Netflix to experiment with a 'binge-viewing movie event'

Netflix is about to blur the line between streaming movies and television even further.

The streamer announced Wednesday it will release all three films in a new horror trilogy, Fear Street, over three consecutive weeks this July, Variety reports.

Based on the books by R.L. Stine, the movies take place in three separate time periods across 300 years. The first installment, Fear Street Part 1: 1994, will debut on July 2, followed by Fear Street Part 2: 1978 a week later on July 9 and Fear Street Part 3: 1666 on July 16. The movies were all directed by Leigh Janiak and filmed at once over one summer.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"It's kind of a hybrid," Janiak told The New York Times. "It's kind of a new thing. It's a mix between a traditional movie and what would be considered traditional TV: Each installment, each part, tells its own story but it's also very connected to the next piece. That is a very exciting thing for me as a filmmaker."

Producer Peter Chernin told the Times that given that binge-viewing has "come to dominate television and it changed the way people thought about content," the "idea of having a binge-viewing movie event seemed exciting to me." A trailer for Fear Street that debuted Wednesday advertised this as a "film trilogy event." The Times, which described this as a new "experiment" for Netflix, notes the films were originally set to be released by 20th Century Fox, but the trilogy was sold to the streamer in 2020.

It's certainly unusual to see a whole trilogy of movies start and end within the same month. But between this release plan and television showrunners often declaring their series to actually be more like "six-hour movies," it seems the trend of film becoming more like TV and TV becoming more like film isn't slowing down.