Could The Streaming Era Finally Bring Short Films To Center Stage?

Speaking in terms of the film industry, there was little space for short films before the streaming era came along. Theatrical distribution wasn’t financially, or logistically, viable since you couldn’t really program a single short film amidst all the feature-length projects competing for slots. Theaters in cities with a larger film industry, at times, would screen all the Oscar nominated shorts, however, this has been proven to be a limited market. The closest we’ve gotten to shorts getting a wider theatrical distribution are anthology films such as Paris, I Love You (2004), where a series of world renowned the directors made short films taking place in Paris and put them all together to make a feature-length film that could have a normal distribution path. Broadcast television presents much of the same issues, fixed time slots make it harder to program shorts which tend to vary in terms of show time and networks are more interested in a recurring program that can build an audience. Similarly, television finds its exception to this trend in the form anthology series such as The Twilight Zone and Goosebumps, where each week you’d tune in to watch a standalone episode that you could count on being unsettling and dealing with the unknown. Effectively, the audiences of both these shows were tuning in for their weekly horror short film. Overall, however, short films have functioned as an internal element of the industry. They’ll play at film festivals around the world and serve as a calling card for emerging filmmakers and actors to show their abilities in hopes of ascending into feature-length or television projects. Simply put, short films couldn’t really find a path towards commercial viability within the traditional media landscape. 

In theory, the current streaming era is much more welcoming to the short film. Without the constraints of scheduled programming (whether it be in a theatre or on broadcast), spectators are freer than ever to watch films or series with highly varying runtimes whenever they please. You could sit and watch the entire Godfather trilogy in reverse order or watch a single episode of Sex and the City in 5-minute increments. We’ve even seen streaming exclusive shows such as “Master of None” tinker with varying the lengths of episodes within a single season. While the individual short films still struggle to find a wider audience, major streaming platforms have found critical, and moderate commercial, success in producing anthological collections of shorts. Love, Death & Robots debuted in 2019 on Netflix,  an anthology series of animated shorts that vary in genre far beyond what its three-worded title suggests. The series brings together directors and studios from around the world, each one with its own animation style, for what ultimately is a celebration of the animated short film that has gone on to win 13 Emmy awards throughout its four seasons (a fifth one is on the way). On the more IP-driven side we have Star Wars: Visions, “an anthology of animated shorts from around the world celebrating the mythology of Star Wars through unique cultural perspectives.” As you’ll notice, both of these example have the added element of being animated. When it comes to live-action, the streaming era has proven to be kinder to  more medium-length projects such as Netflix’s Black Mirror and Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, where episodes are closer to the hour mark or longer in terms of runtime. 

On the more independent side, this current digital age has also seen the rise of a few platforms that champion the short film. One shining example is Short of the Week, a free page where every week they’ll post a new short they think is worth seeing, tagging with what genre it resembles most closely. The shorts on this page have already had a festival fun and are free to view for anyone. Then there’s a platform like NoBudge where they have both a paid and free side to their service which curates and promotes low budget short films from around the world. Not to mention streamers the Mubi with champion independent/world cinema, including shorts, and have recently dipped into general distribution. Yet while short films are more available than ever, they still struggle to become a part of the average viewer’s media diet. In all honestly, it’s most likely due to the fact that non-cinephile audiences simply aren’t accustomed to the format. If you want a contained story you go watch a film, if you want a shorter “piece” you’ll put on an episode of a show as it belongs to a larger narrative. The short film exists in that middle ground between both where its runtime doesn’t exceed the 30-minute mark yet its story starts and ends right there. Recent, and older, examples of success within an anthological framework suggests that audiences are more receptive to short-form narratives if they come curated under a thematic umbrella: horror in the Cabinet of Curiosities or science fiction/fantasy animation on Love, Death & Robots.

One can’t help but think that streaming platforms with a much wider reach could have a mutually beneficial relationship with the thousands of shorts that get made around the world every year. As the streaming boom slows down, streamers are eager to find fresh, high-quality projects to fill their libraries and differentiate themselves, ideally at a low cost. Every year the same prestigious festivals that host the year’s most important independent, art-house features have a slew of equally fascinating short films on display that are usually only seen by those who attend each festivals the film screens at. It’s only until about over a year after a properly distributed short is publicly available, usually on the director’s Vimeo page. If a streamer wanted to host a collection of suspense-driven stories, for example, it could easily scout the same festivals it sends sales agents to for the best shorts related to the subject. A distribution deal would most likely be a financial boon for any director at that level and the streamer could attract or retain an audience by offering this lesser viewed format. Not to mention that it would showcase new faces in front of and behind the camera that could captivate audience and lead to larger scale projects in the future. With the economics of the entertainment industry in limbo, only time will tell if larger studios start considering the untapped potential of short form filmmaking.