Until recently no Hollywood studio had ever released two movies with the same name at the same time. At most studios, such a strategy would be unthinkable. Audiences might accidentally buy tickets to the wrong film, and the PR fallout would be disastrous: snipes from trade-magazine writers; angry calls from investors questioning the studios’ business acumen; angrier calls from agents demanding to know why their clients’ images were being intentionally sabotaged.
Netflix, however, is not most studios. On April Fools’ Day, 2022, the company released a Judd Apatow comedy titled The Bubble, which takes place on the set of a Hollywood dinosaur franchise that’s forced to quarantine in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. Four weeks later, it released an animated film by Tetsurō Araki, director of the popular Japanese anime shows Death Note and Attack on Titan, about a postapocalyptic world in which the law of gravity ceases to exist. Araki’s film was called Bubble.
There were no box office mix-ups, no snipes from the press, no angry calls. The few critics who bothered to write about it panned Apatow’s Bubble, an unfunny comedy that’s duller than the blockbuster franchises it makes fun of. Nobody had anything to say about Araki’s Bubble, a TV movie better suited to a graveyard slot on a children’s cable network. Like all Netflix movies, Bubble and The Bubble floated away as quickly as they appeared, becoming tiles in the company’s sprawling mosaic of content, destined to be autoplayed on laptops whose owners have fallen asleep.
For years Ted Sarandos, the Netflix co-CEO who pioneered this distribution strategy, has been hailed by the press as a visionary. Even after the streaming giant faltered in 2022, recording an overall loss of subscribers for the first time in a decade, the podcast impresario Scott Galloway raced to Sarandos’s defense in the New York Times, comparing him and Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings to “A-Rod and Barry Bonds.” He added, “You don’t want to bet against these guys.” Galloway had apparently forgotten that the two baseball players he named had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs at the height of their careers. In this way his comparison was more accurate than he intended. Netflix is a steroidal company, pumped up by lies and deceit, and has broken all of Hollywood’s rules.
For a century, the business of running a Hollywood studio was straightforward. The more people watched films, the more money the studios made. With Netflix, however, audiences don’t pay for individual films. They pay a subscription to watch everything, and this has enabled a strange phenomenon to take root. Netflix’s movies don’t have to abide by any of the norms established over the history of cinema: they don’t have to be profitable, pretty, sexy, intelligent, funny, well-made, or anything else that pulls audiences into theater seats. Netflix’s audiences watch from their homes, on couches, in beds, on public transportation, and on toilets. Often they aren’t even watching.
Over the past decade, Netflix, which first emerged as a destroyer of video stores, has developed a powerful business model to conquer television, only to unleash its strange and destructive power on the cinema. In doing so, it has brought Hollywood to the brink of irrelevance. Because Netflix doesn’t just survive when no one is watching — it thrives.
As Reed Hastings tells it, the Netflix eureka moment came in 1997, when he rented a VHS of Apollo 13 from Blockbuster Video. Some weeks later, he discovered the tape under a pile of papers in his dining room. He had forgotten to return it. When he did return it, Hastings was shocked to learn that he owed $40 in late fees. “I felt so stupid,” he later said of the experience. “I was embarrassed about it.”
Hastings wasn’t alone. In the 1990s, Blockbuster was reviled by its customers. As the journalist Gina Keating found in her 2012 history Netflixed, Blockbuster’s own research showed that customers usually had to visit stores for five weekends in a row to get what they wanted. Stores were overstocked with movies no one cared about and employees left empty VHS boxes on shelves, giving the appearance that a store’s inventory was larger than it actually was. Worst of all were the late fees: a late return often tripled the price of a Blockbuster rental, and a lost tape could set you back as much as $200. The system was widely despised — customers filed twenty-three separate class-action lawsuits against Blockbuster over unfair late charges — but outrageously profitable. In 2000, near the company’s peak, Blockbuster collected nearly $800 million in late fees, accounting for 16 percent of its annual revenue. Internally, company executives described its business model as one of “managed dissatisfaction.”
Every week Netflix seemed to deliver a new movie no one had ever heard of that somehow broke every viewing record in the world.
The year of the Apollo 13 incident, Hastings sold his software business Pure Atria to another tech company for more than $700 million. His experience at Blockbuster got him thinking. “Was there another model,” he wondered, “to provide the pleasure of watching movies in your own living room without inflicting the pain of paying a lot when you forgot to return them?” Hastings and Marc Randolph, Pure Atria’s chief of product marketing, began to brainstorm a new kind of movie rental business. They had noticed Amazon’s success selling books over the internet. Why not do the same with movies?
Using $2 million of Hastings’s own money, the duo began testing hundreds of ways to sell and rent DVDs by mail. The model Hastings and Randolph eventually solidified, in 1999, was simple. Netflix would charge customers a fixed monthly fee to rent up to four movies at a time. (This was soon reduced to three.) Customers could keep the discs as long as they wanted — no more late fees — but could only rent new movies after they mailed back the old ones. The open-ended approach was more convenient for customers than Blockbuster’s. But for Hastings and Randolph, customer satisfaction was secondary. The duo was trying to solve a logistical problem.
