Sing Sing, the earnest prison drama that recently netted Colman Domingo his second shot at an Oscar, had its first public screening back in September 2023. George Santos was still a member of Congress and the WGA and SAG were still on strike when the film premiered at a subdued Toronto International Film Festival, where it garnered praise and, more importantly, the attention of A24, which ended up buying it. Sing Sing hit theaters in July 2024 in a platform release that started on four screens and topped out at around 200 — far from being in every multiplex, but it wasn’t making enough money to justify going wider. Instead, knowing it had an Oscar contender on their hands, A24 opted to hold Sing Sing back from home video until just last week, after it had returned the movie to theaters, in order to capitalize on buzz about potential nominations.
This sort of strategically convoluted route isn’t unusual for an arthouse film, which might round multiple festivals in search of distribution, and which depends on early acclaim and awards to serve as an extension of its marketing budget. But for a film lover who’d been interested in Sing Sing since that initial burst of festival coverage, and who didn’t live near one of the major markets where it was playing in theaters, the wait must have seemed interminable — 16 months from that distant premiere to its being readily available to rent.
Movies rely on time-tested mechanisms of anticipation, which is as true for a studio releasing a trailer for a trailer or raising a leg over a weekend two years from now on behalf of Untitled Event Movie as for an indie winding its way from the festival circuit to select theaters hopefully near you. The difference is that, while everyone pretty much gets their shot at seeing Untitled Event Movie at the same time, the latter process can feel like watching other people getting let past a series of red ropes while you’re left outside. Big festivals are insular and expensive, and even if you’re able to travel to one, there’s no guarantee you’ll get tickets to the individual movies you most want to see. Smaller films may officially open in theaters in New York and L.A. and take weeks to expand elsewhere, leaving you shit out of luck if you’re not within driving distance of a major city (and if you’re not in the U.S., access is even less predictable). The drumbeat of discourse being counted on to drive interest in these movies can fuel resentment, creating feelings of being unfairly excluded from a conversation that the digital era has made inescapable.
The obvious solution is to just be patient because everything makes its way to home viewing and some streaming platform eventually, and usually on a much brisker timeline than 1.333 years. But that same digital era has made me a lot more sympathetic to those who, for understandable reasons, consider home viewing to be the moment when a movie is actually released into the world and find all that trickling through festivals and limited releases — while a privileged minority log their reactions on Letterboxd — to be an exasperating sort of cinephile edging. Even if that slow build in theaters is an integral part of getting audiences out to see films that aren’t obviously commercial, and even if the festival circuit exists as a way for independently funded work to attract attention and acquisition.
The digital era has also made me more amenable to piracy, for different reasons. Tectonic shifts in the entertainment industry (as a result of mergers, streaming revolutions, and the confounding whims of massive media giants) have led to myriad rights issues, leaving so many titles in a purgatory of accessibility, not to mention the recent phenomenon of companies deleting entire movies in exchange for tax breaks. But I still winced when Twitter erupted in flurries of debate over people dropping links to pirated copies of Nickel Boys. What struck me was the sense of aggrieved righteousness of some of the posts, which treated the very idea of expecting anyone to pay for RaMell Ross’s sumptuous first-person adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel as entitled, despite the fact that it’s one of the best films of the year and that it has been struggling in theaters in a way that’s clearly going to make the now Amazon-owned MGM write it off as a bad bet. I’m not talking about people who live in India or the Philippines pointing out that Nickel Boys may very well never get released locally. I mean the people who posit the very idea that they want to see Nickel Boys as payment enough — that a movie priced at anything other than free is too expensive and that an artist should be grateful simply for someone willing to watch their work. The film becomes simultaneously so valuable it has to be made accessible immediately and also so innately worthless that to even suggest it has monetary worth constitutes an act of gatekeeping.
