Most of Netflix’s movies are mid and inconsequential - it has a chance to change the game

In a move everyone was expecting, Netflix confirmed it had fired its movies boss, Dan Lin, over the weekend.

Lin, who still gamely showed up to both a screening of La Bola Negra and the high-profile Academy Gala after he received the news, marks potentially the end of the brutal clean-out of the streamer’s creative executive ranks.

His boss, Bela Bajaria, was shown the exit door at the end of last week, a day after Lin’s number two, Doug Belgrade was swept out along with a raft of decision-making on the series side.

This overall Netflix purge numbered around 1000 staff, or six per cent of its workforce, but outside of these talked-out executive cuts, were mostly from the legal, tech and HR teams.

The company remains profitable and the market leader, but its share price is down 40 per cent over the past year since it made that unsuccessful attempt to acquire Warner Bros, and growth has stagnated.

The sackings have gained so much notice outside of the inside Hollywood circuit because it signalled a shift in Netflix’s content strategy. Veteran former Fox and Disney executive Peter Rice has been brought in to replace Bajaria in the top content role, which controls a budget of $US20 billion.

Rice will need to appoint a replacement for Lin too, and the scuttlebutt suggested that in the frame are Pamela Abdy and Mike De Luca, who were just sacked as head of film at Warner Bros after the studio was absorbed into Paramount at the conclusion of that $US110 billion merger.

More likely, Abdy and De Luca’s names are floating around because of their own very recent exits, and there has been commentary from Hollywood observers the pair, who greenlit Sinners but also Digger, may not be what Netflix needs right now.

So, what does Netflix need when it comes to its movies business?

The streamer’s originals ambitions started in the early 2010s, first with Lilyhammer and then most notably with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black in 2013. It didn’t release its first original film, Beasts of No Nation starring Idris Elba, until two and a half years later.

Which is to say, the Netflix brand has always been synonymous with TV.

Its movies side has never been on as strong a footing, despite co-chief executive and one-time head of content Ted Sarandos’ ambition to change movie-watching behaviour so that people never had to go out to cinemas.

It didn’t work, people still go to cinemas. If anything, the box office this year has been on the rebound, and films such as Obsession, Backrooms, Project Hail Mary, The Odyssey, The Drama and Spider-Man: Brand New Day have dominated pop cultural discourse in a way that no Netflix movie has since K-Pop Demon Hunters.

And not just since K-Pop Demon Hunters, but also before K-Pop Demon Hunters.

In the decade-plus since Netflix started making movies, its victories on the film front are few and far between. That’s not for lack of trying – at its volume peak in 2022, it released more than 200 new films that year.

In the first few years, Netflix movies were easy to categorise.

There were the streaming movies which were the equivalent of direct-to-DVD, most starring relative nobodies in stories that few knew existed and even fewer remembered. You would get the occasional break-out hit, such as To All the Boys I Loved Before or The Kissing Booth, and they were of varying quality.

There were some high-profile projects with movie stars such as Adam Sandler’s deal with the streamer, which began with The Ridiculous 6 and The Do-Over (Netflix’s second and fifth earliest original films), which were widely watched but lacked the enduring power of, say, Billy Madison or 50 First Dates.

Or, worse still, they were colossal failures on the creative front, such as Bright, a David Ayer-directed fantasy action movie with Will Smith and Joel Edgerton. Edgerton should be thankful he was unrecognisable under those orc prosthetics, because no one remembers he was in that awful movie.

Then there were the mid-budget movies that it sometimes commissioned and sometimes bought, and many of them had interesting filmmakers such as Alex Garland (Annihilation) or David Michod (The King) and featured famous faces including Natalie Portman and Timothee Chalamet.

There were the awards-play films from well-known auteur filmmakers including Bong Joon-ho (Okja) and Noah Baumbach (The Meyerowitz Stories, Marriage Story).

Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, a stunning black-and-white, semi-autobiographical historical epic, was released in 2018 and won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival where it premiered. This was a prestige film, beloved by other filmmakers, cinephiles and tastemakers.

Roma was nominated for 10 Oscars, winning three including best director for Cuaron, and if it had been released by anyone other than Netflix, it would’ve won best picture.

But Netflix was on a collision path with the rest of the industry because it refused to release its films into cinemas with that pre-Covid 90-day exclusivity window. It pissed off theatre owners and it pissed off people who believed cinema, especially something like Roma, should be seen on the big screen.

Roma did get a very limited cinema release to qualify for awards and within the month, was available for at-home viewing, which, of course, included mobile phones.

