There are plenty of high-profile filmmakers out there who’ve blasted the unstoppable rise of streaming, with Quentin Tarantino most recently singling out Ryan Reynolds’ Netflix vehicles for criticism. However, that hasn’t stopped many of the industry’s biggest names from either making or starring in them, which has left Tom Hanks sounding a tad hypocritical.
A staunch supporter of the theatrical experience and its unique beauty, the two-time Academy Award winner recently opined to The New Yorker on why he doesn’t care for watching movies on-demand, when reflecting on the current state of cinema as a whole.
“Be honest: How many times have you – and maybe you alone, or you and your family – said, “Hey, let’s watch something tonight”? Great, you pick up the remote and it takes you forever to agree on what you’re going to watch on Apple or Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime. “Oh, no, not that. No, not that. No, not that.”
So 45 minutes later you have decided, by way of bitter compromise, what you are going to watch – which is not what you want to watch, but you’re going to have to go along with it because three of the rotten members of your family have voted in favor of this thing and you’re on the losing side. You turn down the lights. You enter your fucking password. And the code comes along and it asks for your billing address. And someone has to go through their phone, come up with a billing address. Because why did they reboot this? Who rebooted it?
So there’s another 15 minutes that are lost to the process. Now you’re finally ready to start the movie that you have all “agreed” to watch. And you think, At last, let’s watch the movie. 17 minutes into it, you think, I have no investment in this movie whatsoever. I don’t like this movie. I’m going to leave the room and not bother watching the rest of this movie. Right? How many times?”
While you can understand the point he’s trying to make, you can’t help but notice the irony in his statement given that Hanks has starred in no less than five movies that were exclusive to streaming, which began with a passion project he’d written himself after Greyhound debuted on Apple TV.
He also made a cameo in Prime Video’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Paul Greengrass’ Western News of the World only saw the inside of a theater in the United States and China with Netflix handling the rest of the distribution, before he got back into the Apple business with underrated apocalyptic sci-fi Finch, prior to taking top billing in Disney Plus’ horrendous $150 million Pinocchio.
As much as everyone loves Tom Hanks, it’s maybe not very fair of him to blast streaming-only titles when he seems to keep on agreeing to star in them.
