From Art House to Full House: Streaming's Struggle To Balance Multiple Audiences

Early on in my career, a wise mentor pointed out that People magazine far outsold The Atlantic, that romance novels far outsold literary fiction and that bubble gum pop hits got far more radio plays than avant garde jazz.

This was not something unique to late 20th century America, but rather, the way the world has always worked.

Pop culture is popular because it is accessible to many more people. The rise of mass media just meant that the masses had access to it.

That is why I was surprised to read IndieWire’s take on Willem Dafoe’s interview with The Guardian, which they portrayed as “Willem Dafoe: “Challenging” Movies Fail on Streaming Services.” 

(DaFoe’s actual comments to The Guardian were, in fact, far more nuanced and focused on the totality of seeing a movie in a theater and discussing it afterwards with friends, versus watching in bits and pieces at home.)

It’s an interesting point though, one that streaming services are currently struggling with, one that is also hard to discuss without injecting healthy doses of classism.

On the one hand, “challenging” (e.g. “highbrow” or “snobby”, take your pick) movies do get more of an audience on streaming. Especially if they’re being heavily promoted by the algorithm. (Or the marketing department.)

What happens though—and this seems to be particularly horrifying to fans of more highbrow films—is that all sorts of people then wind up watching them.

And, as you might have guessed, finding them lacking.

In pre-streaming times, these sorts of films played at art house cinemas where they were only seen by the types of people who seek out art house films, people who don’t shy away from English subtitles. 

As a result, the filmmakers and critics could be assured they were talking to a very specific audience, their type of audience, one that came with a certain set of prejudices and expectations.

That is not the case with streaming.

Take Saltburn, a movie currently showing for free on Amazon Prime that would fall squarely into the art house category. Set in an English country house (as many art films are) it’s a meditation on class, sexuality and power that checks many of the art house crowd’s many boxes.

Unfortunately, the film also stars one Jacob Elordi, a teen heartthrob of Euphoria and The Kissing Booth fame. 

This means that many of his fans—decidedly not art house aficionados—are watching the movie and finding it wanting. Words like “confusing,” “gross,” “disgusting,” and “boring” get thrown around a lot. 

These are most definitely not the types of nuanced opinions Dafoe was referencing. 

There’s a compelling argument to be made that this is a marketing problem rather than a content one—the movie is front and center on Prime when you launch the app, and so it’s no wonder that a more mainstream audience is tuning in. Especially since, unlike a movie theater, there’s no cost involved, no 12 dollar ticket to buy, no 20 dollar bucket of popcorn and a soda.

That said, how to keep multiple audiences happy and entertained is an issue that all the streaming services currently are facing.

On the one hand, it has not gone unnoticed that HBO is dominating the Emmys and that despite the diminishing importance of awards shows, that still matters.

On the other, the “HBO audience” is not going to give them those big subscriber numbers, especially on their ad supported tiers.

So what to do?

Max seems to have come up with what should be a viable solution: create an interface that feels more like a mini-MVPD than a one-size-fits-all streaming app like Netflix.

So rather than divide content by broad subject matter categories (comedy, drama, international), it has it divided up by brands.

There’s HBO and HGTV and Food Network and Discovery. There’s also Sports (Bleacher Report) and News (CNN Max.)

That ensures viewers can easily find the types of shows they are most interested in without accidentally getting waylaid by a “challenging” (or “unchallenging”) movie.

It also puts less pressure on an algorithm that’s wrong as often as it is right and which often denies users the pleasure of serendipitous discovery.

It’s up to each brand in the Max universe to serve up the kinds of shows its fans want, but with enough brands, there’s also the feeling that there’s a real choice, one that, despite the volume, is easier to navigate than a broad menu of unclear topical categories.

Bonus points on all this is if the merger with Paramount goes through (and CES scuttlebutt was that this is all but a done deal) since the combined entity gets even more popular channels to add to the mix: CBS, Showtime, Paramount+, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, VH1 and MTV.

For viewers who actually didn’t mind the bundle, that’s going to be a very attractive offering, one that feels like “real TV” while managing to appeal to a broad array of tastes and audiences.

Meaning Netflix and Disney may have a strong third competitor. Especially if Paramount is part of the equation.