[COLUMN] Is There Still Time to Stop the Enshittification of Media? | by Darren Mooney

It feels a little bit like nature is healing.

Obsession released on digital this week. A physical media release is set two weeks from now, and it is expected to stream on Peacock some time after that. This comes eleven weeks after the film’s May 15 theatrical premiere, and a month after the initial planned digital release date of June 2. Curry Barker’s low-budget horror film enjoyed great success, grossing $375 million worldwide, significantly outperforming bigger-budget offerings like The Mandalorian and Grogu or Masters of the Universe.

This extended exclusive theatrical release window is notable, as it demonstrates the value in keeping movies in theatres for longer and in making home media audiences wait for releases. It is in keeping with a broader industry sentiment. At CinemaCon, David Ellison promised that Paramount would commit to a 45-day theatrical window. Universal also committed to 45 days, with Steven Spielberg praising the decision but pushing for more. “Do I hear 60 days? 90 days? 120 days?”

This feels like an attempt to return to normality in the wake of industry-wide insanity. During the pandemic, release windows shrunk dramatically. Before the pandemic, the average window was around 90 days, but studios had pushed that window down to 45 days in August 2021. By 2024, the average window for a big summer release had dropped to just 35 days. By December 2025, the average had dropped even further to 32 days.

Obsession was distributed by Universal, who pioneered the straight to streaming trend and boasted in 2022 that they would consider theatrical windows as short as two-and-a-half weeks before sending a movie to digital. Last year, for example, Warner Bros. sent Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 to digital just 18 days after its theatrical launch. Reportedly, when they were considering buying Warner Bros. earlier this year, Netflix’s commitment to a theatrical release was just 17 days.

This was a push driven by technology. The advent of digital purchasing platforms that allowed studios to keep a greater percentage of customers’ money and the launch of subscription streaming services that desperately needed high-profile content to compete in the market encouraged this short term trend. As with so many decisions driven by innovations in the tech field, there was little thought of long-term viability. The plan was to move fast and break things.

They certainly broke things. The problems with this business were self-evident. It is very hard to turn a profit on a movie on streaming, hence why movies on streaming have a habit of just disappearing. Streaming works as the bottom of the waterfall, as a pool that can collect projects after they have already extracted maximum revenue. Sending films to streaming too quickly limits their capacity to generate income, which makes it harder to justify making them in the first place.

Even making these films available for digital purchase makes it easier to pirate them in higher quality. And, more than that, it conditions the audience to wait for the digital release of movies rather than going to the theatre. So compressing all of that down into a couple of weeks cuts the legs out from under these sorts of projects and incentivizes audiences to change their behaviors in ways that are far more damaging to the larger industry.

It is worth noting that the movie industry has always been somewhat volatile. However, it had managed to find a sustainable model that offered something approaching stability towards the end of the 20th century. Movies would be released in theatres, where they would play exclusively for three months. They would then come to home media. They would then be licensed to television. It was an approach that allowed even bombs like The Princess Bride to eventually become profitable.

There is a term in technology known as “enshittification” that is often used to discuss how online platforms inevitably deteriorate over time. However, it is also applicable to larger systems and structures. The past decade-and-change has seen an aggressive enshittification of the movie industry in intensely predictable ways, often tied to the growth and influence of technology companies within the sphere and the desire to appease shareholders with infinite growth.

Streaming is perhaps the most obvious example, where the arrival of Netflix encouraged most of the major studios to spend billions of dollars producing films and television shows to be sent direct-to-consumer via online platforms. There was never any way for this model to be profitable for the studios, and they predictably ran up huge amounts of losses producing expensive content that was barely watched.

Chasing that imaginary high, the studios destroyed beloved and invaluable brands. Disney’s embrace of streaming corresponded with the decline of both Marvel and Star Wars, as the company taught audiences to expect that level of production at home for free. Paramount ran Star Trek into the ground. Warner Bros. decision to send its entire slate of 2021 movies direct to streaming destroyed their relationship with Christopher Nolan and led to owner AT&T pawning them off to Discovery.