Netflix’s hostility to a theatrical release, led by Sarandos who once called the cinema model an “outmoded idea”, put it at odds with the artistic community and the business side of the industry. It even led to the Cannes Film Festival changing its eligibility criteria in what was essentially a Netflix ban.

Over time, as Netflix’s content strategy changed to be something-for-everyone, so did the kinds of movies it made, as in, it now made everything. Pulpy true crime documentary features sat alongside serious, Oscar-winning factual films.

Frothy, forgettable rom-coms popped up, as did action movies so dumb even Jason Statham didn’t want any part of it. It still made awards movies, and this year, bought an already completed La Bola Negra out of Cannes for several territories (in Australia, it is in cinemas now through a local independent distributor), and has Lee Chang-dong’s first film in almost a decade, Possible Love.

There were genuinely good films such as Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequels, or small drama His Three Daughters with Elizabeth Olsen, Natasha Lyonne and Carrie Coon, and films such as Mudbound, Mank, High Flying Bird, All Quiet on the Western Front and Wes Anderson short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.

But most of the films were inconsequential, although Sarandos did manage to change audience behaviour on one front, albeit not singlehandedly, and Covid had a lot to do with it.

With the flood of Netflix movies (and also from other streamers, but not at the same aggressive pace), certain genres were devalued as cinema experiences, especially rom-coms, studio comedies and mid-range adult dramas and thrillers.

These were the lifeblood of the industry as recently as the 1990s, but now viewers were trained to only turn out to the cinema for “event” films.

Here’s where Netflix’s movie arm has really struggled. It didn’t know how to “eventise” a movie. It spent so much money (often hundreds of millions) luring filmmakers away from traditional studios, greenlighting their passion projects, and then just letting it die a whimpering death on a crowded platform.

Without the fuss, conversation and marketing campaign of a cinema release, people barely knew these films existed. Even if they watched them, they didn’t remember them because you need the circus around a movie to make it sticky in the long term.

The cinema release is the first step, and it creates value not just in the box office but also down the line on digital rental and purchase, streaming, physical media release and so on.

Instead, a Netflix movie is served to a viewer that first week of release – maybe – and then if they make it to the end, the platform is so quick to move you onto something else (that autoplay function is offensively fast), you don’t even have a chance to think about what you’ve seen.

And then it disappears into the digital ether, never to be heard from again. Maybe a lot of people will watch it, maybe it’ll even make Netflix’s top 10 list but can anyone really say, with any conviction, they remember what The Adam Project (157 million views) was about?

One of its own filmmakers, Anthony Russo, said as much during the release of The Electric State, a sci-fi adventure with Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown, which cost an unhinged $US300 million to make.

Russo said to The Hollywood Reporter, “The struggle is, can you even eventise a streaming (film) when they don’t create any sense of special place in terms of how they’re presenting to the audience for a movie to say it is an event – and they don’t go out into the wider marketplace to declare an event.”

To be clear, The Electric State is a diabolically bad movie that shouldn’t have been made, but if you’ve already sunk that much money, the least you could do was make a big deal out of it.

Lin had been brought in less than three years ago to cut costs on the runaway spending of his predecessor’s, Scott Stuber, era, which he did. In that sense, he met the brief, as did Bajaria, who was tasked by Sarandos to broaden the slate.

Lin hadn’t been in the job long enough to have made a massive impact, other than, reportedly, some souring of talent relationships based on his belief that he wasn’t there to coddle famous people, but he did start inching Netflix towards the cinema.

In fairness to Lin and to Stuber before him, you’re already working with one hand tied behind your back when Sarandos refused to weaponise cinema releases.

When Netflix went after Warner Bros last year, one of the biggest criticisms it had to overcome was its historical opposition to theatrical releases, and Sarandos made assurances, perhaps persuasively, perhaps not, that it was ready to evolve its philosophy.

Even though it failed to buy Warner, it has made commitments to theatrical, although it seems to have been dragged, kicking and screaming to the lobby.

Greta Gerwig, leveraging the success of Barbie, was able to exact a 45-day cinema window following a wide release for her upcoming Narnia adaptation, but only after a protracted internal battle.

The Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sequel, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, will get a two-week IMAX run, and next year’s Charlie vs the Chocolate Factory will have at least 45 days in cinemas.

So, the change is already happening, and the streamer’s new content tsar, Rice, is expected to take it further.

Rice has deep experience in film and TV, but he is most associated with film. If anyone is going to be able to guide Netflix into a new era of movies so that there is more coherence and cultural relevance, it should be him.

That would be good news for everyone, especially the audience.