Meta: Genre threads instead of 'streaming service' threads?

I know Tom hates omnibus movie threads, but I don’t read individual movie threads much, unless I’ve already heard about a movie or the thread title piques my interest.

Since movies move services so much, I think genre threads would be better for discoverability, and would love to read through a “Drama” or “Thriller/suspense” thread when in the mood, or a “comedy” thread for new ideas, or an “action” thread when in need.

Single threads would still be around, of course, but I’d be much more likely to read through a thread about “Romance movies” when I’m looking for ideas, than to read through the Amazon and Netflix threads hoping for romance movie recommendations.

Anyone agree? This been tried?

There’s one talking about horror movies. I dunno, it’s possible it would work better in general, I suppose, but if something’s not on a service I subscribe to hearing about it has limited utility to me and a lot of what gets discussed is funded by the services and thus will be permanently exclusive. YMMV.

I’m with you on finding omnibus threads much more useful for discoverability and recommending things I’ve seen and liked, though. (Dedicated threads are of course better for actually having substantive discussions about specific things, but my experience is there’s a lot of movies and shows where there’s no demand to have any such thing.)

IMHO there could be both (genre- and service-based), and folks should just be judicious about splitting off and linking to individual movie/show threads.

I’ve never clicked on the horror movie thread, since I don’t like the genre. But I do wonder sometimes if I’m missing out on cool discussion or cool movies just because I don’t generally like that genre.

Still, other genres aren’t usually as niche. It’s an interesting idea. And as someone suggested in either the Netflix thread or the Prime thread, when you do have a recommendation for folks, post in two threads. One in the general thread, and also in that post, point them to the newly created movie thread as well. That way people who won’t read the individual movie thread will be guided there by the recommendation from the general thread.

I like topics that are divided by streaming services. I have Prime and Netflix so my hope is good movies and shows on those services would be discussed in those topics. I don’t have Disney+ so I don’t bother with the Disney+ topic most of the time.

And of course sometimes a show is too popular to be stuck in a generic service thread and deserves its own topic, like Ted Lasso.

While that works well for originals, sometimes they start to drift between streaming services. For instance, Moonlight was made with Amazon money, so of course it’s on Amazon Prime Video. But it’s also currently on Hulu and Showtime (streaming) and a few other options. For another example, the last season of Community was an exclusive to Yahoo! Screen. But now that Yahoo! Screen is dead and buried, season 6 is available with its five other seasons on, if I have this right, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu. Reno 911! was resurrected on Quibi, but now that Quibi imploded, I can’t even keep track of how to watch the new and old episodes. But they’re out there.

So I lean towards threads for shows, not for services. Some of those services look like they’re too big to fail. But even before they do, they can pass content around like poker chips.

While I don’t share Tom’s aversion to omnibus threads, I’m not in favour of having more genre threads, simply because that’s not generally how I watch movies (or shows). With basically two exceptions, I don’t think “I want to watch a [genre] movie”. I think “I want to watch this specific movie”, or “I want to watch something from my backlog”. The exceptions being horror - so I’m fine with that thread - and “big dumb spectacle”. And, I suppose, films that are so bad they’re good, but that’s not really a genre and anyway has its own omnibus thread. Several actually.

Yeah, I also don’t often search out specific genres, generally its more what services do I have and whats decent on them (though I’m sure there are a few who subscribe to most services and thus the actual required platform becomes less relevant).

Overall I understand the irritation of having many discussions about specific movies/shows peter out and die in these catch-all threads, so I’ll repeat what I posted in the amazon thread (I think?):
How about we mostly just use it as an index for stuff we found there and immediately link to a thread of that particular thing. ie “Hey guys, I just watched this awesome action comedy on Netflix called boomchakkaboom and here’s the thread with a few of my thoughts.” (even if those thoughts are just “its fine” - at least then those that wanna to comment on it have somewhere to go).