Have I felt alone for so long because these special extras feel like they’re generally only special to me, and I could just mindlessly binge Friends (which is bad) or The Office (which isn’t bad, but I’ve seen it enough) without complaining about this possibly meaningless crusade? Let’s not make this personal. Do I get concerned looks when I complain that a special SteelBook release doesn’t deviate from the already-available bonus features in a standard Blu-ray? That’s not unimaginable.
MOVIE EXPLORER APP BONUS MATERIAL MOVIE
Īm I going to have a movie night with friends where we watch a feature-length commentary or a recorded Q&A from a festival screening? Probably not. HBO certainly saw the value when it came to explaining why Game of Thrones’ last season was such a rush job. These materials exist and are put out on disc releases, so why can’t I enjoy them on streaming platforms? I’m sure Disney and Netflix and Amazon and AT&T have the cash on hand to clear whatever rights issues might be standing in the way, or to produce original features for content. I want to be able to learn more about a movie, to immerse myself in these stories and the artists who brought them to life. For the vast majority of these streaming platforms’ titles, the best we can expect is an attached trailer. Yet, seeing these options here and there only makes me crave more. And Disney+ has the occasional special feature that’s actually special, like the feature commentary that can play during Avengers: Endgame (if there were better commentaries available, it would be less special, but beggars can’t be disappointed about listening to the Russo brothers explaining time travel, I guess). Amazon Prime has X-Ray trivia running over their movies, if you want to keep pausing and checking intermittently. HBO GO sometimes offers extended editions of a movie. Sure, Netflix and Hulu have some featurettes or clips hidden with certain releases – the odd podcast or alternate cut. I want to be able to learn more about a movie The next thing to do is to actually show where they are, instead of pretending they don’t exist. The first step in offering great bonus features is to make them or at least make them available. You can search for bonus features and you can add one of them to your watchlist without adding the movie it’s related to. Movies are treated as films or collections, and when you open them as collections, all the extra shorts, commentaries, interviews, and extras are laid out, easy to see.
The Criterion Channel treats bonus features like they’re worth watching, and it’s clear when you look at the UI. Movies are a whole lot better with context - and a little extra something. When Criterion’s movies end, they don’t force anything on me. The first thing I watched on the service when I activated my subscription was a making-of documentary for A Hard Day’s Night. The one streaming service that I’ve found that really, fully does this - where you can generally depend on having more to watch than just the movie - is the Criterion Channel, where much of the library and supplements from the Criterion Collection are available. In the age of limitless content and fully customizable menus, this experience is all but dead. I miss the context and bonus content that would come with DVDs, ones that encouraged me to stay with a movie even after watching it. I want to see alternate takes the filmmakers opted not to use in the final work and hear commentaries from those artists, or the scholars who can teach me more about what I’m watching. I want to learn more about the creative process behind the piece and engage with the ideas of whatever media I’ve just seen.
MOVIE EXPLORER APP BONUS MATERIAL TV
While I crave a moment to process the film or TV show I just enjoyed, I also want other ways to enjoy them. I want to be able to sit with the movies and let them soak in, and that’s often not easy to do when I’m being pushed to watch something else and move on – because, to analytics-obsessed streaming services, everything is content and the goal is for me to be yet another number in a streaming quarterly report. Netflix doesn’t let me have a quiet moment from the second I open it, and at one point or another, it had buttons to encourage skipping the opening credits or rewatching a scene that had just finished in the middle of a movie. Disney+ won’t start something without a click, but it’ll try to get me to start something else while the credits are rolling. Hulu, like many other services, has autoplay set up so that as soon as I finish one movie, I’ll start whatever’s next.
0 kommentar(er)
