The State of Documentary Film - Episode III. The Streamers

Getting An Understanding of How The Streaming Landscape Has Affected the Documentary Film Market

May 08, 2024

Welcome to this week’s Wednesday Edition of The Backlot. These mid-week newsletters are reserved for deep dives of the latest filmmaking news, interviews with filmmakers, and episodic series on major issues affecting the industry.

NOTE - The mid-week version of this newsletter, including the Documentary Film series, is for paid subscribers. All Sunday Evening posts are free.

This week, we’re continuing our series on the Documentary Film Industry and getting to know the streaming landscape…

🎞️ The Streamers and Their Influence on the Doc Market

🎬 Looking Ahead to the Next Edition

🎬 News from the Industry

Catch up with the previous episode first…

Episode 2 - The State of Documentary Film: Getting Deeper at Getting Real

Keegan Sentner

April 24, 2024

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white and black concrete building during night time — Photo by Venti Views on Unsplash

Starting from the Beginning

For decades, documentary films have helped produce society-altering perspectives and shared real-life stories that have sparked change around the world.

These films have helped raise awareness on issues such as climate change, the AIDS epidemic, political malpractice, and the casualties of war, among many other topics.

Although these films are incredibly important, it’s really no surprise that documentary filmmaking has never really been a lucrative career. Yet, over the past decade, things have changed, and a career in documentary film has started to look a lot more financially and commercially sustainable.

This started with the launch of Netflix’s streaming service in 2007. The new platform changed the media landscape forever and, with it, the future of documentary film.

Before streaming, the landscape for distributing a documentary film looked very different. Outside of a few major releases, most documentaries were confined to cable television, film festival runs, and small theatrical events.

The creation of these online streaming platforms changed the way audiences interacted with nonfiction films. These services allowed documentaries to cultivate an international audience that was increasingly hungry for different types of stories told from diverse voices and perspectives.

This led to the market blossoming and what is known as the “Golden Age of Documentary.” Suddenly, filmmakers were selling their projects for millions of dollars, social issue-driven docs were getting greenlit by major studios, and nonfiction filmmaking was in high demand.

As expected, Netflix led the charge, acquiring films at festivals and producing documentaries at a faster rate than any other platform. By 2020, nonfiction became the fastest-growing genre on their platform, and by 2021, it accounted for 19 percent of their entire catalog.

This growth was largely driven by Netflix Originals, which were projects they produced in-house or owned the distribution rights to. In 2012, Netflix released only two original nonfiction films. The number jumped up by 2021 when they released 124 Netflix Original nonfiction films and series.

It wasn’t just Netflix, though; other streaming platforms, notably Showtime, Disney+, and HBO, also participated in the astounding rise of nonfiction filmmaking. By the beginning of 2022, the demand for nonfiction programming was higher than ever, and the future of nonfiction filmmaking looked bright.

Then, all of a sudden, something changed.

The Last Few Years

As we’ve mentioned throughout this series, the last few months of 2022 and early 2023 were when everything seemed to slow down. The post-pandemic documentary boom was winding down, and suddenly, the market looked incredibly dire.

There are a few different reasons for this slowdown, including the pandemic itself, but a large reason is due to the changes in the streaming landscape.

During the rise of documentaries, many filmmakers, industry members, and executives reported that the filmmaking processes were becoming highly scrutinized by the streamers and producers. They were asking for quicker turnarounds and longer series, and filmmakers were forced to oversee larger projects under shorter timeframes.

In the fall of 2022, The Hollywood Reporter ran a piece about the documentary cash grab, talking with several filmmakers, including Alex Gibney and Ken Burns, about the warning signs of the changing landscape.

Gibney, known for films such as Taxi to the Dark Side and Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, started noticing red flags and attempts by streamers to “scientifically rationalize” the process.

“Both us as a production company and then soon the streamers themselves were trying to reintroduce formulas,” Gibney told THR. “And suddenly, we realized that that was the road to perdition.”

Other filmmakers reported similar issues with the commercialization of the industry, including questionable ethical practices in nonfiction productions. Projects were starting to pay their subjects, giving them final-cut permissions, and testing the boundary between fact and fiction.

The market was attempting to treat nonfiction filmmaking as a commercial endeavor without establishing the necessary guardrails to prevent major companies from taking advantage of the genre.

These practices also spurred increasing competition and attempts to increase production to keep up with the demand of audiences. In journalism, this is known as “feeding the machine,” and once you start feeding the machine, you can never stop.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen this content production process destroy the journalism industry and send it into a downward spiral.

