Why FilmStruck Was Never Going To Work Out

no one said it would be easy

FilmStruck was a fantastic idea. As someone who owns a John Cassavetes box set and can make a good case for Masahiro Shinoda being the best Japanese director of the 1960s, I feel as though I fell squarely into this service’s target audience, and I was genuinely excited when the Criterion Collection announced their plans for it back in 2015. Blu-Ray quality art house films complete with extras and commentary, delivered with the convenience we’ve come to expect from streaming services? What wasn’t to love?

But the sad truth is that FilmStruck was destined to fail. I’ve seen a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over its demise, and while it’s important to mourn it as a loss for the film community it’s also important to be realistic about what killed it. It served a niche market in an increasingly overburdened streaming landscape and often failed to make itself easy to use even for people who desired its services, much less users who might have fallen outside its desired demographics. The fall should have been easy to see coming, because:

1. FilmStruck always had mixed reviews

Unlike Moviepass, another too-good-to-be-true film service whose most popular iteration met an untimely end, FilmStruck had struggled to be embraced by audiences from the get-go. While it ended up fostering a tight, passionate community that was…