Dave Bautista, far left, Morena Baccarin, and Jacob Batalon in a scene from Prime Video film Wrecking Crew.Jason Laciste/Amazon Prime
Next week, Prime Video will release a new film starring two household-name action stars (Jason Momoa and David Bautista), directed by a filmmaker who previously helmed a gigantic comic-book movie for DC Studios (Angel Manuel Soto) and, to judge by the number of explosions and car crashes and gun fights in its trailer, made with a budget to rival the GDP of a small island nation. I would tell you the movie’s title, but there is ultimately little point in doing so – by this time next month, the film (all right fine, it’s called The Wrecking Crew) will have very likely disappeared into Prime Video’s algorithmic vortex, never to be seen or heard from again.
This isn’t an isolated incident. Upon learning of the existence of this new Momoa/Bautista joint – an act of discovery only afforded to me by the nature of my job, part of which is to track every single new release – I couldn’t help but start to recall countless other ostensibly high-profile streamer movies that have been instantly vapourized from the public consciousness.
Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson in Prime Video action-comedy The Pickup.Amazon Prime
For instance, does anyone out there know that Eddie Murphy starred in a new action-comedy last summer called The Pickup? That John Cena and Idris Elba played world leaders forced to run for their lives in a buddy flick called Heads of State? Or that Mark Wahlberg headlined a new adaptation of author Donald E. Westlake’s beloved Parker series, directed by Hollywood’s go-to action-comedy guru Shane Black? What about Fountain of Youth, a globe-trotting adventure starring John Krasinski and Natalie Portman? Or Swiped, which stars Lily James in a Social Network-like tech-world thriller dramatizing the rise of the dating app Bumble?
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There are new movies featuring Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon, Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz, Nicole Kidman and Matthew Macfadyen, Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney, George Clooney and Brad freakin’ Pitt. Jack Black plays Santa Claus! Melissa McCarthy meets a genie! These are all real-deal movies that have come out over the past few years, not 30 Rock-style faux-film gags.
And yet despite their star power, their audience-friendly concepts, their generous budgets and the collective industry powers behind them, all these productions and so many more fit into a new category of streaming-era cinema that I’m going to dub Black Hole Movies. They exist for a mere blip of time, before falling into a dark void of no return. They aren’t accidental productions, though, or money-laundering schemes (I think). Streamers take the time and money to either make these projects from scratch or to acquire them for distribution after they have already been independently financed and shot. But then they release them into the world with barely a peep. Why?
Presumably it’s because subscribers like you and I keep watching them, albeit perhaps as mere background noise while we fold laundry or make dinner. For the streamers, that’s enough to register as a view, and for audiences that’s enough to keep paying a few extra bucks a month for the half-pleasure of mindless distraction. And yet the mere existence of Black Hole Movies – the sheer waste of talent, money, effort, time – feels at once bizarre and insulting to the very concept of feature film.
John Cena, Jack Quaid and Idris Elba in Heads of State.Chiabella James/Amazon Prime
Lily James as Whitney Wolfe Herd in Swiped.20th Century Studios/TIFF
There is only a trickle of advance marketing behind these releases, and the movies might pop up on your subscriber homepage for a millisecond. Maybe the odd film gets a blink-and-miss-it festival premiere. Clooney and Pitt’s crime-comedy Wolfs made its debut at the Venice Film Festival in 2024 before quickly vanishing into Apple TV’s catalogue, while Swiped made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, the film slipping onto Disney+ Canada a few days later.
Mostly, though, the movies seem to enter the world with as much fanfare as they leave it, existing only to fatten the depthless catalogues of streaming giants. The largest of these services are locked into a war for the eyeballs of the world, each streamer convinced that it can appeal to everyone and anyone so long as it has a movie, any movie, that matches a few search-engine-optimization-friendly keywords.
