Enlarge / Clear your year end vacation schedule, there's streaming to do. (credit: Nathan Mattise / ESPN / Orion Pictures / Ingrid Haas / Warner Bros. / Joshua Tsui / Fantasia Fest)
"2020 has been a weird year for film" feels like a massive understatement even in the moment. The pandemic has ransacked reliable sources of new films like theaters and film festivals. And any number of major titles we may have looked forward to on January 1, 2020 (from Dune to Top Gun) have instead chosen to push back by at least 12 months.
In just a few years, however, it feels more likely we'll look back at 2020 not as "weird," but as an industry inflection point. Warner Bros. is the first major studio to push an entire year's worth of film releases to streaming services simultaneously with whatever theaters are open, a trend that has loomed over the film landscape ever since streaming-first companies like Netflix and Amazon have become major production powers. And just a year after an independent foreign film took home the Oscars top prize, the uncertainty of the box office moving forward may all but ensure the only stuff that makes it to most theaters (whatever that landscape may look like heading into 2022 and beyond) will be heavily reliant on familiar IP, whether that means superheroes, space, or some other established film franchise behemoth.
Today, we're not here to hypothesize or fret about film's future, though. As grim as things seem, right now there's still an ample amount of diverse new films worth getting excited about. From the streaming services churning out new work with heavyweights (from Mank to Da Five Bloods), to unorthodox productions pleasing massive audiences (American Utopia, Hamilton), to however you want to classify a new 2020 Borat film, 2020 may have been harrowing for films at large but it gave film fans just as many exciting new titles to enjoy as almost any other year.
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