How Streaming Is Making Us All Cinema-Illiterate

Right now, there are 4,000 movies on Netflix. Just about any type of film you might possibly want to watch — from a rom-com about a K-pop star with an S&M fetish (Love and Leashes) to a coming-of-age story about a transgender Yiddish woman having a belated bat mitzvah in Buenos Aires (Transmitzvah) — is available for your viewing pleasure on the world’s biggest, most popular streaming service.

Any type of film, that is, except for one: movies made before 1973.

As of January, the oldest non-holiday-themed Hollywood feature in Netflix’s catalog was The Sting, the Robert Redford-Paul Newman caper flick that, 52 years ago, swept the Oscars. It’s a delightful picture, one of director George Roy Hill’s masterpieces, with a plot twist-packed storyline and a jaunty Marvin Hamlisch score that briefly propelled ragtime jazz to the top of the Billboard charts. Still, Netflix can’t be serious. Did the company’s algorithm truly determine that nothing made prior to 1973 was worthy of streaming in January of 2025? Not The Godfather? Not The Graduate? Not Hill’s other masterpiece starring Redford and Newman, 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?

The great promise of streaming, of course, was supposed to be a world in which every movie ever made would be immediately viewable at the touch of a button. And in some ways, Netflix notwithstanding, that promise has been kept. There are scores of platforms — Amazon, Fandango, Paramount+, MGM+ and TCM, to name a few — where you can find huge libraries of classics, if you’re motivated enough to look for them and shell out the rental or subscription fees. Wait long enough and even Netflix will sometimes surprise you with a seasonal oldie (It’s a Wonderful Life popped up during Christmas).

And yet, as it turns out, the streaming revolution has been something of a disaster for classic movies. It has, in fact, been slowly and methodically wiping the collective culture’s memory of anything made before … well, 1973 seems about right.

Back in the Before Times, the pre-streaming era, budding young cinephiles learned about classic movies the old-fashioned way, by staying up past their bedtimes and tuning in to The Late, Late Show. In those days, there wasn’t much choice in the films you watched on TV. Sometimes you’d get served gems like Grand Illusion, sometimes you’d be force-fed dreck like Beach Blanket Bingo. But that serendipitous cinematic education taught more than one generation of film lovers (and future filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, who was all but weaned on late night movies) about film history, the classics as well as the stinkers. Everyone back then could do a lousy Humphrey Bogart impersonation — or at least knew who Humphrey Bogart was. Just about everyone had seen Casablanca at least once.

Thanks largely to platforms like Netflix, governed by computers with zero interest in serendipity or film history, that’s not the case anymore. Instead, the streaming revolution has created an entertainment environment so cluttered with uncurated content — thousands and thousands of movies, limited series and, increasingly, originals — that classic films get buried in plain sight, sort of like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie (ask an old person). Why would viewers today bother to search Apple TV+ or Google Play for a classic film like, say, The African Queen, when their Netflix home screens are already beckoning them with original offerings like Kinda Pregnant and La Dolce Villa? Of course, there’s every reason they should watch John Huston’s 1952 adventure story — not the least of which is Bogart and Katharine Hepburn’s bristly onscreen chemistry — but most won’t. They’ll watch Amy Schumer strap on a fake belly bump instead. Because there isn’t a Late, Late Show making them watch the good movie.

No doubt there are smart economic reasons behind Netflix’s decision to ignore the first 50 years of Hollywood’s history. Clearly the platform has crunched the numbers and determined that its 300 million subscribers just aren’t interested in movies made before The Sting. Obviously, it’s decided that making and streaming its own content, rather than paying licensing fees for older films, is a more profitable business model. And that’s OK for Netflix. Nobody appointed the streamer guardian of the cinematic temple. It can make all the crappy Rebel Moon and Red Notice movies it wants. It can pick any arbitrary cutoff year for its library that it desires. But it’s worth noting what’s being lost in the process, as streaming and its cold algorithmic imperatives continue to take over the culture and turn us all into cinematic illiterates.

Which is nothing less than Hollywood’s legacy — its soul, if you will.

No less an authority than Bogart’s 75-year-old son confirms the worst, bemoaning the fact that his dad has largely been forgotten by modern audiences. “Kids don’t really know [who he was] because it’s tough when you’re looking at your phone, and you want to see the latest Marvel,” Stephen Bogart said last year while promoting his new documentary, Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes (also, by the way, not available on Netflix). “Not that I have anything against Marvel,” he went on. “I used to collect the comic books. But people are not aware of the past at all.”

This story appeared in the Feb. 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.