In 2015, Tom McCarthy made the journalism drama “Spotlight,” which won the Oscar for best picture. This year his follow-up feature, “Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made,” skipped theaters and headed directly to Disney Plus. Best picture it won’t be. As the streaming landscape expands and more movies bypass a theatrical release to land on your welcome screen, we wondered: do these movies have a quality issue? Or should we accept that most streaming-only movies are “good enough”? We put these questions to critics who regularly review these movies for The Times.

Should we have lower expectations for the quality of streaming-only movies? Should they be considered the modern equivalent of straight-to-video, or are they headed in a different direction?

JASON BAILEY It’s tempting to put straight-to-streaming movies in the same box as straight-to-video, and a fair number of them achieve the same function; streaming-service home pages need “filler,” new content to feed an ever-widening maw, as much as video stores once did. But I think it’s more accurate to think of the streaming platforms in terms of the old studio system. MGM, Fox, Paramount, et al., much like Netflix, controlled not only the means of production, but also their own distribution networks (in the form of studio-owned theaters). So they had to create a lot of product. And thus, some of their films were A-list, with big stars and high production values, and sometimes they made B-movies, with lower budgets, lesser performers and less attention. Netflix is doing roughly the same thing, and it’s not hard to sniff out the difference between, say, “The Irishman” and “Sextuplets.”

ELISABETH VINCENTELLI I agree that Netflix, Amazon et al. have become the new studios — at least in terms of putting movies in front of eyeballs, since they don’t always participate in the production process and just pick up distribution rights. And they’re better at it than legacies like Warner Bros. or Universal or Sony Pictures, which have little interest in “Okja” or “The Land of Steady Habits.”