Hollywood is producing more movies than ever before. But how many of them are any good?

The streaming revolution has not only rewritten the rules of movie production and distribution, it’s also upended how movies are judged as Hollywood’s major studios and tech giants hasten a sharp increase in the number of new films hitting the market.

Netflix is Hollywood’s clear leader in new movie production, churning out in 2020 more films than weeks in the year. And Amazon is increasingly producing more original movies for Prime Video. But it’s not just streamers upping the volume. Old-time studios like Walt Disney Co. and Paramount Pictures are also ramping up their output of direct-to-streaming movies on their own platforms in an effort to stay competitive and keep subscribers. Paramount recently said it planned to release one new movie to its Paramount+ service each week by 2022.

Cue the existential crisis: What does this mean for cinema?

“It’s a different way of thinking about movies,” says producer Randy Greenberg, a former marketing and distribution executive at Universal Pictures now developing film projects for streaming services.

Traditionally, the movie business has been a hit-driven business where the goal of producers and studios was to create movies capable of luring audiences to theaters and selling tons of tickets. “You have to give a reason for people to leave their home,” Mr. Greenberg says.

Streamers, on the other hand, aspire to lure subscribers with a steady flow of films and series to keep them satisfied enough to continue paying their subscription fee -- which costs roughly the same as one theater ticket -- month after month. The importance of how good each individual film, both from a company and a consumer standpoint, is lowered. Many Hollywood insiders worry about the pressure studios are putting on themselves to maintain quality amid the huge jump in production.

According to data Ampere Analysis calculated for The Wall Street Journal, Netflix produced 133 films between 2016 and early 2020, more than three times that of Disney, Hollywood’s dominant studio, which also produced the fewest number of movies. Sony Pictures Entertainment is the second most prolific studio on the list with 111.

Although Hollywood is producing more movies, very few titles score high with audiences and critics. Ampere measured popularity with two different metrics: a critics’ score, that offers a weighted average of Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic critics scores; and an audience rating that is based on aggregated public online ratings.

On average, audiences gave Netflix’s original films, which include some Oscar contenders, a score of 59.1 out of 100, while the critics’ score yielded the company an average score of 54.4, according to Ampere. The research firm also found consumers lost interest in Netflix films faster than those made by major studios.

By comparison, Disney scored the highest average among audiences and critics, according to Ampere. The average Disney film, which includes big franchise films like Marvel, had an audience rating of 70.3 and a critics’ rating of 66. Disney also had the most films which achieved sustained popularity.

This increase in volume and distribution has led to debate among people in the industry. On the one hand, there are more opportunities than ever for new filmmakers and ambitious projects which may never have been given a chance in Hollywood’s old system. On the other, some industry professionals and cinema lovers are worried. Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese recently wrote in Harpers of his concern that cinema as art is being devalued as movies are lumped together with television series and unscripted shows and offered as “content” on streaming platforms.

It is also making it harder to determine what is actually a hit. While for decades box-office revenues have offered the clearest indication of popularity, ticket sales’ ability to separate winners from losers faces a diminished role as films increasingly premiere on streaming platforms. And although the box-office is showing signs of life post-lockdown, it is unlikely to slow Hollywood’s move to release more films either exclusively online or in conjunction with a limited theatrical release, according to several industry veterans. Streamers are mostly reluctant to share data on the popularity of certain titles, and what they do self report lacks context like how many people finished a movie versus just watched a few minutes. Some companies like Nielsen are trying to devise a way of tracking online viewership, and thus popularity.

Changes to distribution are also rewriting what’s at stake for filmmakers. In the past, filmmakers often took less money on passion projects, instead partnering with the studios so that if the film did well in theaters they would receive a percentage of the box office as a bonus. Filmmakers and studios both assumed risk in the hopes of a big payday.

A streaming release changes that calculus. For a movie that debuts online, filmmakers are generally paid generously upfront without a chance to benefit financially if their movie is a big hit.

Many Hollywood power players wonder how this work-for-hire model may influence quality. Without a chance to share in box office revenues, filmmakers are no longer partnered with distributors and therefore have less riding on how commercially successful their movie is.

“The attitude of what’s a hit and what’s a flop changes completely,” says Peter Guber, a film producer with four decades of experience who also completed a successful stint as head of Sony during the 1990s. During his Hollywood career, Mr. Guber has helped produce iconic films like “Rain Man,” “The Color Purple” and “Batman.”

Whether the stakes are higher or lower for filmmakers and executives, figuring out how to craft movies that are hits with audiences and critics has never been easy.

“If you look at the golden age of Hollywood...they didn’t believe in sequels and franchises. Every film was simply a gut feeling,” says Stephen Galloway, a journalist who covered the entertainment industry for about 40 years before becoming the dean of Chapman University’s film school. “Quality you can never really guarantee.”

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