Not too long ago Netflix announced that it was splitting its DVD/Blu-ray subscription service off from its streaming service and renaming it Qwikster. It was a move that everyone hated. Under this plan, customers who wanted to use both the streaming service and the DVD-by-mail service would now have to log in to two websites, pay two bills, and rate the movies they watch in two different places. It was a bad idea that would have inconvenienced a huge portion of the company’s customer base, and it also gave the impression that DVD subscribers were second class citizens who could expect less and less service for their money as time went on; so they killed it before it ever even launched. But the problems that the company were trying to solve by creating Qwikster still exist. Their disc rental service only exists in the U.S., and their streaming service is something that they want to expand all over the world. Most of their customers don’t do the DVD subscription, and have the streaming service only (they have 11.1mDVD subscribers and 21.6m streaming subscribers). This makes for a messy user experience when streaming only customers search their site and come up with results for movies that they can’t actually watch. Using Netflix.com is more confusing than it needs to be so that the company can continue to cater to an ever-shrinking group of customers located in the U.S. who are still renting discs. So the company is taking another crack at

You gotta hand it to the writers over at The Oatmeal…they know how to start a debate. Whether it be here on this site or any of the other number of sites, the comic about pirating Game of Thrones due to its lack of streaming availability has sparked some incredibly vocal controversy. Some are waging in on the mental attitude of pirates, some about HBO’s potentially out-dated business model, and even some are arguing over whether it’s possible to steal things that aren’t physical ‘things.’ All of these discussions are thought-provoking and entertaining topics of deliberation – but there’s something that appears to be missed or ignored in this whole debate session, until recently on the AV Club,  and yet is almost directly front-and-center from the source of the discussion: People are fighting hard against the wrong villain.

In an age where Hollywood studios finally seem to be wising up to the value of streaming rights to their content, I’ve been questioning the continued viability of all-you-can-watch subscription services like Netflix. But, if the company is able to continue inking deals like the one they made today, we could all be safely watching gobs of cheap movies through their platform for the foreseeable future. What’s this deal I speak of? Brothers Harvey and Bob’s Weinstein Company has made an agreement with the service to make a host of their recent films available for streaming on Netflix exclusively, instead of sending them to cable. That includes titles like the Madonna-directed W.E., the Shakespeare adaptation Coriolanus, and probably the crown jewel of the deal, Best Picture Nominee The Artist. As usually happens when deals like this are made, ass-kissing by both sides commenced. Netflix CCO Ted Sarandos said, “We couldn’t be happier to be working again with Harvey and Bob, who have an unmatched track record of creating critically acclaimed and commercially successful movies.” He then added, “The Artist is a symbol of the Weinsteins’ triumphant return to the top of the film business. Through deep passion, great taste and phenomenal vision, Harvey and Bob continue to surprise audiences and make history.” You hear that? These returning heroes are making history. That Uggie was one cute dog.

Looks like Netflix is again going back on a controversial decision, but perhaps too late to salvage any customers it might have lost in the first place. Last year, Netflix cut its bread-and-butter plan: the DVD-0nly version that launched the company to begin with. CEO Reed Hastings has made no bones about the fact that he thinks that streaming is the wave of the future and that the DVD arm of their business will steadily decline “forever” until they’re left with nothing but a pile of really expensive coasters while their customers happily consume film after film after television series on Watch Instantly. Yet, despite what Hastings thinks, and despite the popularity of Watch Instantly, cutting DVD-only plans apparently hasn’t worked out for the company, because they’re bringing them back. In a post on the official Netflix blog (via Gizmodo), the company announces that customers can again sign up for a DVD-only plan. The plans start at just $7.99/month, and will include access to  around 100,000 titles on DVD. Upgrades to Blu-ray will cost an additional two dollars per disc. Over at /Film, they note that DVD-only plans never truly went away, but they were not available as a standalone choice when a subscriber first signed up, and it required some silly and complicated rejiggering to get to a DVD-only service. As they note,  “since last year, Netflix has only allowed new customers to sign up for its Watch Instantly service. Once an account had been set up, subscribers had the

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly collection of movie and television news that throws caution to the wind, but never ever pees into the wind. That’s just not smart, friends. We begin this evening and this week with artist Kinjamin’s depiction of the Community cast as the characters from Street Fighter. It was found via Twitter, as posted by the show’s executive producer Dan Harmon. Needless to say, it’s inspired. So inspired, perhaps, that it makes us hope that Harmon is writing this one down. How about a Street Fighter episode in season four? Hey NBC, how about a season four?

Redbox kiosks have their good points and their bad points. On the one hand, you can’t beat renting newish home video releases for just a buck a night. That price beats any of the brick and mortar video stores and any of the VOD services that are baked into people’s home electronics. But, on the other hand, I kind of see them as the multiplex of the home video industry. By putting brick and mortar video stores out of business while offering a much more limited selection, they’re just reinforcing the idea in the moviegoing public’s mind that there are only two or three huge movies out that are worth paying attention to at any given time, indie and art films be damned. Still, you can’t beat that price, so Redbox’s parent company Coinstar has seen profits grow and their stock prices soar over the past couple of years. And now that things have gone so well, Coinstar is looking to capitalize on that success by making moves to take over the entire home video landscape. Dueling reports on Redbox activity have hit the financial world today, and both could have big impacts on the future of how we watch movies at home.

