Also this week
Netflix cuts 1,000 jobs and London’s iconic Prince Charles Cinema survives eviction. Elsewhere, The Prestige gets a 70mm rerelease and a music video director gets one shot at filming the rising moon.
Render Reel
Netflix is cutting 1,000 jobs, its biggest round of layoffs yet. About 6% of staff are going, mostly in product, tech, legal and HR. The company made $11 billion in profit last year and expects revenue to pass $51 billion in 2026.
The Alex Gibney Musk saga continues. TikTok permanently suspended the doc’s ad account just as the film expanded into cinemas, then restored it two days later and blamed an error. Meta and YouTube gave the same excuse last month. Seems the film’s trouble getting advertised is becoming part of the film.
Obsession director Curry Barker thinks Gen Z likes cinemas because nobody expects you to talk. He says young people want a shared experience without having to speak to strangers. He started out making shorts on YouTube, and he has no interest in Hollywood’s originals-versus-franchises debate. In his view, people want good stories wherever they come from.
Vimeo wants us to come home
Vimeo has published a revealing sentence in a recent blog post: “We’re making Vimeo a home for filmmakers again.”
“Again”.
In the early 2010s, Vimeo was the place where indie filmmakers ventured to get their work seen. A time where a Staff Pick would genuinely launch a career.
Then in 2017 the company pivoted to selling hosting and collaboration tools to businesses. YouTube took a lot of the audience and the rest filtered their way through social media.
Vimeo then became the place you sent password-protected cuts to clients.
That’s about to change.
Bending Spoons bought Vimeo last year, and the new owners want us back. Their first move is unlimited free public uploads which has never happened in Vimeo’s 22 year history.
There’s a catch. The free videos can’t be embedded anywhere else and embeddable + private videos are capped at 3GB so private festival screeners and portfolio embeds stay limited.
That catch is strategy. When you embed a film on your own site, Vimeo pays for the bandwidth and someone else gets the visitor. If you can’t embed it, people have to come to Vimeo to watch.
It also gives Vimeo a reason to keep old films online.
Jason Sondhi co-founded Short of the Week and used to run Vimeo’s curation team. He recently audited his site’s archive and found about 150 selected films had vanished, including the Daniels’ Interesting Ball and Rob Savage’s Dawn of the Deaf.
When creators cancel a subscription or run out of storage, their films go dark and so does every embed pointing at them.
Under the new policy, those creators can make their films public again for free. It won’t fix broken embeds automatically, but it’s a start.
Keeping films online is one promise and Vimeo’s also making one about what happens to them while they’re there. They say they won’t train generative AI on uploads without the creator’s consent.
Cinemas are lying about when films start. The Guardian’s Jeffrey Ingold bought a ticket for a 7.15pm screening of The Odyssey and sat through 30 minutes of ads and trailers. He wants cinemas to run the ads before the listed time. Films are getting longer and tickets pricier, so he has a point.
The Prestige is getting its first IMAX and 70mm release. Nolan’s 2006 film returns in January for its 20th anniversary, although it came before his IMAX era and wasn’t shot on the format.
Only 2.3% of films at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance and Toronto arrived with no industry backing. Stephen Follows does God’s work again, tracing all routes behind 3,037 festival selections from the last five years. Not one film in the Cannes, Venice or Berlin main competitions got in cold. Yikes.
Archive watch
London’s Prince Charles Cinema has been saved for another 25 years. The Leicester Square repertory cinema spent 21 months fighting its landlord over a lease that allowed eviction on six months’ notice. The new deal has no break clause. More than 168,000 people signed the petition, including Edgar Wright who backed the campaign.
A rough cut accidentally became the finished film. Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding had a troubled production, and in 1983 an unfinished edit was released as the completed version. Burnett only re-cut it decades later. For years, audiences judged the film by a version he never thought was done.
Cut of the Week: Elmiene, Comets and Gold (Moon Rising)
Peter Reinstein made a music video with the least cooperative performer imaginable; the moon.
He filmed Elmiene performing against the rising moon in real time, on a 1,200mm lens. At that focal length, a tiny shift in position throws off the entire frame.
The crew had to predict exactly where the moon would appear, down to the second, and they got one chance.
No virtual production or VFX, just a very long lens and a very precise call sheet.
Retail Therapy: Honey, I Shrunk the Camera
Kenko Tokina’s Pieni III is a tiny camera that shoots one-megapixel photos and video, and looks like a normal camera that went through a 90-degree wash.
The images are soft and imperfect, which is exactly what camera makers spent twenty years trying to fix.
Now they’re selling it back to us for about $42.