As media companies and publications have demanded more content to keep up with the machine, they’ve prioritized quantity over quality, slowly eradicating the time and resources necessary for good reporting.

In the past two years, this has led to major layoffs at National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Buzzfeed, and The Los Angeles Times, as well as the closure of respected publications such as Vice, which filed for bankruptcy in 2023.

That’s not even discussing the onset of artificial intelligence and the announcements of several major publications that they will start using AI for journalism and reporting. In fact, The Ankler reported this morning that DotDash Meredith has struck a deal with OpenAI to use ChatGPT—fun stuff.

This idea of trying to feed the content machine isn’t conducive to the documentary film industry, and without proper mechanisms to handle the commercialization of the industry, the doc market and its buyers began to falter.

A Loss of Distributors

Along with the loss of journalism outlets, the loss of distributors, especially streaming platforms, has played a major role in the slowdown of the market.

As mentioned, streamers such as Showtime, Disney+, HBO, and Netflix were among the biggest buyers of nonfiction projects. In addition, a number of smaller companies, such as CNN, New York Times Presents, and Discovery, helped saturate the market with a diversity of buyers.

Unfortunately, in the past few years, that wide range of distributors has dwindled to fewer and fewer players in the market.

Several platforms, such as CNN, gutted their nonfiction film budgets. Some companies merged together, such as Discovery and Warner Brothers. Other outlets that allowed streaming, such as Vice and, more recently, Participant Media, have shut down altogether.

Even this past week, news broke that New York Times Presents, which produced nearly 50 documentaries, is scaling down due to changes in the company strategy.

Fewer and fewer companies are picking up or greenlighting films, which means filmmakers have fewer options for financing their projects.

Sundance, one of the best litmus tests for gauging the documentary market over the past decade, has highlighted this loss of buyer parity.

In 2022, 9 documentaries were acquired out of Sundance, including major hits Fire of Love, Descendant, and Nalvany, which eventually won the Oscar. Eight different distributors picked up these films, with only National Geographic Films double-dipping on Fire of Love and The Territory.

Compare this past January’s festival, when there were 6 acquisitions, all but one of which was acquired by Netflix. The other was acquired by Warner Bros. Discovery.

Although people have seen this year’s festival as an optimistic turn for the market, this lack of parity is concerning.

If Netflix and a few other major distributors become the only buyers of nonfiction films, they will be able to dictate the market.

This could create a bottleneck for the diversity of stories we saw in the past because these distributors will be able to prioritize the genres that turn profits, such as true crime, celebrity, and sports docs.

Other topics may become more excluded by the market, receiving less financial support and making it harder to find success. This could even have widespread implications for the practice of nonfiction filmmaking as a whole.

It’s still early to confirm this trend, but it should become more apparent over the summer as notable films make their debuts at Cannes, Tribeca, TIFF, and Venice.

Hopefully, we will still see parity in buyers, and the doc market will remain a competitive landscape that fosters new voices, diverse perspectives, and a wide range of socially driven programming.

On the Next Episode

In the next episode, we’ll keep diving into the landscape of streaming and how it is affecting the documentary film market.

With our broader understanding of streaming’s role in the rise and fall of documentary film, we can start to explore the more nuanced ways these companies are influencing the documentary landscape.

Next week, we will be launching our first in a series of talks and conversations with filmmakers and industry members. I will be joined by Gavin Shwahla, an award-winning documentarian, and photographer using different mediums to shed light on various issues in environmental conservation

Mid Week Updates

This week’s updates from the world of filmmaking…

Civil War, Alex Garland's political thriller, has passed $100M worldwide, making it A24’s second movie to reach that mark.
Lady Gaga has announced her self-directed concert film, Gaga Chromatica Ball, which will premiere on Max on May 25th.
Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, has indicated that Marvel Studios will reduce their output to 2-3 films and 2 television series per year.
According to a new report from McKinsey & Co. and Goldhouse, less than 30 percent of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders feel represented in film and television. The report indicates increasing API representation could lead to $2 to $4.4 billion in additional revenue.
Coralie Fargeat’s upcoming body horror The Substance, starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, has been acquired by Tubi. The film will premiere at Cannes later this month.
According to Bloody Disgusting, reports that A24 has halted development on Crystal Lake, the prequel to Friday the 13th, are false. The production company is reportedly “retooling” the series instead.