I’ve got a bit of an obsessive compulsive issue when it comes to DVDs and Blu-rays. I’m one of those suckers who will get caught every so often in a double-dip if I’m not paying attention. If I am being observant, I’m the guy who waits four extra months to get a disc with some special features attached. I really dug Transformers 3 and wanted to watch it again, but I’ll be damned if I was going to buy a disc with no extras on it! The issue that has my panties all aflame this week is all about special features and the lack thereof. Oh, most discs today come with some special features on them, but the “featurette” has become the bane of my existence. It used to just be what they called small extras on the disc, but now they’ve really emphasized the -ette, meaning mini, small, or useless.

It’s been my opinion for a while now that all-you-can-eat subscription services like Netflix are going to be a temporary thing with a limited window of success. Back when movie streaming was a minor thing aimed at a niche, tech savvy audience, it probably made sense for studios to sign deals with Netflix giving them access to their film libraries. Even five years ago high speed Internet wasn’t so ubiquitous, and if you wanted to stream something over the Internet, that pretty much meant you were streaming it to your computer monitor. But in today’s world of omnipresent wifi and apps that allow everyone to stream movies to smart TVs, video game consoles, app-enabled Blu-ray players, smart phones, and tablet computers, the entire game has changed. Now people can stream movies wherever they are, whenever they want. And they do… a lot. I think we’ve all seen that statistic floating around that 1/3 of all Internet traffic in the evenings comes from people streaming movies through Netflix. While I’m not in any position to prove that such a statistic is true, let’s just assume that it’s mostly true; that accounts for a huge amount of movie watching that ten years ago was being done through the more profitable to studios vehicle of DVD purchases and rentals.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie and entertainment news column that, now that it’s a year old and feeling mature, is looking to bring you only the best links of the day. Think of it as your one-stop-shop for the best of the entertainment web. If you didn’t see it here, it probably wasn’t that good. If we missed it, just email it to neil@filmschoolrejects.com and we’ll consider it for tomorrow. We do this every night. We begin tonight with a new shot of Emma Stone in The Amazing Spider-Man as a funeral-going Gwen Stacy. She’s looking quite sad. I wonder who died. Oh right, they are telling the origin story of Spider-Man again. I know who’s going to die.

Netflix is really jumping envelope first into the production game, having already set up deals to bring David Fincher and Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards, Jenji Kohan’s Orange is the New Black and more episodes of Arrested Development to the little screen. Now, according to Deadline Hemlock Grove, they’re close to securing a deal with Gaumont International Television to produce 13 hour-long episodes of Hemlock Grove, based on the novel of the same name by Brian McGreevy. McGreevy will be involved as a writer (alongside writing partner Lee Shipman), but the biggest name attached is executive producer and director Eli Roth who would bring his baseball bat into the mix. The story is focused on the murder of a young girl who is found ripped up near a steel mill and the two young men trying to solve it. Werewolves are inevitably involved. The big question is whether original programming will help save Netflix. If you’re considering dropping them, are shows like this enough to make you reconsider?

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a thing about movies that happens every week night, just before you go to bed. It brings you dangerous ideas, fascinating movie news and all that in between copious helpings of shenanigans. We begin tonight with one of three beautiful new images from Pixar’s upcoming film Brave. As with all Pixar projects, Brave looks absolutely gorgeous and in a point of interest to many, stars their first leading lady hero, Merida, voiced by Kelly MacDonald. Personally, I’m looking forward to it. Then again, I’ve been pot committed to Pixar for a while. In a terribly sad bit of news, NBC has pulled Community from its midseason schedule. This doesn’t mean that it’s been cancelled, but it’s definitely not a good thing for Community fans (also known as “anyone has ever watched Community“). We should have known that it was too good to last.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s the nightly movie news column you need right now. It doesn’t care what you want. It knows what you need. We begin tonight with some news about The Dark Knight Rises, a film that has not been mentioned in this column for quite some time. We missed the part where it was going to Occupy Wall Street and skipped ahead to the good stuff: like the confirmation of a TDKR proluge showing with 70mm IMAX prints of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol when it hits theaters on December 16. That’s awesome.

What is Movie News After Dark? As per usual, it’s a nightly movie news column that finds a way to get a little silly on Monday nights. It’s mostly weekend hangover related, but also a product of its own environment. On weekend, it plays a clown in a traveling circus. It lives a diverse life like that. We begin tonight with an image of the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. As you know, Halloween is coming up and we’re all looking for good costume ideas. Over at io9, the nerds from the future have it listed as one of their 20 zero-effort, high-concept Halloween costumes guaranteed to alienate your friends. For those of us who dislike both effort and friends.

