The films ‘too bad for the cinema’
When directors are promoting their films, they usually talk about how happy they are to have put their own personal vision on screen. Not so Dexter Fletcher, when he was promoting Ghosted, an Apple TV+ action comedy starring Chris Evans and Ana de Armas. Discussing the film on Alex Zane’s A Trip to the Movies podcast, Fletcher mentioned his plans for an opening sequence in which De Armas would drive through the mountains for three minutes. Executives at Apple Studios vetoed the sequence because, they said, if “something doesn’t happen in the first 30 seconds, the data shows that people will turn off”.
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Fletcher didn’t mind. “You can’t make a film for streaming the same way you make a theatrical [ie, a film intended for a cinema release],” he insisted. “You can’t. There’s different metrics and there’s a different approach. There has to be, even for the reason that people can turn off very quickly… What is a cinematic experience for me as a filmmaker… becomes, ‘Ok, I’ve got to adjust to retain my audience’.”
So now we know. Streaming enables our viewing habits to be monitored more closely than ever before, so while traditionally made films still end up on Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV+ and other streaming services, there is a whole new wave of films being precision engineered according to previously unavailable “data” and “metrics”: shiny, big-budget updates of what were once termed “direct-to-video” movies.
The most important statistical category, said Fletcher, is “completion”, meaning the number of viewers who watch a film from start to finish. Apparently, Ghosted hit “a really high number” in that category, and so Apple Studios chalked it up as a triumph. But did the data improve the film in any other respect? A one-star review in The Guardian condemned it as “content dictated by algorithm at its absolute, industry-shaming worst, so carelessly and lifelessly cobbled together that we’re inclined to believe it’s the first film created entirely by AI”. And this review wasn’t unusual. On Rotten Tomatoes, the website that tallies positive and negative reviews, Ghosted scored 28%, a figure that seems all the more pitiful considering the four previous films directed by Fletcher – Rocketman, Eddie the Eagle, Sunshine on Leith and Wild Bill – all scored between 81 and 100%. Direct-to-streaming movies might keep us on the sofa and away from the remote control, but that doesn’t mean they are any good.
What it means, in fact, is that they are the screen equivalent of junk food: easy to consume after a hard day’s work, but not exactly nourishing. As well as Ghosted, some notorious examples of such eyeball fodder are Shotgun Wedding, a Prime Video rom-com with Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel, and several violent Netflix capers, including Red Notice with Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot, and Murder Mystery and Murder Mystery 2 with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. In each case, the filmmakers followed the same recipe: take two or three attractive stars who may or may not have any chemistry, put them in a couple of sunny, scenic locations, whether or not those locations make sense in terms of plotting, sprinkle with stunts and explosions, keep the tone light and quippy, and top it all off with a simple, catchy title.
None of these vapid, sub-Bond romps would have had audiences flocking to the cinema, but as Fletcher suggests, viewers have different requirements when they’re clicking away at home on a Tuesday night. Ghosted and its fellow direct-to-streaming movies provide blandly undemanding escapism that the whole family can agree to sit through. However terribly reviewed they are, they have enough allure to get us asking, “How bad can it be?”
Two hours later, we might well answer that question with the words: “Very bad indeed.” But that doesn’t matter. By then we will have reached “completion”, and in the world of streaming, that’s all the data that counts.
Ghosted is available to stream on Apple TV+ now.
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