Netflix’s DVD catalog was not constrained by the size and shelf space of a brick-and-mortar store. Whereas Blockbuster might have to stock fourteen copies of a “big” title — like Steven Spielberg’s A.I. — at the expense of other options, Netflix could stock A.I. and Mario Bava’s Four Times That Night and Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers, too. But even with fewer spatial constraints, housing several hundred thousand DVDs in the Netflix warehouse was inefficient. “Reed and I began riffing,” Randolph later explained. “‘It’s kind of a shame that we have all these DVDs sitting here in a warehouse doing no good. I wonder if there was some way to store them in our customers’ houses? Can we let them keep the DVDs? Can they just hold on to them as long as they want?’”
A decade before Airbnb persuaded homeowners to transform their homes into hotels, Netflix convinced its users to turn theirs into mini Netflix warehouses. Customers who held onto their DVDs for longer meant fewer shipping costs for Netflix, and fewer DVDs for the company to manage and store. Netflix tracked heavy users of its service — labeling them internally as “pigs” — and secretly throttled their deliveries. It didn’t matter if Netflix rented fewer DVDs than Blockbuster, because the company would keep collecting its monthly fee. The difference between Blockbuster and Netflix was this: Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful; Netflix rewarded them for being mindless.
Netflix grew its business by targeting companies that Americans hated, and the only company that Americans hated more than Blockbuster was their local cable provider. In the early 1990s, cable providers began working with the television networks to push the limits of what they could extort from customers, building on a rich history of viewer-screwing innovations like fees for set-top boxes and annual contracts that were impossible to cancel. Between 1995 and 2005, providers doubled the number of channels in the average cable package and raised prices at three times the rate of inflation. In 2007, FCC chairman Kevin Martin wrote in a letter to advocacy groups that “the average cable subscriber was paying for more than eighty-five channels that she didn’t watch in order to obtain the approximately sixteen channels that she does.” The average cable package cost more than $700 per year.
Hastings had always wanted to push Netflix toward cable television. Film producer Mynette Louie learned this firsthand in the late ’90s. Before she entered the film industry, Louie worked for a market-research firm that specialized in internet companies. It was the height of the dot-com bubble, and each week different start-up CEOs dropped by Louie’s office to pitch their businesses. She still remembers the day Hastings came in to speak about Netflix. “He said, ‘We’re not in the DVD business. The only reason why we have these DVDs is to scale the customer base for what we ultimately want to do, which is streaming,’” Louie told me in an interview this year.
Out of all the start-up founders Louie met, Hastings stuck out. “He was so impressive,” she said. “We didn’t know it was going to destroy the film business as we knew it.” During its first decade of operations, Netflix waited patiently for broadband internet speeds to become fast enough to support a streaming platform, draining Blockbuster of its customers and insinuating itself into the homes of millions of Americans in the process. In 2007, the same year Martin wrote his letter, the technology was finally sufficient, and Netflix launched its streaming platform.
Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful; Netflix rewarded them for being mindless.
The service, initially called Watch Now, was primitive. Netflix made just one thousand titles available, which users could access only through Internet Explorer on PCs. Still, long-oppressed cable subscribers immediately recognized Watch Now’s appeal. Netflix’s streaming site offered viewers many of the shows and films they’d find on cable for a fraction of the price, as little as $5 per month. Hollywood studios were happy to license their second-run content to Netflix, which at first seemed incapable of threatening their cable interests. But the studios overlooked that streaming was more convenient than cable, as Netflix beamed images directly onto viewers’ laptops — and, soon enough, televisions and smartphones — with no annual contracts, cancelable at any time. Above all, there were no ads.
Streaming made perfect sense for Netflix. Since it began shipping DVDs, Netflix had hoarded customer data to improve its recommendation algorithms, and Watch Now gave the company access to granular insights about audience behavior in real time. The streaming platform eventually noted when viewers watched from their computers, televisions, or phones; which scenes they skipped, paused, or rewound; and how long it took them to abandon a show they didn’t like or finish a season that they loved. This proved useful when Netflix produced its first original series, in 2013, House of Cards. Company executives claimed that they acquired the show, a political thriller starring Kevin Spacey and directed by David Fincher, based on data that showed Netflix users flocked to Spacey and Fincher films. Data helped with the show’s release, too. Netflix engineers had observed that most viewers consumed episodes of television in large batches, often without breaks in between. Company executives called this “binge-watching.” Ted Sarandos, then Netflix’s chief content officer, decided to feed the habit, releasing all thirteen episodes of House of Cards at once in defiance of the television industry’s model of appointment viewing.
Netflix argued in its 2013 “Long-Term View” report to shareholders that the company’s “originals” acquisition strategy was just one of many reasons that “the linear TV experience” was “ripe for replacement.” “The data we have on our members’ viewing habits,” Netflix stated, “enables us to avoid overpaying for content” and “do as good or [a] better job than our linear TV peers in choosing projects.” The company explained how its formal advantages — its lack of prime-time slots, its varying episode and season lengths — “provide a platform for more creative storytelling.” “A show that is taking a long time to find its audience is one we can keep nurturing. This allows us to prudently commit to a whole season, rather than just a pilot episode.”
