Going to the movies is a luxury that I enjoy, but doesn’t match my current lifestyle. As the parents of a seven-month-old, my wife and I consume plenty of content through streaming, but never go to a theater and enjoy a premium new release. Instead, when we notice something that excites us, we wait until it comes to a streaming service to catch up on what we missed.
When it was time for Mean Girls to find a digital home, we were excited. We grew up in the cultural shadow of the original film 20 years ago (oy…). Alas, the movie made its way onto Paramount+, one of the only major streaming services to which we don’t subscribe. We debated getting a free one-week trial, but decided we’d wait and try to get the DVD from the library instead (an anachronism in our modern era).
That could have been the end of it. Except we were primed to pay attention to references to Paramount+. And considering we usually stream our content from other providers without ads, it might well have been. But when we watch Hulu with Live TV, we occasionally have to sit through ads. Which is why, when catching up on the latest episode of Survivor, we saw a commercial for the partnership between Paramount and Walmart.
The media company and the retailer, which might seem like they have very little in common, have built a partnership that allows anyone who subscribes to Walmart Plus, a premium service that allows for member pricing, free shipping, and discounts on gas, to access Paramount+ for free. Sounds like a good deal, right? As a dedicated Target shopper, I wasn’t any more interested than the first time, but I couldn’t help notice my discomfort. I’ve been well taught by the modern world that there is no such thing as a free lunch. So, what does Paramount+ get out of this?
The world today makes me think a lot about the social contract we agree to when participating in society. Commercially, we know the trade: I give you money in exchange for goods and services. I pay Netflix a certain amount of money per month in exchange for watching to TV shows and movies that they acquire, produce, or distribute. Fair enough. But the “streaming wars” have led media companies to try to find more complex ways to engage in the buyer-seller marketplace. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings once famously said that sleep was the company’s biggest competitor, rather than Hulu or HBO. And it’s true. No matter how big the library gets on Netflix, I will never be able to consume more TV than I already do. The endlessness of the database has little baring on the limits of my time and attention.
Every quarter, though, it seems that Netflix begins to bite into the benefits of the program. Sure, I get access to an expanding catalog of content, but the price has continued to inch (or yard) up every few months. Recent attempts have made it so that I can’t share my account with my family, requiring each of us to individually pay for the service. What I get for my money might seem like it is increasing, but the cost-benefit analysis is shifting under our feet, and Netflix is hoping we don’t notice.
Which brings us back to our original question: why would Paramount offer us free content for engaging with Walmart? Because the most fruitful contract is no longer between consumer and producer. Instead, the economic reality has shifted to mean that the power players are producers and advertisers. If Paramount can demonstrate to its partners that there is a critical mass of subscribers, they have more leverage to make demands in the future and can claim the attention of a wider market share. We are no longer talking about the content a viewer is streaming; instead, we are talking about a company’s ability to create even more opportunities for money-making in the future.
It isn’t that seeking to make more money is inherently morally wrong. That is, after all, what we agreed to when we signed up for a capitalist system. But what makes this entire situation so challenging is when the end users aren’t fully aware that they are being used as pawns in a much larger game. We do ourselves a disservice when we think that signing up for a streaming service is about how we access intriguing content. Instead, we are seeing ramifications for what it means to participate in the larger flow of society, as well as a shift in our relationship with media materials. After all, few currently “own” a movie or show in the way we did when we would buy a physical copy of that content. Instead, we pay to gain access to a gated community of viewership, one that has a significant impact on the way we get to internalize and digest culture.
To be an ethical consumer is not to refrain from the process altogether; after all, that is a kind of isolation that doesn’t require nuance. Instead, ethical consumerism requires us to notice when our time and attention is being used as a commodity, and to be thoughtful participants in how and when we choose to engage. The onus falls heavily on the shoulders of the viewer, and it is all-too-easy to be taken advantage of if we aren’t careful.
Mean Girls has held a large place in our cultural repertoire for the past decade and a half, and a remake keys into all of the nostalgia that is one of the greatest motivators for engagement. But a movie two decades ago and the same movie today are distributed very differently, and we can be the victims if we don’t adapt to the shifts in our circumstances.
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