theaters to other platforms such as video-on-demand, television and streaming.
“Last year, when we selected these two films, I thought I could convince Netflix to release them in theaters,” Fremaux told Le Film Français. “I was presumptuous: they refused.”
Fremaux said that while streamers such as Netflix and Amazon are enabling directors to make big-budget films, they are creating “hybrids” that aren’t TV and aren’t quite film.
“Cinema (still) triumphs everywhere even in this golden age of series,” he told the magazine. “The history of cinema and the history of the internet are two different things.”
The 71st Cannes Film Festival is scheduled to run May 8 to 19.
Meanwhile, Spielberg said in a recent interview with ITV News that Netflix films shouldn’t qualify for Oscar nominations, even if they are screened in a traditional theater first.
“Once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie,” he said. “You certainly, if it’s a good show, deserve an Emmy, but not an Oscar.”
Spielberg doesn’t believe that films “that are just given token qualifications in a couple of theaters for less than a week” deserve Academy Award consideration.
“Mudbound,” an acclaimed film distributed by Netflix, is a recent example of what Spielberg is referencing. It had a oneweek theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles and went on to receive four Oscar nominations. Also, Netflix’s “13th,” which did not release in theaters, was nominated for best
documentary feature at the 2016 Academy Awards.
The 71-year-old producer-director, who was promoting his latest film, “Ready Player One,” noted that streaming services are posing “a challenge to cinema,” just as the emerging medium of television did during the 1950s.
“Television is really thriving with quality and art but it poses a clear and present danger to filmgoers,” he said.
One of the problems, he added, is that the major studios are relying on tent-pole franchises and sequels to box-office blockbusters, while smaller, character-driven films are landing elsewhere.
“The smaller films that studios used to make routinely are now going to Amazon, Hulu and Netflix,” he said.
For the 2018 Oscars, Netflix became the first streaming service to earn eight Academy Award nominations.