How Netflix is ruining the film industry

-During the 2000s, “despite launching and acquiring indie film wings of their own, the Hollywood majors began focusing their resources on IP-driven, family-oriented blockbuster franchises and used their vast resources to book these films on thousands of screens at once, crowding out competition from smaller films,” according to the piece. “After the 2008 crash, risk-averse executives increasingly gave themselves permission to drop their mid-budget fare entirely and produce predictable blockbusters about superheroes that, when successful, generated billions of dollars in box-office revenue.”

-The old way of producing an indie film — like cobbling together multiple different funding sources — could fall apart at any moment. Actor Elijah Wood thought going to Netflix would mean avoiding the death of a film associated with direct-to-video. One journalist thought streamers would be more experimental.

-Netflix did take risks on films like Bong Joon-ho’s Okja and acquired documentaries like Ava DuVernay’s 13th. “But its commitment to good filmmaking was short-lived,” the piece states. “As with its DVD-rental business and its pivot into streaming, Netflix’s concern was scale, rather than the cinema it was scaling. Movies, as the founder had told [film producer Myette Louie], were merely a means to an end: acquiring subscribers who paid for access to Netflix’s entire library of content every month.”

-Film studios have always released movies that flopped, but Netflix “seemed to relish making its films vanish as soon as they were released, dumping them onto its platform and doing as little as possible to distinguish one from the next,” according to the piece. One producer told the writer: ““Your film ends up as a thumbnail, and culturally it doesn’t make a splash. It’s not the same.”

-Piece states that Netflix’s lack of marketing doesn’t  make any sense. Marketing is “the lifeblood of cinema,” since it’s how you raise awareness. Netflix’s algorithmic recommendations can’t substitute traditional marketing, as many of the films it’s acquired have essentially disappeared, like the silent films of the 1910s and 1920s. They still exist on the paltform, but no one watches them.

-Streamers stopped acquiring films by auteurs, especially since some of these films could get them in trouble (like “Cuties”), so “they turned to a safer, more uniform product.” Documentaries have become more conventional too — think true crime,  celebrities, pop science, etc.

-Author talks about how badly Netflix originals are shot. They look like they are “algorithmically constructed,” the dialgoue is “filled with overexplanations, cliches and lingo no human would ever use” and the editing is terrible. The author points out that the large quantity can’t alone explain the drop in quality, because in the 1920s and 1930s, Paramount and Warners Bros. released 70 movies a year. “The difference between Netflix and its predecessors is that the older studios had a business model that rewarded cinematic expertise and craft. Netflix, on the other hand, is staffed by unsophisticated executives who have no plan for their movies and view them with contempt,” the author wrote.

-Netflix makes “ridiculous claims” about how successful its films are, and constantly seems to be announcing a new record that was broken, even though “watching a movie” doesn’t mean the viewer actually watched the movie all the way through. It counts as long as you’ve watched at least two minutes.

-“Moviegoers must choose to buy tickets. They cannot skip around, fast-forward, or order groceries through the Prime app on their phone. No moviegoer enters a theater expecting to leave after two minutes. Until Netflix, one of cinema’s essential qualities, the thing that distinguished it from television, was the way it commanded an audience’s attention. Whether a movie grossed big numbers or bombed, a box office report carried an inadmissible truth: the vast majority of the audience experienced the movie in full, and its taste couldn’t be ignored.”

-“Netflix has a more important coterie of stakeholders to keep happy: Wall Street investors. In an attempt to keep its stock price high, Netflix has moved away from auteurs and embraced big-budget projects that telegraph the company’s supposed mass appeal. Since 2019, Netflix has increasingly funded blockbuster-style event movies with expensive actors like Ryan Reynolds (6 Underground, Red Notice, The Adam Project), Ryan Gosling (The Gray Man), Mark Wahlberg (The Union), and Eddie Murphy (Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F).”