Your points in terms of the art are sound. But... it's much bigger than that. You must consider how the movie industry actually works. How it makes money.
There is no way to produce a reliably successful film. None. There's not even any way to improve your chances. For every film filled with star-studded actors that is a success, there is one which is a failure. For every big-budget blockbuster, there is a big-budget flop. For every formulaic success, there is a formulaic failure. On the balance, and it has been extensively and exhaustively studied, it's random. The public audiences response to a film is truly, 100%, random. Only very recently have some strides been made in predicting the future success of a film before opening - and that only based upon tweets in the 48 hours prior to its opening. Quite a bit shy of the years of notice necessary to actually inform funding decisions of projects.
You can't survive in a space where the return on investment is random. Unless... you can rig the game. If you can control what films the public has access to at any given time, and you make sure to yank poor performers out of the theater after their first weekend, while keeping the successes around for far longer... then you can get an edge. You can make a profit. Without that ability to control and manipulate distribution, and restrict availability, they would be left with the randomness again. And they would quickly falter in the face of that.
The book 'A Drunkard's Walk' includes a whole chapter on the public's response to media, the research which proves it is purely random (down to the audience never being the same group of people twice among other factors), and the way the big businesses in those industries deal with that fact. Without those tactics, which online distribution completely robs them of, it really is an existential threat. Of course, Netflix is showing us that we don't need them at all and there are entirely different ways to handle the problem.
There is no way to produce a reliably successful film. None. There's not even any way to improve your chances. For every film filled with star-studded actors that is a success, there is one which is a failure. For every big-budget blockbuster, there is a big-budget flop. For every formulaic success, there is a formulaic failure. On the balance, and it has been extensively and exhaustively studied, it's random. The public audiences response to a film is truly, 100%, random. Only very recently have some strides been made in predicting the future success of a film before opening - and that only based upon tweets in the 48 hours prior to its opening. Quite a bit shy of the years of notice necessary to actually inform funding decisions of projects.
You can't survive in a space where the return on investment is random. Unless... you can rig the game. If you can control what films the public has access to at any given time, and you make sure to yank poor performers out of the theater after their first weekend, while keeping the successes around for far longer... then you can get an edge. You can make a profit. Without that ability to control and manipulate distribution, and restrict availability, they would be left with the randomness again. And they would quickly falter in the face of that.
The book 'A Drunkard's Walk' includes a whole chapter on the public's response to media, the research which proves it is purely random (down to the audience never being the same group of people twice among other factors), and the way the big businesses in those industries deal with that fact. Without those tactics, which online distribution completely robs them of, it really is an existential threat. Of course, Netflix is showing us that we don't need them at all and there are entirely different ways to handle the problem.