Studios have slowly learned from that predictable mistake. Warner Bros. has pivoted many of its bigger brands off the streaming service HBO Max and back to HBO. Disney has cut back on producing live action streaming content and is trying to get Star Wars back to theatres. Paramount are reportedly trying to launch a new theatrical Star Trek franchise. However, the damage may already be done. The brands may already be devalued and broken.

There are other recent signs that Hollywood is trying to pull back from recent catastrophic business decisions. It was recently announced that Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey would not be hosting the early influencer screenings that had become part and parcel of modern movie promotion since at least Barbie. Although influencers have attended some of the movie’s early press and critics’ screenings, there are not special early screenings being organized specifically for them.

As with the extended theatrical window, the studios’ relationship with critics was a stable and functional one. Critics could draw the audience’s attention to good movies. They could convince audiences that a particular movie was worth their time. The quality of individual critics may vary, of course, but there was value in the existence of a profession of qualified individuals familiar with the medium and its history, capable of contextualizing new releases, particularly over the alternative.

There was, of course, a risk in this. Critics would often explicitly identify bad movies and would openly call them out. This embarrassed studios and filmmakers, and it also ran the risk of turning audiences off these films. Critics were something of a hurdle, often demanding quality production and craft. It is easy to understand why studios would seek to undermine and dilute their influence. So the past decade has seen a concerted effort to marginalize critics.

A lot of this has been done by harnessing fan culture. Studios will often claim that poorly reviewed movies are “for the fans.” Actors like Samuel L. Jackson would direct fans to target critics who gave bad reviews to films like The Avengers, such as A.O. Scott. It turned fans into marketers, creating the illusion of ownership of these brands. Critic Amanda Dobbins has talked about “how much it felt like a gross capitalistic exchange; all of these people were just doing the work for, for these companies and accepting less.” Getting consumers to accept lower quality material is just good business.

As with so many of these trends, the influencer screenings offer short-term gains for the studios. It is, after all, risky to screen movies for actual critics and journalists. Critics and journalists have opinions and they might not like the movie. In contrast, influencers are more easily swayed and manipulated, more likely to offer hyperbolic praise. As denizens of social media, influencers are more likely to chase virality by praising a given movie in the most outlandish terms.

It is a proposition like cutting movie theatres out of distribution, in that it offers a very clear benefit to the studios in the abstract. In the short term, this minimizes the risk of the sorts of negative reviews that can make movies harder to sell. The only problem is reality. After dozens of these sorts of cycles, audiences have understandably grown wary and distrustful of influencers. Why should viewers trust people who always have extremely positive things to say?

More broadly, though, like the shortening of release windows helped to convince audiences that films were no longer worth taking the trip to the cinema to see, the drowning out of critical discourse communicates that films were no longer worth talking about. What is a film worth if it cannot stand up to criticism? If it is not capable of withstanding more consideration than a 280-character tweet, an Instagram reaction or even a TikTok ramble making sure to use the studio-approved buzzwords?

These recent attempts to reverse the damage feel in line with larger trends. After spending nearly a decade trying to destroy television, streamers have finally realized that maybe they should just become television, with advertising and live events. Of course, the result of this big circular meander is a worse and more expensive version of television that is probably unsustainable in the long term, but it is also a tacit acknowledgement of the damage wrought by the streaming wars.

These are deeply uncertain times in the film industry. The movies are in turmoil. Warner Bros. is being consumed by Paramount, in large part because the billionaire who owns Paramount has a father who happens to be close friends with the President of the United States. Big-budget blockbusters like Supergirl and The Mandalorian and Grogu are faltering. There is a palpable chilling effect in mainstream culture, as these companies try to appease the right-wing government.

However, there is perhaps some small cause for hope. It does feel like, very slowly and very late, the industry has realized the horrifying consequences of some of its most self-destructive decisions over the past decade or so. The past fifteen years have seen a concerted enshittification of film and television as mediums, an attempt to devalue and debase in the assumption that audiences will accept less and pay more for it.

These recent decisions around pivoting back to theatres, extending the exclusive theatrical window, and moving back towards a model that acknowledges the role of criticism within the larger eco-system, are steps in the right direction. It is too much to hope that things that can go back to the way that they were, that what the studios broke in their haste can ever be fully repaired. The enshittification may be irreversible. However, the window is at least open.