By and large, these are not Oscar-calibre titles, the kind of adult-minded cinema that moviegoers have been clamouring for as Hollywood’s traditional studios increasingly tilt toward franchise-ready spectacle. But they are not dirt-cheap direct-to-video flicks, either, like the grungy movies starring faded action stars that once clogged cable television and your local Walmart’s bargain-bin DVD box. Black Hole Movies are, for the most part, legitimately produced, high-budget, star-led vehicles that just a few years ago might’ve found an eager audience at the multiplex. What’s more: They once helped keep movie theatres alive.
Brad Pitt and George Clooney in Wolfs, streaming on AppleTV+.Scott Garfield/Apple TV+
For so very long, the health of the theatrical box office has depended on variety. You had your megamovie tentpoles a la Mission: Impossible and Transformers, but also romantic comedies, gritty thrillers, breezy adventures, sexy dramas and so on. If you weren’t able to get a ticket for the week’s big new release – or simply had no interest in seeing such a thing – then there were options just one screen over.
Here’s a fun experiment: Pick any random weekend from a decade ago, and you can spot how such simple diversification helped buoy the theatrical marketplace. Take the second weekend of March, 2015, whose box office was led by a familiar contemporary phenomenon: a “live-action” Disney remake (in this case, Cinderella). But just below that obvious money-maker was a Will Ferrell/Kevin Hart comedy, a Will Smith/Margot Robbie con-artist thriller, a Kevin Costner sports drama, a Liam Neeson action flick.
Today, the industry’s big five Hollywood studios (Warner Bros. Discovery, Universal, Sony, Paramount and Disney) have either stopped making such lower-stakes films or punted them straight to the streaming services they now own, such as Disney+, Paramount+ or Warner’s HBO Max (which is basically Crave, for us Canadians). Meanwhile, the streamers who have no theatrical business to speak of (Netflix, Prime, Apple TV) are content to pump out one “big” movie after another to give the impression of a firehose of compelling content. But the actual effect is simply overwhelming audiences.
Sure, you can stay home instead of heading to the theatre because there is just so much stuff to watch from the comfort of your couch – but, who are we kidding, you’re just going to scroll endlessly through all those choices. If you’re lucky, you’ll fall asleep halfway through something that you never return to. One disposable movie is replaced by another.
Reese Witherspoon, left, and Will Ferrell in a scene from You're Cordially Invited, streaming on Amazon Prime Video.Glen Wilson/The Associated Press
Not too long ago, when a bad movie opened in theatres and flopped, it still made something of an impact on the culture. Today, they are dropped completely unnoticed.
Of course, no one is exactly mourning the fact that, say, the Kevin James/Alan Ritchson action-comedy Playdate is getting lost in the shuffle (search for it on Prime, if you dare). But as theatres struggle to stay open with the meagre product that they receive, and as streaming audiences are inundated with even more throwaway movies, it’s all too easy to see that we might one day very soon yearn for bad movies that felt somewhat real. And the situation is only set to get worse once Netflix or Paramount snap up Warner Bros., or another merger comes along to squeeze the system that much more.
Who is to blame for this mess? We can start with the stars, who seem all too eager to take an easy paycheque without bothering to inquire whether anyone will actually watch their work (Cena seems to be the biggest offender here, but he’s got plenty of competitors). Then again, talent goes where the money is, and right now, that’s in streaming.
Some services have better track records than others. Netflix, for all the middling trash that it lards onto its servers thanks to licensing content from other production companies, largely puts effort and care into its originally produced films – ensuring such titles as Wake Up Dead Man and Frankenstein get top-tier placement on subscribers’ home screens across the world. It’s not much, but it’s more than Prime, which exists as something of a pump-and-dump operation.
Even as I was writing this column, I received a half-hearted press release from the Amazon-owned streamer about a new Priyanka Chopra Jonas/Karl Urban pirate movie called The Bluff. It comes out next month. But don’t worry about the details. I’m confident that you will never see or hear about it again.