None of this was true. Netflix did commit to producing two seasons of House of Cards without seeing a pilot (outbidding HBO and AMC with an up-front offer of over $100 million — the very definition of “overpaying”), but this had little to do with “nurturing” the show. “More creative storytelling” was also a stretch: House of Cards resembled much of the bland and high-budget television that had dominated premium cable channels since the late 1990s. And it wasn’t clear how much insight into Netflix’s members’ viewing habits was really needed to green-light the show. After all, it didn’t take complex data analysis to know that House of Cards — an adaptation of an already popular British series, remade with Hollywood stars — would find an audience.
For decades, television — with its episodic, high-volume format — had been Hollywood’s most powerful economic engine. With a successful pilot, a television producer could employ actors, directors, writers, and crew for as many as thirty-four episodes over a single season. After a string of successful seasons, the producer could sell the show in foreign territories, screen it in other formats (DVDs, video on demand, airplanes), and eventually syndicate it for reruns. All these sales produced residual payments: shares of the profits for the writers, actors, and directors who worked on the show.
Residuals had been a fixture of Hollywood since the collapse of the studio system in the 1950s, providing job security for tens of thousands of professional artists. But streamers, which by 2014 included Hulu and Amazon, saw residuals in a new light. They had no intention of rebroadcasting their shows on linear television networks, in foreign territories, or on planes. They already owned exhibition platforms — Netflix.com, Hulu.com, and Amazon.com — that were increasingly accessible from all over the world and from the most common internet-connected devices.
“The philosophy of the guilds was always, ‘If you reuse our material, and you make money off the reuse of our material, then we should be compensated for that,’” a former Writers Guild of America officer told me. The officer recalled a 2014 conversation he had had with a studio executive about streaming. “His response was, ‘I don’t pay my plumber every time I flush my toilet.’” Netflix pioneered a different model. Instead of residuals, the streamer offered producers a payment model known as “cost-plus.” With cost-plus, Netflix offered to pay for an entire season up front — as it did with House of Cards — plus a “premium” that Netflix calculated, as Sarandos once explained in an interview, “via what we think the back end would have been.”
Until Netflix, one of cinema’s essential qualities, the thing that distinguished it from television, was the way it commanded an audience’s attention.
Initially, the guilds didn’t see Netflix as a threat. “The WGA had its head in the sand,” the former guild officer told me. “The guild thought, ‘If and when Netflix becomes a proper studio, we’ll deal with it like how we deal with the other studios.’”
But the guilds like the WGA and the Screen Actors Guild under-estimated just how quickly Netflix would take over the industry. Suddenly, most of the work in Hollywood was in streaming. And as the journalist Nicole LaPorte found in an investigation for Fast Company in 2018, little of it paid well. While A-list showrunners like Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy signed nine-figure streaming production deals, everyone else saw their salaries shrink. Writers who were paid per episode noticed that Netflix’s varying season lengths really meant shorter seasons and smaller paychecks overall. Without residuals, small jobs that used to generate reliable income for years became worthless. Some actors learned they were making thirty times less than they would have on a network show. Five years before the WGA and SAG’s historic overlapping strike, which in part sought to redress the streamers’ elimination of back-end payments, LaPorte concluded what it would take major newspapers and magazines years to report: streaming had brought about “the death of Hollywood’s middle class.”
In the years after House of Cards debuted, Netflix flooded the market with television shows. Its spending on content ballooned from $2.4 billion in 2013 to $12 billion in 2018. The other streamers — Hulu, Amazon, and Apple — clamored to outspend one another and fill their content pipelines. Studios like Disney withdrew their content licensed to Netflix and started their own streaming services. By 2018, Netflix had taken over television, just as it had taken over the video store. But by the time the other studios followed suit, Netflix already had a new target: the film industry.
A few years after Mynette Louie had her run-in with Hastings, she quit her job at the market-research firm and eventually became an independent film producer, shepherding films by Andrew Bujalski and Karyn Kusama. In 2013, she helped launch a financing company called Gamechanger Films that specialized in funding narrative feature films directed by women. By then Netflix had already been streaming for half a decade, and Louie’s timing seemed ideal. While Netflix already had its eye on the mainstream — in 2014 it announced a $250 million four-picture deal with Adam Sandler — much of its film budget was devoted to funding small- to mid-budget projects and aggressively acquiring finished independent films at top American festivals.
Louie benefited from Netflix’s splurge. In 2015 the company picked up the streaming rights to Kusama’s The Invitation after the film’s premiere at South by Southwest. Louie sold two more films to the streamer the following year, both for generous fees. “We were made whole by those sales, which was amazing,” Louie told me. “Amazing for our filmmakers, amazing for our investors, and at the time we thought, ‘Great, we’ll just keep making movies.’ We were all very hopeful about indie film having a place.”
