ASK & DISCUSS
INDEXNetflix Science: Why Aren’t We Watching Documentaries?
12 years, 1 month ago - Helen Jack
Our lifestyle choices our now, more than ever, a public affair. The photos we upload to Facebook and the articles we share on Twitter is our way of telling the world “this is me”, or rather “this is the ideal version of me”. This, it appears, also applies to our viewing habits. A recent article on Wired (http://bit.ly/199Mpxm) reveals that the majority of Netflix users who claim they watch foreign movies and documentaries are hiding behind a cultural façade, and are instead consuming the movie equivalent of a greasy burger with extra cheese. Not to condemn these choices – we all want a burger sometimes – but what’s interesting is people’s desire to be seen as someone who likes more leftfield, independent cinema. I would guess that people think it's more sophisticated to namedrop Werner Herzog more than James Cameron, and therefore falsify their real urge to watch Avatar rather than Grizzly Man.
As a lover and champion of documentaries, this worries me. As a niche (documentary) within a niche (independent cinema) I'm constantly aware of how hard it is to get people to watch documentaries, and make them a mainstream staple. I find it frustrating when so much excellent, unpretentious and simple work is made, only for it to be sidelined and ghettoised as complex, boring and worthy cinema. Most of it isn't. Most of it is very good.
People watch films for their storytelling, right? And escapism. I think docs offer both of these things in abundance. I'm interested to hear people's thoughts on why documentaries are still not people's 'go to' films of choice.
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12 years, 1 month ago - Marlom Tander
People LOVE documentaries. There are loads of them on TV every night, many of them exceedingly brilliant, and many with good viewing figures.
But I think that's the key - TV is great at docus and small scale drama, and now, with all these multiple niche channels, it's very easy to pick on a docu that you've never heard of, but watch because it's on a channel who you like. So we watch our docus on TV, not on Netflicks, and use the channel managers as our first cut editorial filter.
People are not interested in investing loads of time and effort hunting down A* docus when plenty of A grade ones are easy at hand.
Cheers
12 years, 1 month ago - Helen Jack
Having posted the above earlier, I was intrigued to read this piece in the New York Times http://nyti.ms/17dhb2V. This summer's documentaries (in the US) averaged 12 times the original production budget in box office returns - 'Of course, documentaries are generally much cheaper to make than other genres, averaging about $2.6 million in production budget versus $95 million for action films (unadjusted for inflation). So it makes sense that for the small subset of documentaries that do well (remember, these averages include only those films with domestic grosses above $2 million), the R.O.I. can be enormous.' Clearly some of the bigger docs are finding audiences...