Summer Streaming Season is here. Despite Hollywood’s expected slowdown in the coming months as the WGA strike continues, the season has been bursting at the seams with incredible new shows, series and movies to catch this summer.
After combing through listings, early screenings and pouring over trailers, Yahoo Entertainment’s Ethan Alter, David Artavia and Kevin Polowy, break down the summer’s top entertainment trends, from what to watch for onscreen to WGA strike impacts behind the scenes.
What should people tune into this summer?
Disney’s grown-up streaming service has additional helpings of two of its most acclaimed series on deck for August. First, Reservation Dogs returns for its third and final season on August 2, bringing the curtain down on co-creator Sterlin Harjo’s lovingly nuanced and very funny portrait of a group of indigenous teens on an Oklahoma reservation. The first two seasons deftly balanced flights of fancy with the sometimes harsh realities of life on the rez — including alcoholism and the foster system — and Harjo has woven ongoing storylines into the characters’ lives that should reap emotional rewards as the series comes in for a landing. On screen, what trends are you seeing in representation in Hollywood?
David Artavia, Senior Reporter, Yahoo Entertainment: What’s exciting me the most is, of course, the fact that trends are at a steady climb when it comes to representation in Hollywood, but the fact that it’s a conversation at all is even more thrilling. It’s a significant change from over a decade ago, when there was less of a call to action for creators to implement diversity in storytelling and casting.
There is a significant push for stronger female representation and empowerment on screen as the percentage of women in leading roles nearly doubled over the last decades (as has their share of writing and directing credits). Films like Everything Everywhere all at Once, Tar, The Woman King, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, M3GAN, 80 For Brady, Boston Strangler and the Chloé Zhao-directed Nomadland are fine examples of that.
Still, there is much more work to be done to advance these numbers. There has been a push for more authentic portrayals of the LGBTQ experience, especially in television, which saw an increase of LGBTQ series regulars by 2.8 percentage points, per a recent GLAAD report. It’s encouraging to see that representation of mental health and disabilities are also being explored in exciting ways, like in the Oscar-winning CODA, starring real deaf actors; Marvel’s Eternals, which a character communicates entirely through sign language, or pretty much anything Ali Stroker (my favorite actress ever, who rocks a wheelchair) does.
Cultural and ethnic diversity — especially around characters with intersectional identities who are multidimensional and represent the complexities of real-life people — is more mixed. While Black leading roles increased in 2022, data shows that Hispanic representation in film has decreased in front and behind the camera. Indigenous, Middle Eastern and North African representation is even lower. Still, projects like Blonde (which cast Oscar-nominated Ana de Armas, a Cuban immigrant, as Marilyn Monroe), the Father of the Bride remake (starring Andy Garcia and Gloria Estefan) or The Little Mermaid (starring a Halle Bailey, a Black Ariel, and Spanish actor Javier Bardem as her father) are tiny glimpses of how future Hollywood hitters — and future audiences — are making baby steps toward the right direction.
Will people return to the theaters or will streaming reign supreme?
Kevin Polowy, Senior Correspondent, Yahoo Entertainment: The results have been mixed so far this summer, with a couple superhero movies taking off (like Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 3, which fun fact, has been the most searched movie this summer in the US according to Yahoo Search) and another one (The Flash) crashing and burning. Same in the family market. Somehow, someway, The Super Mario Bros. Movie passed the $1 billion mark this summer, while the usually reliable Pixar struck out with Elemental. Streaming Isn’t going anywhere, obviously, but studios are doing a bang-up giving audiences reasons to hit theaters over the next month with the release of Indiana Jones 5, Joy Ride, Barbie, Oppenheimer and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part One.
Ethan Alter: It’s become increasingly clear in the first half of 2023 that there is a dedicated audience that will show up in theaters for specific Hollywood blockbusters… on opening weekend anyway. Younger audiences have shown up in force for Marvel movies (although not for DC Comics-based movies, as the anemic returns for Shazam and The Flash have shown) and horror fare like M3gan and Cocaine Bear, allowing those films to open to sizable grosses, which steadily drop off as the weeks go along. Parents, meanwhile, seem willing and eager to take their kids back to animated movies starring familiar characters with cross-generational appeal — specifically Super Mario Bros. and Across the Spider-Verse — over and over again
On the other hand, older moviegoers without kids have been showing up in more limited numbers, and make less of an effort to see a movie on opening weekend, as Indiana Jones 5 most recently showed. Smaller adult dramas have felt the absence of that audience most acutely: acclaimed films like Celine Song’s Past Lives or Ben Affleck’s Air hope to play the long game, depending on strong word of mouth to drive older audiences into theaters over weeks in release. That’s the same game Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer certainly hopes to play, and Universal seems ready to accept that the three-hour historical drama is a long game instead of a short-term profit.
But that theatrical model is harder to maintain in an industry that’s increasingly shifting to prioritizing opening weekend grosses. Not coincidentally, that’s also the audience that tends to wait for movies to show up on streaming — as Air did after only a few weeks in theaters — or is already in the middle of binging streaming shows to take the time to go see something on the big screen. Those services also seem to be telling the kinds of stories — be it period romances like Netflix’s Bridgerton, sports dramedies like Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso and familial dramas like Paramount’s Yellowstone — that movie studios have mostly abandoned in favor of comic book blockbusters and other youth-oriented genres. As long as streamers keep offering them compelling reasons to stay home, that audience won’t be borrowing the family car from their teenagers for a night out.
What happens if the WGA strike continues? How are networks preparing?
Ethan Alter: WGA members have been on the picket line for over two months now, and are going to continue marching until the other guilds have had their turn at the table with AMPAS (The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences). The DGA (Directors Guild of America) recently agreed to a new deal and all eyes are on SAG (Screen Actors Guild) to see if they’re able to come to an agreement as well or initiate Hollywood’s first double-guild strike in decades. If the actors and writers are both on the picket line, all production stops in its tracks and big compromises will be required in order to start the engine back up again.
Anticipating that kind of broad work stoppage stoppage, movie studios, networks and streamers have all scrambled to have movies and shows in their vault ready to roll out in the absence of making fresh content. At the network upfronts in May, ABC memorably unveiled a fall line-up that consisted mostly of unscripted fare, with repeats of shows like Abbott Elementary taking the place of new and returning scripted series. That pattern is poised to be repeated at other network and cable channels should the strike drag on into September and October.
Other outlets, like Netflix, seem better prepared to weather an extended period where no new scripted content goes into production. The service has the already-shot returns of big series like Bridgerton and The Lincoln Lawyer awaiting release, and also has a history of turning global dramas — most notably Squid Game — into stateside hits and those shows aren’t subject to domestic labor disputes. There will inevitably come an inflection point where the producers and studios need to get back to the table with the writers and listen to what they’re asking for, but time appears to be on their side.
What’s one thing I didn’t see in the first half of 2023 that I should catch up on?
Ethan Alter: Get thee to Peacock and stream Nida Manzoor’s Polite Society. Premiering to strong reviews at the Sundance Film Festival in January and, sadly, empty theaters during its brief theatrical release in April, this tale of two Anglo-Pakistani sisters deserves to become a cult favorite. Fusing a variety of influences — including Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Kill Bill, Get Out and even The Great Muppet Caper — Manzoor’s movie packages a resonant story about breaking patriarchal power structures inside a rollicking action-comedy framework. And after you see Polite Society, cue up Manzoor’s breakout British series, We Are Lady Parts, which is also streaming on Peacock. Get in on the ground floor as her career takes off.