It had been a long time since independent film had occupied anything like a prominent place in Hollywood. In the 1990s, the emergence of home video and foreign television outlets provided a rising generation of auteurs — Richard Linklater, Allison Anders, Gus Van Sant, and so on — with a deluge of new markets that multiplied their commercial success. Ted Hope, a film producer and cofounder of the indie production company Good Machine, recalled how foreign buyers helped his films thrive. “If you picture about one hundred different territories where you could find an audience,” he told me, “and a minimum of five different distributors in each market, you had five hundred different ways to find success. Everybody had a structure where they could take more chances.” The sheer number of buyers meant that indie filmmakers could fund their entire movies through foreign distribution sales alone, all before they shot a single scene. The competitive environment was good for audiences, too, as new indie distributors like Miramax, Fine Line, and October, aiming to make a name for themselves, raced to acquire work made by the most audacious filmmakers from the United States and abroad.
Rather than cultivate this success, the largest Hollywood studios spent the first decade of the new millennium stamping it out. 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. 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 optimism Louie felt when Netflix and Amazon began acquiring indie films in the mid-2010s was warranted. What Hope described as five hundred ways to find success had always involved a degree of risk. Producing an indie film required cobbling together funding sources, many of which were contingent and could fall through at a moment’s notice. With Netflix and Amazon, there was just one deal for global distribution, and the streamers’ cost-plus premiums guaranteed that investors made a profit. As the streamers increasingly paid enormous sums for the global rights to independent films — like Amazon’s $10 million for Dan Fogelman’s Life Itself, or Netflix’s $8 million for Marti Noxon’s To the Bone — they simplified the indie film production process and enriched investors all at once.
And global distribution meant larger audiences, or so the thinking went. Speaking to Business Insider in 2017, Elijah Wood, the star of that year’s Netflix film I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, was enthusiastic. “There was a time in the ’90s that this would have been a title that would have gone direct to video, which would have been some certain kind of death,” Wood told his interviewer. “But that’s not the case anymore. If anything, [Netflix] created this equal opportunity for filmmakers.”
As many journalists have pointed out, Netflix and Amazon weren’t traditional Hollywood studios in any sense. The streamers were tech companies, outsiders whose business models didn’t rely on making a billion dollars at the box office from a single franchise film. “The tech giants have more leeway to experiment,” wrote Wired’s Julia Greenberg in 2016. “A single movie or show on Netflix and Amazon needn’t appeal to everyone; the key for both platforms is making sure they offer enough of everything to attract anyone.” The streamers could acquire fringe and pathbreaking films that the largest studios had ignored. Perhaps indie cinema could rise once again.
Netflix took risks on films from distinguished auteurs, like Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, a science fantasy about ecoterrorists trying to rescue an enormous bioengineered pig, and Alice Rohrwacher’s portrait of an ingenuous sharecropper in the Italian countryside, Happy as Lazzaro. And it acquired ambitious documentaries, like 13th, Ava DuVernay’s history of the American prison–industrial complex, and Icarus, Bryan Fogel’s film about a Russian sports scientist who helped his athletes avoid doping regulations for years. (The latter delivered Netflix its first Academy Award for a feature-length film.)
But its commitment to good filmmaking was short-lived. 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 Louie, were merely a means to an end: acquiring subscribers who paid for access to Netflix’s entire library of content every month.
The range of indie films on Netflix didn’t resemble the ’90s boom and its cultivation of new auteurs. As the years went on, the streamer picked up lifeless vehicles for A-list talent like The Polka King, a comedy starring Jack Black as Jan Lewan, the real-life Polish immigrant and polka band leader who launched a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme; preposterous directorial feature-length debuts like Brie Larson’s Unicorn Store, a fantasy-comedy starring Larson as a failing artist who learns that unicorns are real and that Samuel L. Jackson wants to sell her one; and found-object curios not worth remembering, like the 2016 biopic Barry, starring Anya Taylor-Joy as Barack Obama’s white college girlfriend.
Film studios have always released duds: movies that fail to gain traction and are shuttled to the studios’ archives, where they disappear into obscurity. Until recently, for most studios, a forgotten film was a sign of failure. But Netflix, uniquely, 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. “Your film ends up as a thumbnail, and culturally it doesn’t make a splash. It’s not the same,” one producer with movies on Netflix told me. “Unless you’re Scorsese or something, the streamers don’t craft custom bespoke marketing campaigns for these films.”
Netflix’s antimarketing strategies made no sense to anyone in the movie business. Marketing had always been part of the lifeblood of cinema, the driving force that raised audience awareness, drove ticket sales, and aided films as they wormed their way through their ancillary windows. It was especially vital to independent films. “In the old days,” Hope told me, “one of the great inefficiencies that existed was when you made a movie, you had to go ahead and tell everyone about it in order to get the small percentage of people that you’d actually be able to drive to become a ticket buyer. Whether your movie was crap or beautiful, you still had to tell everybody.” Print advertising, TV and radio spots, press junkets, magazine interviews and profiles, college screenings, cast appearances on the late-night talk-show circuit: all this was part of the playbook for cementing a small-budget film in the memory of the moviegoing public and turning it into an enduring hit that could generate profits in perpetuity.
None of this mattered to Netflix. All viewing of its movies was confined to its platform, which supplied users with algorithmic recommendations tailored to their every whim. As Sarandos bragged in 2015 during an interview with TV Insider about Netflix’s television series: “A lot of the heavy lifting of getting audiences to the show is done with the user interface. . . . Marketing spends we do mostly to attract subscribers to join Netflix. The actual viewing of shows, the user interface is driving almost all of that.”
