For much of the past two years, cinema lovers have been rightfully frustrated by the explosion on Netflix of films that seem to have no purpose other than to simply give audiences what the streamer’s algorithm has determined they like. The Netflix that was once home to interesting new cinematic projects like Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman seemed to be a brief hopeful shadow moment of the past, subsumed by a panic in the wake of the streamer’s much commented on subscriber losses in 2022.
This resulted in a home screen full of Kevin Hart films and other easy crowd-pleasers, complemented by a slew of films from around the world whose subtitles could not hide that at best these films were the digital-era equivalent of the “straight to video” releases of a previous era. Where there had once been a commitment to quality over quantity, Netflix seemed to have decided that quantity would save it far more successfully than quality.
The streamer still managed to garner some Oscar buzz for its German language adaptation of All Quiet On the Western Front, which was released towards the end of 2022. It earned nine Oscar nominations and won four, including best international feature. But Netflix seemed generally to have given up chasing Academy Awards or critical acclaim in favour of streaming views, having lost the race for the first streaming studio to win a best picture Oscar when Coda, Apple TV+’s teary, sentimental drama about a hearing child of deaf parents, won best picture in 2022.
But times and strategies change and as the end of 2023 and the 2024 Oscar race hots up, and despite the shutdowns on publicity and promotion imposed by the recently ended Screen Actors Guild strike, Netflix’s list of current and forthcoming film titles is, surprisingly, looking promising for the first time in a while.
David Fincher’s The Killer starring Michael Fassbender as an existentially angsty assassin arrives on the platform on Friday, fresh off a warm critical festival reception and it will soon be followed by a number of prestige titles that cannot be flippantly dismissed as mediocre, by-the-numbers, crowd-pleasing fare. These include Bradley Cooper’s much-anticipated Leonard Bernstein epic Maestro; Todd Haynes’ festival favourite May December starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore; and Rustin, a biopic of the gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground production company.
This is not just a late season Oscar run, with many of these films receiving theatrical releases that will enable them to qualify for awards before they land on Netflix. It is also, according to a recent Variety interview with Scott Stuber, the head of Netflix’s film division, just the beginning of a strategy that will revert to the company’s previous “quality over quantity” mantra.
As Stuber explained it, Netflix’s original focus was to “make sure we had enough. We needed volume” and that is understandable for a new player in an industry dominated by major studios whose history stretches back more than a century to the invention of the movies. This led to inevitable jokes about Netflix’s seemingly infinite amount of content, which left many users spending more time trying to decide what to watch than actually watching anything. That deluge was greatly assisted by deals that involved major studios licensing their products to Netflix for large sums of money that guaranteed that their shows and films would have new viewership numbering in the millions.
After studios figured out that selling content to Netflix was only helping to increase subscriber numbers and profit for the streamer, they decided to create their own subscription platforms and the streaming wars began. When the crushing effects of the pandemic were compounded by the Hollywood strike shutdowns in 2023, many of the other streamers began to drastically cut costs and reduce production of original content and some have reverted to licensing product back to Netflix.
There has also been a shift to the use of theatrical releases of major tent pole productions as a means of encouraging new subscribers to the streaming services of the studios producing them. This has been particularly evident in the strategy adopted by Apple TV+, which has put substantial money into Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Ridley Scott’s forthcoming epic Napoleon, both of which are to be released in cinemas before they arrive on the platform.
Netflix’s strategy now seems to be a combination of several approaches. Some original films like Maestro will have theatrical releases before arrival on the service. Others — like Nyad, the recently released sports biopic starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster — will go straight to Netflix. And still other titles, like Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, which though not produced or financed by Netflix have been acquired through deals at festivals and are due for release in the coming months.
All of which may mean that cynics who believed Netflix had shifted from being a platform that had the possibility to expand the cinematic universe with intriguing, original content to one that was driven by bottom-line considerations to spew out masses of lowest-common-denominator schlock may yet be proved wrong. As Stuber told Variety, “Right now, we’re not trying to hit a set number of film releases. It’s about, ‘Let’s make what we believe in ... and let’s actually put forth a slate that we can stand behind and say, this is the best version of a romantic comedy. This is the best version of a thriller. This is the best version of a drama.’”
That certainly sounds promising but let’s not forget, as Stuber admits, that Netflix is also “a machine that was built to go, go, go … and that doesn’t always result in quality. A lot of streaming companies made the mistake of moving so fast that we made a lot of things that weren’t ready to be produced. I want to avoid that.”
Here’s hoping that for the sake of serious film lovers everywhere, Stuber and Netflix’s film division manage to find space for quality within all the quantity.
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