Today marks the beginning of a strange new phase in the streaming wars, one that points to a real, human being leading one of the largest streaming services instead of a faceless machine that never seems to learn that people prefer action films with one or two household names (like a Ryan Reynolds or a second Ryan Reynolds). This is due to the fact that Netflix has introduced a brand-new section titled “Milestone Movies” for movies released before 1974, as reported by IndieWire.
Furthermore, they aren’t just random movies that Netflix chooses to lump into a different category. According to IndieWire, Netflix has added 14 Milestone Movies this month. These movies are from a variety of movie studios, most of which have their own streaming services but are irrationally unable to hold onto the rights to their most important historical works because they would much prefer to profit quickly from them. This implies that Netflix, that vengeful Netflix, has been monitoring which 50-year-old films are available for purchase and has been picking them up especially to compile a carefully selected catalog of 50-year-old films—something that Paramount+ and Max are obviously not as interested in doing.
According to IndieWire, Black Belt Jones, Blazing Saddles, Chinatown, The Conversation, Death Wish, The Gambler, The Great Gatsby, It’s Alive, The Little Prince, The Lords Of Flatbush, The Street Fighter, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore are among the Milestone Films included in the 1974 collection.
It looks like this will be a continuous project going ahead, as Netflix has plans to release such compilations for 1984 in April 1994 in July, and 2004 in October. If it’s a hit, maybe next year we’ll see collections of the 1975, 1985, 1995, and 2005 films. After that, Netflix will presumably take over as the go-to place for historically significant movies instead of Max’s TCM library, which is probably currently being used to point people toward older films that are “like” The Curse of Oak Island or whatever.