But Netflix’s user interface was hardly a replacement for the traditional marketing distributors once used to get audiences into theaters. Between 2016 and 2017, Netflix spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring indie films and documentaries to fill out its platform: The Polka King and Unicorn Store, but also The Incredible Jessica James, The Mars Generation, a movie called Fun Mom Dinner, and many, many more. The vast majority of these films have effectively disappeared, like the thousands of silent films from the 1910s and ’20s that Hollywood studios lost before they standardized film preservation.
Unlike those films, Netflix’s movies still exist and can be watched on their website. But for the most part they aren’t. If Netflix’s executives learned anything from indie film it was this: on the platform, you didn’t need to make a hit to succeed. You didn’t even need your film to be remembered. You just needed, in Greenberg’s words, “enough of everything to attract anyone.”
It didn’t take long for the streamers to abandon independent film altogether. Ted Hope learned this the hard way. Back in 2015, when Amazon was first attempting to break into original movies, the streamer hired Hope as the head of development of its film division. It seemed like a natural fit. Amazon was trying to distinguish itself by distributing sophisticated auteurs, the kinds of filmmakers Hope had been producing since the early 1990s. The pairing started off well. In 2016, the studio’s first full year of releases, Hope acquired Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea and Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman, which together collected three Oscars: best screenplay, best actor, and best foreign-language film.
But as Hope learned, making a successful movie on a streaming platform didn’t necessarily make a streaming platform successful. At Amazon, Hope discovered he was in the customer acquisition business, not the film business. “And the way you win the customer acquisition business,” Hope said, “is by maintaining a regular cadence at a consistent quality in an environment that people trust.” Competition intensified, with Apple, Disney, Paramount, and NBCUniversal all entering the fray, and “it became tougher to keep a customer,” said Hope, “as people would dip in and dip out.”
In an effort to reduce “churn,” the rate at which customers canceled their subscriptions, the streamers began pushing a different kind of production model. Instead of acquiring films by auteurs, which had gotten them into trouble — Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties, a film about preteen dancers in Paris, sparked a baseless right-wing panic that Netflix was sexualizing children — they turned to a safer, more uniform product that could be made in-house, and replicated and tailored to the diverse tastes of their enormous subscriber bases. (This also guaranteed they’d keep global distribution rights instead of having to negotiate for them.) “They no longer wanted that outlier,” Hope said. “They wanted someone to have correct expectations: ‘Oh, look at those two couples kissing. One’s wearing pool flippers. That must be a romantic comedy. I get it, do you want to watch a romantic comedy tonight?’ And that’s what it reduced down to. As long as people got what they expected, they stayed in tune.”
In documentaries, too, executives shifted to conventional feed. “It’s not enough to do something that a few million people might really love when you’re trying to reach twenty-five million people or fifty million people,” a former Netflix executive told the journalist Reeves Wiedeman in a 2023 article in New York about the documentary streaming “boom.” “A lot of documentaries — I would say the majority of documentaries — don’t meet that bar.” So what did? Grisly true crime, garish cult exposés, celebrity hagiography, sports and food miniseries, pop science, and pets. Netflix’s documentary slate quickly became a supermarket aisle of tabloid magazines.1
In 2021 Netflix announced that it would start releasing a new original movie every week. A certain style soon began to take shape, a mind-numbing anticinema that anyone who has subscribed to Netflix in recent years knows by sight. I’ll call it the Typical Netflix Movie (TNM). From the outside, the TNM looks algorithmically constructed, as if designed to cater to each of Netflix’s two thousand “taste clusters,” the genre-like groupings Netflix uses to segment its audience, green-light programs, and recommend films and shows to subscribers. The TNM covers every niche interest and identity category in existence, such as a movie about a tall girl, Tall Girl, but also Horse Girl, Skater Girl, Sweet Girl, Lost Girls, and Nice Girls. Seemingly optimized for search engines, the title of a TNM announces exactly what it is — hence a romantic comedy about a wine executive called A Perfect Pairing, or a murder mystery called Murder Mystery. The opening credit sequence looks thrown together, as if its designer were playing roulette with Adobe templates in After Effects. A typical shot frames two characters, waist up, in profile as the camera slowly dollies across them, a slow and constant whir meant to inject motion into an otherwise inert frame. There is a preponderance of drone shots. The characters’ dialogue is stilted, filled with overexplanation, clichés, and lingo no human would ever use, like two bots stuck in a loop. “Want to catch a beer?” a buddy asks Adam Sandler in Murder Mystery:
Nick (Adam Sandler): I can’t . I gotta run a few errands.
Jimmy: What? You don’t want a beer? What’s wrong?
Nick: I got the results back from the detective exam.
Jimmy: You failed again. This is why I never took that test . All the anxiety and disappointment . At some point you have to realize you have hit your ceiling and just give up .
