The theatrical business is not going away, he told The Daily Beast.

What to Watch Best Movies on Netflix Best of Disney Plus Best of Amazon Prime Best Netflix Documentaries New on Netflix Advertisement Continue reading the main story Supported by Continue reading the main story This Year Was a Disaster.

We also wondered what the catastrophe called 2020 will mean for movies.

People will want to go back to movie theaters when they can, our critics write, but some of the shifts brought about by the pandemic seem lasting.

Credit. Carter Johnston for The New York Times By A.O.

Scott and Manohla Dargis Published Dec.

Updated March 3, 2021 The end of December usually brings a flurry of big releases and a blizzard of Oscar speculation.

But with the Academy Awards postponed and many theaters shuttered or half-empty, this movie year closes with a shiver of existential anxiety in Hollywood and beyond.

In 2020, Netflix expanded its reach, and two of the surviving legacy studios Warner Bros.

As 2021 approaches, our critics examine the film industry in crisis, and wonder what the future might hold.

A.O. SCOTT Is this the end of moviegoing as we have known it You and I are not in the business of making predictions, and since we are students of film history we know that the death of movies is old, fake news.

The art form has been changing constantly, and so have the ways we consume it: as we have known it includes movie palaces, drive-ins, grindhouses and multiplexes; and also network television Movies of the Week, VHS, Blu-ray, and now streaming.

Still, the situation right now feels different, perhaps more cataclysmic.

I dont doubt that people will want to go back to movie theaters after the pandemic, as they will to restaurants, nightclubs, concert halls and bowling alleys.

But a shift in the industry that was already underway before Covid-19 seems to have accelerated.

Weve sometimes used the studios as a slightly anachronistic synonym for Hollywood.

Are we entering the age of the platforms MANOHLA DARGIS Well, good morning, sunshine Im hesitant to offer any grand divinations, but we know that the movies or, rather, the American film industry is in a state of perpetual crisis.

In the past, the industry has always found a way of circumventing the latest calamity, often by taking advantage of (or even absorbing) perceived threats, like with television.

The threat posed by streaming is on another order of magnitude: i.e., the internet changed everything, including how people watch entertainment.

The rest is history, and another couple of gazillion bucks for Jeff Bezos.

Weve talked a lot about how the pandemic has accelerated this latest shift, even if the larger change occurred with the advent of home video.

Once people could choose what to watch when they wanted, the old days were over (again).

Depending on who you talk to, the movies themselves or at least how the latest generation understood what the movies meant were over, too.

Me, well, I am old enough to remember when Steven Soderbergh made movies that opened in theaters.

Now, he drops a movie on HBO Max and I think, Huh, I guess I should watch that one of these days.

Image Lucas Hedges and Meryl Streep in Let Them All Talk, a Steven Soderbergh film released on HBO Max.

Credit. Peter AndrewsHBO Max, via Associated Press SCOTT Im glad you mention Soderbergh, who has been a thoughtful observer of the industry even as hes worked in just about every corner of it.

Over three decades hes made small and medium-size indie movies, big studio franchises, premium-cable series, self-distributed passion projects, and now straight-to-streaming features.

When some of his peers, notably Christopher Nolan, were raging against Warner Bros.s decision to release its 2021 movies simultaneously on HBO Max and in theaters, Soderbergh was more sanguine, seeing a short-term economic fix rather than a tectonic shift in the business.

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