Filmsane

You’ve probably heard the news. The streaming service FilmStruck, is scheduled to be discontinued as of November 29, 2018.

The streaming service that is a go-to place for every film buff on the planet is being canceled due to WarnerMedia’s restructuring, after it had short, but highly successful life on the Internet.
FilmStruck focused on classic, foreign, and arthouse films and it was much loved place for plenty of great directors, actors and producers from all around the world. It’s exactly those directors and film lovers that are now attempting to save FilmStruck from extinction, and I love that. I just love that.

A group artists in the film industry have penned an open letter to Warner Bros Picture Group chairman Toby Emmerich appealing the decision, saying it would be a colossal mistake for everyone that enjoys the art of film-making.

Paul Thomas Anderson, Guillermo del Toro, Christopher Nolan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Hader, Edgar Wright, Guilermo del Toro, Barry Jenkins, Barbra Streisand, and many others have signed the open letter in hopes that the service can be saved, and that petition is still open. The fight for saving FilmStruck is ongoing, and I can’t stress how important this is.
More than 52,826 people has signed the on-line petition, and if you’d like to join in, you can do it right here.

While the streaming device was criticized the functionality of the search catalog, most of its users are uniformly agreeing that FilmStruck provided some of the best selection of movies. It catered the content to cinephiles and focused on rare, classic, foreign, arthouse, and independent cinema, which is not something that you can find that easily these days. Sure there’s an abundance of streaming services (Netflix, Hulu…) but none of them offer a movie selection quite like FilmStruck’s. And just like it said in the open petition…

This goes beyond mere demographics and streaming numbers. This was not about creating the next Netflix or Hulu, this was about preserving the art of film from all walks of life through the years.

It think that’s the whole point. It’s easy to dismiss FilmStruck as just another streaming device. But whomever does that, is missing the whole idea of what that streaming device represented to all the film aficionados. For us it was an archive. A museum where you keep locked the art that someone before you made and its there for generations and generations to come. When you hear Quentin Tarantino say that his film school was the movies he watched when he was a young man, FilmStruck will hopefully make sure that there is another Tarantino in 10 or 15 years down the line.

Don’t kill FilmStruck!