Classic Films, Hard To Find On Streaming, Are Making Their Cinematic Comebacks

Glance at the lineup of films at your local cinema and you might briefly believe you have passed through a time portal. Stirring athletics biopic Chariots of Fire sits cheek by jowl with schmaltzy Tom Hanks fable Forrest Gump; magical Japanese animation My Neighbour Totoro finds houseroom next to melancholic Hungarian art film Werckmeister Harmonies; 1990s action yarn The Mummy galumphs alongside Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid 70s classic The Conversation. The surge of reissues and restorations appears unstoppable. This week sees the release of a new edit of the notoriously sleazy Caligula, first released in 1979, with the Tex-Mex crime story Lone Star (1996) and Coraline (2009) to follow shortly.

Previously they were largely the preserve of organisations such as the BFI making archive treasures available on the big screen, or to publicise home entertainment releases on DVD and Blu-ray, the surge is in part down to simple issues of supply and demand. According to Jack Reid Bell, sales and marketing director of reissue specialist distributors Park Circus, the drying-up of the industry pipeline due to the pandemic and then the writers’ and actors’ strikes, left cinemas casting about to fill their screens. “It gave cinemas, who may not have had much of a tradition of playing reissues, really strong results when they did that. And it’s just continued from then. I suspect the appetite has always been there, but that the market hasn’t been geared to it.”

Box office statistics suggest there is money to be made – not to the same extent, perhaps, as a heavily marketed blockbuster, but lucrative enough. My Neighbour Totoro landed in the Top 10 in the UK last weekend, with nearly £70,000 in receipts, while the reissue of the 2002 superhero film Spider-Man took more than £250,000. The Mummy, featuring Brendan Fraser in his action-movie heyday, made more than £100,000 at the box office on the first weekend of its rerelease in July. Reid Bell cites research from data analysts Gower Street and Comscore that shows box office returns in the UK for classic films in 2023 has grown by 133% compared to the pre-pandemic average between 2017-2019.

The big question is: who is going to see these films and why? Tom Jowett, head of programming at the Ultimate Picture Palace in Oxford, says that the audience is not just confined to filmgoers consumed by nostalgia. “There is an incredible hunger out there from younger audiences to learn more about the history of cinema. The idea that they don’t go to the cinema and would rather stay at home and watch films on streaming platforms doesn’t tell the complete story.”

“First, the narrative that everything is on streaming platforms is utter tosh – so many films are either not available to stream or are buried so deep within the algorithm that they are impossible to find. Second, I don’t think Netflix can even conceive of the idea that a classic film can exist before 1980 – there’s a world of cinema history being neglected by streaming platforms and that’s where independent cinemas can come in.”

Jowett suggests that summer is proving a particularly good time for back catalogue films, at least as far as independent cinemas are concerned. “Blockbusters tend to dominate the cultural consciousness during these months, but they don’t play well at cinemas like ours. We’re usually waiting for the days to become shorter, the weather to get more grim, and for a consistent rolling-out of awards season titles to get audiences back in. However, we’ve found that classic titles can bring people in, often in greater numbers, than whatever new releases we have to offer.”

Archive releases are also a way of directly affecting the wider cultural consciousness through the rediscovery of forgotten or largely ignored films. In July, experimental film distributor Other Parties rereleased Bushman, a film that made little impact when it was first released in the early 70s. A study of a Nigerian man navigating life in San Francisco, it was greeted with five-star reviews and a sense that an underground classic had been retrieved from history. Aneet Nijjar, founder and director of distribution at Other Parties, says that while the company is happy with the business aspect of the release, the chance to act as a conduit for its ideas was the overriding motivation. “It’s such a special, beautiful, powerful film and we wanted audiences to engage with the film’s political themes surrounding race, immigration and power. It’s more than a timely reminder of some of the struggles that are playing out today.”

Nijjar says they came to the movie through the network of festivals that specialise in archive films – including Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy, and its UK counterpart Cinema Rediscovered in Bristol – having had a positive experience in 2023 with the 80s feminist film Variety, with which, Nijjar says, “we were encouraged by audiences’ reaction to older films that they might not have necessarily heard of or engaged with, but which had themes that are more than relevant now.”

Thomas Negovan, the musician and writer behind the new reconstruction of Caligula in its “ultimate cut” form, also says that the curatorial significance is paramount. “The project took nearly four years and was terribly expensive, but it’s impossible to quantify the success of rescuing a lost film against hours or dollars; the ultimate reward is the contribution to culture.”

Negovan adds: “We need more risk taking in the contemporary film industry, and hopefully Caligula can inspire some of that to unfold.”

Reid Bell says that Park Circus’ ambition is to do more than simply release individual films, and enable curatorial activities in all shapes and sizes. “There is such an appetite for classic films these days it almost feels as if they are part of the first-run calendar. What we want to do is go beyond straight rereleases; we are presenting a huge array of titles and a constant flow of new restorations, which cinemas can use to programme new and different seasons.”

Jowett is of a similar mind. “I don’t want to use the phrase ‘noble failure’, but sometimes it’s totally worth showing a film that is going shine a spotlight on something rarely seen, as the people who come along tend to be your most loyal supporters. This goes for new releases as well as classics. After all, it isn’t just about numbers on a spreadsheet.”