The editors of these films seem to have just given up, too. The cutting between shots is frenetic. The lighting is terrible. The TNM looks both oversaturated and flat, with the blacks brightened and the highlights dulled, a result of Netflix’s insistence that its originals be shot with powerful digital cameras that compress poorly on viewers’ laptops and televisions. (Netflix might be the first studio in Hollywood history to consistently make daylight look bad.) The TNM also never turns down an opportunity to use CGI for shots that don’t need it, such as the kicking of a soccer ball in The Kissing Booth. Worst of all is the music: in the absence of any mise-en-scène, the TNM pipes in recognizable tunes from expensive, blue-chip artists to create moods, such as the vacuous, third-order use of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” in Irish Wish, the mercilessly random Lindsay Lohan body-swap fantasy in which she schemes to marry a rich Irish novelist who lives in a castle.
In 2022, after Netflix’s subscriber numbers dipped and its stock tanked, journalists were quick to link the company’s excessive output with a drop in what they tepidly referred to as “quality control.” Responding to claims that Netflix had pursued “drunken sailor spending,” Sarandos provided a justification to Maureen Dowd in the New York Times: “We were trying to build a library to make up for not having ninety years of storytelling.”
But high output alone can’t account for Netflix’s garbage quality. In the 1920s and ’30s, studios like Paramount and Warner Bros. put out as many as seventy movies per year. Around its peak in the ’90s, Miramax tried releasing a new film almost every week. 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. Cindy Holland, the first employee Sarandos hired, who eventually served as vice president of original content, once compared Netflix’s rapacious DVD acquisition strategy to “shoveling coal in the side door of the house.” This remained true as Netflix ramped up its original-film production. In researching this essay, I was told by sources about two high-level Netflix executives who have been known to green-light projects without reading the scripts at all.
Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)
One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.” Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas, a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.” A high-gloss product that dissolves into air. Tide Pod cinema.
Marc Randolph, who quit Netflix in 2002, has explained that his cofounder’s origin story about the Blockbuster late fee for Apollo 13 was made up. “[It was] a lot of crap,” Randolph told the Netflixed writer Gina Keating. “It never happened.” According to Randolph, the Apollo 13 story began as “a convenient fiction” to explain the benefits of Netflix’s subscription model but took on a life of its own. In the mid-2000s, Blockbuster demanded that Hastings stop repeating the anecdote in public. “Blockbuster had searched its databases after hearing the story,” Keating reported, “and never found such a transaction.”
Hastings’s lie marked the beginning of a campaign of deception and obfuscation. Despite harvesting large troves of data on users’ viewing habits, Netflix for years refused to release any of it — not even to the producers, directors, and stars of its supposed “hit” movies and shows. Keeping talent in the dark proved to be a useful negotiating tactic when the streamer renewed a television show or green-lit a movie sequel. At the same time, withholding data protected the company from public scrutiny by obscuring how little audiences were watching its original programming in a meaningful way — from start to finish, or even at all.
The TNM covers every niche interest and identity category in existence, such as a movie about a tall girl, Tall Girl, but also Horse Girl, Skater Girl, Sweet Girl, Lost Girls, and Nice Girls.
Netflix was no different from its competitors. “The number of things that tank on Amazon is remarkable,” a former Amazon Studios executive told me. “There are so many things that people hardly watch and it would be embarrassing to release those streaming numbers. I used to get this daily email, which basically said, ‘here are the one hundred movies that people are watching most on Amazon SVOD today by the minute.’ It was always a lot of Tom Cruise sci-fi movies, action movies from the ’90s and aughts, and Talladega Nights.”
That audiences clearly prefer the films of the past has been an inconvenient fact for the streamers who tout themselves as the future of entertainment.2 But rather than address the problem by improving the quality of their programming and distribution, the streamers obscure the failure of their originals even further with PR bluster. Ever since it moved into original content, Netflix had been making ridiculous claims about its films and shows with little to no pushback from the Hollywood press. In a 2018 article about Netflix published in New York, Sarandos described The Kissing Booth, an unmemorable teen romance starring Jacob Elordi and Joey King, as “one of the most-watched movies in the country, and maybe in the world.” His evidence? The rankings of Elordi and King on something called the “Star-o-Meter,” a user-derived measurement for the popularity of celebrities on IMDb.com. “Three weeks ago on the IMDb Star-o-Meter, which is how they rank their popularity, [Elordi] was No. 25,000. Today he is the No. 1 star in the world,” Sarandos claimed. “And Joey King, the female lead, went from like No. 17,000 to No. 6. This is a movie that I bet you’d never heard of until I just mentioned it to you.”
Every week Netflix seemed to deliver a new movie no one had ever heard of that somehow broke every viewing record in the world. There was Army of the Dead, Zack Snyder’s 2021 zombie heist film whose ensemble cast included retired wrestler Dave Bautista and the comedian Tig Notaro; according to Netflix’s bottom-of-the-barrel PR organ Tudum, it was “the #1 film around the world and is projected to be one of Netflix’s most popular films ever in its first 4 weeks.” Airplane Mode, a 2020 Brazilian comedy about an influencer, wasn’t covered by any major outlet. But on Twitter, Tudum issued a “✈ hit alert ✈” calling it “the most popular non-English film on Netflix” of 2020. A few months later, Tudum announced a new record breaker: The Old Guard, an action movie starring Charlize Theron released at the height of the pandemic. No one could claim with a serious face that the film was as popular as the junk television Netflix released during the company’s pandemic boom, like Tiger King and Emily in Paris. Still, Tudum described The Old Guard as a “blockbuster” that was “already among the top 10 most popular Netflix films ever,” and “on track to reach 72M households in its first 4 weeks!”
