By William Watson

Another year has come and gone, so it is time to rank all the movies I saw from 2019.  This was a year that saw a couple of trends start to change the way we experience movies.

First, the growing importance of tentpole franchises started to wear thin.  Sure, there were massive hits like the MCU and the live action remakes of classic Disney cartoons, but franchises like Terminator, Godzilla, and Men in Black all crashed and burned at the box office.  Simply wrapping up the same present again and again was no longer a guarantee of box office success.

The second trend, a positive one for an avid moviegoer like me, was the growth of top quality films debuting (or soon after a brief Oscar run at the theaters) on streaming services like Netflix.  In past years, we had gotten a handful of moderately interesting films, but this year it was different.  Two of my top ten were streaming first runs and two more from my second ten were beamed right to my couch.

The growth of quality streaming films, generally smarter and more adult in nature, seems to be the answer to the growing tide of dumb franchise movies that no one asked for.  More and more, I could see the kind of movies that once lit up the big screen, the mid-budget film, coming to Netflix.  I will be happy to watch them there!
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