These are variations of well-trodden arguments on the internet, but they’re getting honed by an age of instant gratification, in which tech companies have spent years inserting themselves into the middle of our relationship with the culture we consume by way of streaming platforms and have assured us that our attention (in addition to our monthly subscription fees) is payment enough. Posting clips, stills, and, apparently, whole movies online is guided by clout-chasing, sure, but it also has been metabolized into a show of support. This war’s long been lost when it comes to music, where the very act of listening to a song has been transformed into the act of support that buying tracks or albums used to be.
Film doesn’t work that way, or at least it won’t until certain streaming giants swallow everything whole. We do have a model for movies being made legally available everywhere, instantly. It’s the Netflix model, and the years have proven that it’s terrible for creating any traction or lingering cultural conversation around most releases (remember Apollo 10½? The Killer? Athena?) — to the point where Greta Gerwig used the influence she accrued from Barbie’s success to insist the streamer put her upcoming The Chronicles of Narnia adaptation in theaters via an IMAX release first.
Most filmmakers depend on the financial success of one project to help them make the next, either through the support of a studio or by cobbling together funding from different production companies, investors, grants, and other sources of support. It’s almost impossible for a filmmaker to put their own work into theaters in any significant way, much less market it effectively, and to drop a film directly online is to watch it disappear into a sea of noise without any chance of even recouping costs. Indie and arthouse films depend on the precarious ecosystem of fest audiences, theatrical releases that take weeks to spread across the country, and awards — on making people wait. And the perverse reality is that the people who are the most passionate are most likely to wage war with this setup.
Take this year’s Sundance, which closed out, as it has in recent years, with a window in which a selection of titles were available to rent digitally. By offering this particular viewing experience, the festival’s trying to open up the annual event to people who aren’t able to make the pricey trek to Park City — only it went wrong this time thanks to two overly enthusiastic fandoms and shifting standards over something being fair game as soon as it’s available on our personal screens. First, Selena y Los Dinos had to be taken down after producer J. Daniel Torres noticed clips from the film, a documentary about the life of the late Tejano singer featuring never-before-seen home videos, turning up on social media. Then Twinless, a comedy written, directed, and featuring James Sweeney, was removed after fans of star Dylan O’Brien posted clips that included sex scenes and spoilers online. As with most titles that get made available digitally, both Selena y Los Dinos and Twinless were independently funded acquisitions that haven’t yet sold to a distributor — there’s little advantage in putting a film online through the festival if you’re a studio that’s going to release that film yourself. But that also puts them in a more precarious position when it comes to piracy, as it’s unclear what the possibility of your film having been screen-recorded in its entirety will mean for your sales prospects.
The experimental horror film Skinamarink became an internet phenomenon after leaking online after a digital festival screening, something that probably helped it in the long run. But for features like Selena y Los Dinos and Twinless, it’s not being discovered that’s the issue, but the potential that people will harvest parts of the film for content and that no one will bother with the rest. It’s a strange thing to have your project essentially loved to death, though it’s also a lot to ask that fans familiarize themselves with the ins and outs of independent distribution.
“Honestly, if people knew that what they think is a harmless thing of putting a couple of minutes online would jeopardize the film being shared with other fans, I’d be very surprised if they would’ve done it,” Julie Goldman, another producer on Selena y Los Dinos, says. She points out that fans were the ones who tried to put a stop to the piracy, which ultimately led to Sundance pulling the movie from its digital platform. “People on those sites were like, ‘Hey, don’t do this. Now I can’t watch, and also, we want this film to be seen far and wide, so please stop.’ And they pretty much did.” An Instagram post from Selena y Los Dinos guitarist Chris Pérez is awash with comments castigating the people who committed copyright infringement and asking, of course, when the film would be made available, something that isn’t yet certain (it will next be playing at SXSW).
Goldman, who has had other projects play on the Sundance digital platform without problems, sees the issue as one of context. “I think it would make sense to message what needs to be messaged ahead of those moments — not just some anti-piracy thing, but a real note about this film, why this is important.” Could reminding audiences of the people behind these projects change how they think about the long paths that indies and arthouse films take and why immediate digital access isn’t always a viable option? At the least, it could encourage those who must pirate something to, for the love of God, have some dignity and keep quiet about it.
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