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we talk with Lucky McKee about his disturbing new horror film The Woman. Plus, we launch a new feature for the month of October where horror filmmakers discuss a favorite horror film. This week, A Horrible Way To Die and You’re Next writer Simon Barrett praises an obscure modern classic. As if that weren’t enough, FSR Associate Editor Rob Hunter goes mano a mano with Film.com‘s Eric D. Snider in a test of wits and movie news acumen. Download This Episode

We try to keep cursing in the headlines down a minimum in case small children or animals are toddling by an RSS feed, but seriously, Netflix‘s very public business-making decisions lately have demanded a little swearing. It’s a company that started with an innovative idea, but it’s also a company that provides DVDs through the postal service and streaming video. Beyond that, it shouldn’t be rocket surgery. Of course, maybe it’s not that the company has made a few bad decisions lately, but that so many have been broadcast or celebrated publicly before slinking back into the shadows of shame that is what’s so damning. The latest blunder disguised as a shrewd move? Netflix is responding to its stock prices by killing Qwikster before it was even implemented. The company had intended to split their DVD and streaming services into two products, meaning that dual-users would have had to create a Qwikster account and keep up with their Netflix streaming queue. Two queues is apparently way too much for our media-addled minds (especially when you also have Get Glue and Four Square to check into). It’s excellent to see a company respond to such vehement negative customer response, but it’s also one more sign of weakness. Instead of moving forward with the service and letting customers get used to it (or, hell, even grow to like it), Netflix has admitted it was moronic by aborting it. Hopefully this is the last bad dance step. In a short, sweet email to

Recent times have been tough for once-unstoppable giant Netflix. The end of a deal with Starz that afforded them streaming rights to a bevy of films ended, leaving customers complaining about the dwindling selection of the Watch Instantly feature. A separation of the streaming service and the DVD by mail service created a huge price hike that saw customers canceling their accounts in record numbers. A creation of a new company called Quikster lead to the entire Internet pointing and laughing. It’s like those guys can’t catch a break! You know what they say though, “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I think it’s fancy-speak for “just chill.” Netflix may not be doomed after all. As a matter of fact, the New York Times has recently broke the news that the company has just struck a new, very important deal with DreamWorks that will give them exclusive rights to a whole host of their films. That potentially means access to kids’ stuff like Antz, Shrek, and Kung Fu Panda, dramas like Almost Famous, A Beautiful Mind, and American Beauty, and comedies like Road Trip and Old School. This is quite a coup for a company that people have spent the last week predicting the death of. Normally exclusive rights to studio collections like this go to HBO, who has a whole warehouse of money to throw at studios, Scrooge McDuck style. Striking this new deal with Netflix over HBO has a couple

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we speak with legendary actor Ron Perlman about his white dreadlocks in Bunraku, we’ll chat with The Dark Knight Rises executive producer Michael Uslan about his incredible journey to bringing Batman to the screen, and we’ll talk with Brian Salisbury and Luke Mullen about favorite films from Fantastic Fests past to get excited for the debauchery of this week. Plus, Screenrant editors/Screenrant Underground Podcast hosts Ben Kendrick and Rob Keyes fight to the pain in our Movie News Pop Quiz. Is it any wonder we end up talking about Qwikster? Download This Episode

There was a brief period where Netflix worked so well that it was like magic. For a small fee you could consume as many movies as you wanted from a gigantic library, through DVDs sent back and forth in the mail between you and the service. Then the company launched their Watch Instantly service, and suddenly you could watch a portion of their library even more easily by streaming them right from the website. At first that was a free option, built right into your subscription, but eventually the pricing structures switched around so that you were paying a bit for both. Not a problem, Netflix was still a near magical service that allowed film enthusiasts, even those who lived in the country and not in cultural epicenters, greater access to more movies than they’ve ever had in their lives. Eventually use of Watch Instantly exploded, it was a hugely popular service that had lower overhead costs than shipping DVDs through mail, Netflix seemed to have two huge cash cows in their hands. But that’s where the problems started.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a movie news column set to the spectacle of a John Williams score. We begin tonight with the latest in scientific discovery. NASA and SETI have discovered a planet that has two stars. Their first thought? Name it “Tatooine.” We approve, but we can’t help but think this is a giant marketing campaign for the new Star Wars Blu-ray release. We’ll know when nude pics of the planet show up online.

You may already be a film industry cynic. Maybe you think Hollywood is a barren wasteland, devoid of creativity and originality. Maybe you’re sick of seeing talented people get ignored and vapid hacks get splashed all over the trades. Maybe you’re tired of 3D everything and having to re-buy your movies every five to ten years. I’m not here to dissuade you of any of that. Hell no, I’m here to make it worse. Get ready, because this is some of the rottenest shit of which the film industry is capable. These are the things so terrible that Hollywood has to cover them up, lest God see their sin and smite them accordingly (and keep various government entities and lawyers off their backs, of course). If you still had any kind thoughts toward Hollywood, I suggest you prepare yourself for crushing disappointment. But first, I’d like to give a very huge shout out and thank you to writers C. Coville and Maxwell Yezpitelok for their help on this article. You guys are great! And now back to the shit storm, already in progress: