IndieWire turns 25 this year.
To mark the occasion, we’re running a series of essays about the future of everything we cover.Remember when documentaries were deeply honorable but commercially unviable? “Knock Down the House” shattered Sundance records in 2019 when Netflix bought it for $10 million; Apple and A24 broke that record the next year with the $12 million acquisition of “Boys State.” Apple paid a reported $25 million for “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry,” while studios like Concordia, Participant, Radical, and Xtr pump millions into the non-fiction genre.Today, everyone loves documentaries.
Streamers are hailed as giving the genre a new lease on life.
However, the streaming business is not dedicated to speaking truth to power, as documentaries often do; streamers amass subscribers and create shareholder value.So, what does that mean for the future of documentaries? If the risk-averse, franchise-dominated movie business is any example, we should expect more documentaries about famous people,
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