Tonight, at the stroke of midnight, one of the year’s best films will be readily, quietly available to pyjama-clad night owls at home – while over in the US, it is still screening to admittedly sparse crowds in multiplexes. Feverishly awaited by cinephiles and sci-fi geeks alike, Alex Garland’s Annihilation was not supposed to be a direct-to-Netflix release internationally. Tensely following an intrepid group of female scientists into an uncannily mutating stretch of wilderness from which almost no man comes out alive, it’s a larger-scale follow-up to Garland’s smart, stark, Oscar-winning directorial debut, Ex Machina, and should have doubled down on that film’s sleeper success in cinemas. Watching it at home, I missed the vast, dark expanse of a cinematic environment for its gasp-worthy effects and shuddering sound design – it may be intimately, brain-scramblingly idea-driven, but Garland has fashioned it first and foremost as big-screen spectacle.
What happened, then? Annihilation’s surprise, do-not-pass-go swerve into the streaming realm portends an interesting, somewhat alarming future for grownup genre cinema: films that are too large and flashy for arthouses, but whose adult inclinations or deviance from formula make major distributors commercially nervous. Paramount, the studio behind Annihilation, started to get cold feet after test screenings for the film suggested mainstream audiences found Garland’s film overly chilly and intellectually complex – quite what manner of blockbuster they were expecting from him after Ex Machina, not exactly a candyfloss rollercoaster itself, one can only imagine.
With Garland refusing to make suggested alterations to the final act – rightly so, since the whole film is contained in its wordless, haunting crescendo – and Paramount still licking its wounds from the box-office failure of its last adult auteur experiment, Darren Aronofsky’s outlandish Mother!, the studio settled on a cautious compromise: release it theatrically stateside but cut their losses by dumping it on Netflix abroad. Nice as it would have been had the American public then proven the studio drastically wrong, you can’t count on the American public for much these days: Annihilation took in a somewhat soft £8m on its opening weekend in February. Might audiences on Garland’s British home turf have been more supportive? Perhaps. We’ll never know.
This would be a dispiriting turn of events for cinemagoers even with a less exciting film. That a Hollywood studio has effectively given the 2018 version of straight-to-video treatment to a £29m A-list sci-fi epic because a) it’s deemed too brainy, and b) its predominantly female ensemble, led by Natalie Portman, isn’t deemed bankable enough, says volumes about the fears and biases of an industry in thrall to safe, macho franchise formula. (Would swapping Portman for Chris Hemsworth have strengthened Paramount’s resolve?)
For Netflix, however, it’s a gift after a couple of months that have seen the credibility of the Netflix Originals brand – a catch-all term that covers both the films it develops in-house and the ones it acquires from other production companies – take some hard knocks. After establishing itself as a distributor of quality documentaries and arthouse fare, this was supposed to be the year Netflix broke out into blockbuster genre territory. Yet after derisive receptions for a trio of fantasy duds in David Ayer’s Bright, Duncan Jones’s Mute and the surprise-release The Cloverfield Paradox, Netflix’s creative instincts have been called into question.
With the streaming giant still set to premiere more than 60 new films this year, Annihilation – even if it’s not strictly its own – may restore some lustre to the term “Netflix movie”. But it’s something of a sacrificial lamb, sounding a bleak warning for other directors with cinematic visions that don’t fit the Marvel-era mould. If you’ve got big ideas, you might need to accept a smaller screen for them.
New to streaming & DVD this week
The Florida Project (Altitude, 15)
Unjustly sidelined in the recent awards season, Sean Baker’s spirited child’s-eye vision of poverty on Orlando’s social fringes remains a small miracle of hard truths and candy hues.
Paddington 2 (Studiocanal, PG)
Its predecessor ingeniously fused childhood nostalgia with progressive social politics; this ebullient sequel somehow makes lightning strike twice, with added Hugh Grant japery.
Only the Brave (Lionsgate, 12A)
The generically inspirational title doesn’t do justice to this surprisingly involving, humane true-life firefighter drama, which balances thrilling pyrotechnics with fine-cut character detail.
The Little Hours (Universal, 15)
A farcical revisionist twist on The Decameron, with Alison Brie and Aubrey Plaza, is a pitch that’ll draw a highly specific audience who won’t feel let down by the funny but scatty results.
