Matt Damon is right: phones + Netflix mean we’re now in the age of cinema film

MAt Damon has a new movie, a $100 million cop thriller co-starring Ben Affleck called The Rip. It’s currently the most watched movie on Netflix, because it’s a Netflix movie. So how does Damon choose to promote his new movie on Netflix? By putting in Netflix.

During an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience, Damon went to great lengths to describe the differences between going to see a movie in theaters and watching it on TV. “I always say it’s like going to church — you show up at a certain time. They don’t wait for you,” Damon said, explaining his experience watching “battle after battle” at an IMAX screening.

On the other hand, making something you know will primarily be watched on Netflix means succumbing to a lack of focus. Maybe the lights are on. You’ve probably been watching it in parts. Your kids probably won’t shut up. Damon told Rogan that the streamer asks filmmakers to simplify things a bit, adding a big action scene early on to keep viewers interested, advising them: “It wouldn’t be terrible if you repeat the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.” “This is really going to start violating the way we tell these stories,” Damon added.

Now, there are three ways to take this. The first is: Well, duh. If you’ve ever watched anything on Netflix, you’ll know that what Damon said is absolutely true. If the streaming era of filmmaking has a defining characteristic, it’s that things often have to be slowed down and explained to us over and over again as if we were a bunch of kids.

It’s not a movie, but the latest season of Stranger Things was perfect proof of that. In fact, I’m convinced that its episodes were too long, because before anything could actually happen in the show, some of the characters had to slowly explain exactly what they were about to do. This arguably reached its lowest point in a scene where someone literally used some props to carefully replicate the plot so far, which is the storytelling equivalent of watching a pub prove the offside rule with beer mats.

There are exceptions to the rule, of course – usually if Netflix thinks they’ve got an Oscar, perhaps with Frankenstein or Dream Train, directors are usually allowed to be as indirect as they want. But apart from that, we should all just sit back, shut up and wait to be spoon-fed.

The second thought is that maybe, just maybe, Netflix knows what it’s talking about. It’s obviously very frustrating to think that the elected owner of Warner Bros thinks anyone who watches anything is a distracted, uninterested idiot. If this had always been the case, there’s a good chance 2001: A Space Odyssey would have had a goofy friend who kept asking David Bowman what all the bright colors meant.

However, Netflix also has a huge amount of granular viewing data. It knows what we watch, why we watch it, and for how long. This is clear, concrete data that does not tend to flatter us with high-level assumptions. He looked into his crystal ball and saw that we were all just a bunch of slow-jawed monkeys watching things with one hand holding our phones and the other hand going into the front of our pants. In other words, if Netflix says we need the plot explained to us over and over again, it’s because it’s crunched the numbers and knows we do.

But obviously we shouldn’t ignore the third point here, which is that Damon is just a few months away from achieving the biggest success of his entire career. As the star of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Damon knows he’s about to star in a huge theatrical show that will likely tinker with the concept of time and (whisper it) will in all likelihood be very difficult to follow at times. He knows this will make a billion dollars, giving him a very powerful position to show off to Netflix.

However, if Netflix had made The Odyssey, Damon would have kept stopping work to explain why so many characters have similar names. It probably would have been $2 billion, because that’s what we deserve.