Reaching seventy-two million households didn’t mean what it sounded like it meant. What it actually meant was that seventy-two million accounts watched at least two minutes of The Old Guard. According to Netflix, two minutes was “long enough to indicate the choice was intentional,” even though Netflix designed its viewing experience to be totally unintentional. An essential part of Netflix’s platform is its autoplay feature, which launches users into the next episode of a television series, or an algorithmically chosen movie, seconds after a program ends and sometimes just before the credits roll.
In 2023, in response to industry pressure, and as a flex against other less successful streaming platforms, the company began releasing biannual reports that contained the total number of “views” for each of its eighteen-thousand-plus titles over the previous six months. On a conference call with reporters, Sarandos claimed this was the most transparent representation of its data ever shown to the public.
Netflix’s “views” might look impressive on paper (even Sweet Girl, the TNM starring Jason Momoa as a vengeance-seeking survivalist whose MMA-trained daughter takes up his cause, was viewed 6.7 million times in the first half of 2024), but these figures remain a sham. To get to 6.7 million, Netflix first tallies the film’s “viewing hours,” the total amount of time that users have spent streaming the movie. Here, Netflix makes no distinction between users who watch Sweet Girl all the way through, those who watch less than two minutes, and those who watch just a few seconds thanks to autoplay, or skip around, or watch at 1.5x speed. All this distracted, piecemeal activity is rolled into Sweet Girl’s total viewing hours (12.3 million at last count), which the company then divides by the program’s runtime (110 minutes, or 1.83 hours) to produce those 6.7 million views. According to Netflix’s rubric, two users who watch the first half of Sweet Girl and close their laptops equal one full “view” — as do 110 users who each watch a single minute.
Such sleight of hand would be illegal in any other industry. Ford could never tell its shareholders that it sold two hundred thousand F-150 trucks over a single quarter, when in truth the company sold one hundred thousand F-150s to married couples who co-owned their vehicles. But for Netflix, a movie is an accounting trick — a tranche of pixels that allows the company to release increasingly fantastical statements about its viewership, such as the absurd notion that Leave the World Behind, a dubious Julia Roberts apocalypse movie produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, was “viewed” 121 million times. How could anyone believe that?
“There’s a movie on Paramount+ right now called On the Come Up,” a Hollywood producer told me in 2022. “I’m sure you haven’t heard about it because you don’t hear about any of these movies. It’s about a Black female rapper in Chicago and her journey in rap battling. It’s like the Black, female 8 Mile. It’s not a great movie, but in another era, it would have been a crowd-pleaser that could cross over and play a few hundred screens, like Set It Off or Down in the Delta. That was a film by a major poet in her directorial debut, with Wesley Snipes, and that movie comfortably played on four to five hundred screens, a smallish-medium release from Miramax in 1998. What has happened to that movie is that it has become On the Come Up, which just disappears into the ether, and the studios put up two billboards in LA because they know the creators live in LA and want some sort of vision that they are being marketed. Like with Amazon — if you drive through Culver City you will see billboards for Amazon movies everywhere. Why? Because the directors who come to the studio lot to take a meeting there to make a movie, they drive there and they’re like, ‘Oh they’re marketing my movie.’ But they’re not.”
Last winter, while visiting Los Angeles, I went to see the signage for myself. Encircling the intersection of Venice and La Cienega Boulevards were eight towering billboards promoting the latest Amazon original movies and shows. Two advertised The Burial, a legal drama starring Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones. I hadn’t heard of it, nor had anyone else I talked to that week. I drove to more studios, down Sunset Boulevard past Netflix’s headquarters, toward Melrose Avenue and the Paramount lot. Every studio had token billboards for their latest pseudomovies, designed to be played but not watched.
In the past, whenever the movies in Hollywood went stale and executives exerted too much control over artists, the industry had an important hand brake: the audience. If a movie bombed with audiences and box office numbers plummeted, then studios would have to change course. After all, the box office has always been viewed as the gold standard of metrics in Hollywood for a reason: it’s the most distilled and straightforward measurement of audience interest. 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.
How to predict the audience’s taste — what will make money and what won’t — is a question that’s plagued Hollywood since its inception. The problem was captured by the screenwriter William Goldman in 1983. “Nobody knows anything,” he wrote in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work.” Netflix’s greatest innovation was that it found a way around this uncertainty: it provided a platform on which there are no failures, where everything works.
This is an important milestone for the largest Hollywood studios as they all set their sights on integrating artificial intelligence into their productions. In March, news outlets reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had held meetings with top studios to showcase his company’s text-to-video generator, Sora. Clips generated by Sora that circulated online alternated between drone shots of cityscapes that look ripped from video-game cut scenes and animals rendered in the 3D animated style common to Hollywood productions today. Streaming platforms are the only place where this garbage makes any sense — a place where it would never be watched at all.
