There is something so satisfying about watching Streep, Hathaway, and Blunt all back onscreen and trading mean-girl put downs and calls for fashion-shaming. It’s also nice because it’s getting increasingly rare to see any of them on the big screen. While Hathaway is having a genuinely nice moment this spring and summer, leading sure-thing Devil between the more opaque Mother Mary, and having a pivotal role in The Odyssey come July, one of those was a tiny-budgeted A24 indie mood piece masquerading in horror couture, and the other is a supporting role with longtime champion Christopher Nolan.
Yet in recent years, she’s often been relegated to streaming movies like the very good The Idea of You and the very meh The Witches. And as with virtually every other household name these days, she also got a well-reviewed and little-watched Apple prestige series in WeCrashed. Meanwhile Emily Blunt also does prestige work, often though as “the wife or girlfriend,” a la The Smashing Machine and Oppenheimer. And even the Meryl Streep, while always appearing to be fine-dining on anything she appears in, is also more often being pushed to the small screen—Big Little Lies, Only Murders in the Building—or in films that live there, such as Netflix’s The Prom and Don’t Look Up.
It should be stressed though that each is still doing a lot better than some of the top talent of their respective generations who don’t have touchstones like The Devil Wears Prada to revisit; or a studio still thriving enough to make it.
Consider that when The Devil Wears Prada’s original patron at Fox was subsumed by Disney in 2019, it was like a sequoia tree toppled over with reverberations that rippled from the Hollywood Hills to Venice Beach. In the last 12 months, the Ellison family has essentially swallowed the legacies of both Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. whole, and all the while Wall Street prognosticators clapped, saying, “It is the only way to succeed.”
That small-ball, infinite growth, logic is what got the man who gave the world Dr. Pimple Popper and Naked and Afraid on reality TV the chance to run the studio of Bogie and Bacall into near-extinction. But David Zaslav is getting a golden parachute for his troubles—and after nearly firing the creative executives who greenlit Sinners and One Battle After Another for him before either of those films opened.
The bottom line is fewer studios means fewer movies with the apparatuses to succeed in theatrical distribution, which means fewer opportunities for everyone whose value comes from making movies, as opposed to exploiting them. Among those that are getting made are products increasingly retrofitted for the algorithm and “second screen” viewing habits, which can be summed up as streaming services asking filmmakers to make their movies dumber and duller, so folks can follow along while scrolling on IG reels. It’s the same logic that saw print journalism get co-opted by SEO optimization practices (clickbait). But as theatrical attendance continues to decline in a post-COVID world and studios make fewer theatrical films—or Google turns off the spigot of their search engine firehose that so many outlets once catered to—everyone’s fingertips strain evermore to hang on.