But by insulating their films from failure, the streamers have destroyed the meaning of success. Thierry Frémaux, head of the Cannes Film Festival and a vocal critic of streamers, understood this well when he presented the dilemma at a Cannes press conference in 2021. “What directors have been discovered by [streaming] platforms?” he asked. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Frémaux began calling on journalists to name an auteur whose career had been launched by a streamer. By this point, Netflix had released more than seven hundred films in the US alone, with hundreds of directors attached. Yet as the Guardian later reported of the scene, “nobody could name any at all, in fact.”
Here, streaming platforms have achieved a strange paradox. Never has a group of studios gained so much control over the production, distribution, exhibition, and reception of movies by making movies no one cares about or remembers. Having not only failed to discover a new generation of auteurs, the streamers have also ensured that their filmmakers are little more than precarious content creators, ineligible to share the profits of any hit. It’s a shift that has induced a profound sense of confusion.
“What are these movies?” the Hollywood producer asked me. “Are they successful movies? Are they not? They have famous people in them. They get put out by major studios. And yet because we don’t have any reliable numbers from the streamers, we actually don’t know how many people have watched them. So what are they? If no one knows about them, if no one saw them, are they just something that people who are in them can talk about in meetings to get other jobs? Are we all just trying to keep the ball rolling so we’re just getting paid and having jobs, but no one’s really watching any of this stuff? When does the bubble burst? No one has any fucking clue.”
Netflix has created a pyramid scheme of attention, with no end in sight. And yet if the streamer admitted how little impact its movies make, it would undermine its long-running pitch to audiences, Hollywood talent, and their business representatives that the company is a grand star-making enterprise that produces great cinema with commercial appeal. This was always the logic behind Netflix’s superficial foray into funding established auteurs like Alfonso Cuarón with Roma, Jane Campion with The Power of the Dog, and Alejandro Iñárritu with Bardo. Netflix gives these films exclusive theatrical runs for a few weeks — just long enough to qualify them for Academy Awards — in a small number of theaters, a few of which the company owns or operates like the Paris in New York, or the Egyptian in Los Angeles. After that it dumps them on the platform. Some of these films, including Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, have been rescued by the Criterion Collection, whose Blu-Ray editions offer an escape route out of Netflix’s walled garden. Most of the auteurs who end up at the streamer, however, simply languish. To Netflix, auteurs are a means of legitimacy, nothing more.
“If no one knows about them, if no one saw them, are they just something that people who are in them can talk about in meetings to get other jobs?”
After all, 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). As giant burning piles of money that barely register in the cultural sphere, these attempts at generating beloved IP make the least sense in the company’s production slate. “Apparently for Netflix, Ryan Reynolds has made $50 million on this movie and $50 million on that movie,” Quentin Tarantino told a Deadline reporter last year at Cannes. “Well, good for him that he’s making so much money. But those movies don’t exist in the zeitgeist. It’s almost like they don’t even exist.” What everyone in Hollywood knows but doesn’t care to admit is that no Netflix film has ever achieved the name recognition of the streamer’s most popular television shows: Stranger Things, Bridgerton, and Squid Game.
Netflix is first and foremost a television company, one whose recent business strategies have made the company resemble the cable providers it’s tried to make irrelevant. Netflix is no longer the cheap service that freed cable subscribers from the tyranny of the bundle. The company’s standard subscription price has risen almost 100 percent over the past thirteen years, and any cord-cutter who wants access to the major networks’ latest shows must subscribe to several streaming platforms, whose prices have also shot up. Netflix is also no longer ad-free, as the company launched a lower-cost, ad-supported subscription tier in 2022. (When the streamer debuted its ad tier, it sought to charge advertisers around $65 to reach one thousand viewers, an eye-watering sum on par with NFL games. Perhaps an indication that advertisers aren’t buying Netflix’s astounding viewership numbers, this dollar amount has since dropped by more than half.) Netflix is also no longer dedicated to giving subscribers purely on-demand content. Over the past several years, the streamer has flirted with live programming, and this year it made its first big commitment, inking a $5 billion, ten-year deal for the exclusive rights to stream WWE’s live flagship program, Raw. It won’t be long before Netflix starts packaging shows into preprogrammed “channels” that run synchronously 24/7, and claiming it’s something brand new.
But if Netflix now occupies a place in the market similar to cable companies, the business it’s most spiritually aligned with is Blockbuster: a widely disliked service staffed by people who know nothing about movies, stocked with thousands of titles to see, few of them worth watching. Even Netflix knows its users can’t find titles that they like. In 2021, the company briefly introduced a new feature on its home page, called “Play Something,” to help in what the streamer called “times when we just don’t want to make decisions.” When clicked, Play Something instantly began playing for users an algorithmically chosen series or film. “Whether you’re in the mood for a new or familiar favorite,” Netflix wrote, “just ‘Play Something’ and let Netflix handle the rest.”
“Play Something,” as in: play anything. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, if a user is on their phone or cleaning their room. What matters is that it’s on, and that it stays on until Netflix asks its perennial question, a prompt that appears when the platform thinks a user has fallen asleep: “Are you still watching?”
