Last week at the fourth annual South African Investment Conference, Netflix pledged R929m towards the development of SA productions.
This includes an investment in the streamer’s international production Project Panda — the working title of an upcoming live action adaptation of the popular Japanese manga One Piece, which is in production at Cape Town studios in partnership with SA company Film Afrika.
The rest of the pledged investment is to cover three local productions, including a third season of Gambit Films’ YA Cape Town-set drama Blood & Water — which over two seasons since it debuted in 2020 has enjoyed increasing success locally and internationally — and a further two as yet undisclosed titles produced by local production stalwarts Quizzical Pictures and Burnt Onion Productions, the creators of the popular Netflix series How to Ruin Christmas.
Netflix’s director of content for Africa, Ben Amadasun says the streaming giant’s latest injection into the local film industry is a logical continuation of a process that has seen Netflix already invest R2bn in SA productions since it began to create and source local content for the platform in 2019.
“Every time we’ve released really strong titles on the Originals side, we’ve seen strong performance in terms of viewers. So we as a company have belief in stories from this region — African stories [which are] showing different perspectives of Africa that are not being seen anywhere else [or been made by] any other company in the world so we really believe that there are so many brilliant storytellers in this market,” says Amadasun.
We as a company have belief in ... African stories [which are] showing different perspectives of Africa that are not being seen anywhere else [or been made by] any other company.
— Ben Amadasun
Next week will see the release of Senzo, Netflix’s first original true crime docuseries, which investigates the 2014 murder of footballer Senzo Meyiwa. Director Mandla Dube’s historical action film Silverton Siege, the story of a group of anti-apartheid fighters who end up in a tense bank hostage drama after a failed MK mission, arrives as the first wholly produced Netflix original film on April 27.
Netflix director of series for Africa Dorothy Ghettuba says that her department “keeps on saying that we are coming out hot this year. We have more shows in the pipeline and we will be seeing them coming out this year. Our focus is local content for a local audience, and what we’ve found is that the knock-on effect of that is that the more specific a story is, the more it’s received globally. So it’s just a gift that keeps on giving but we have to be true and honour the local market first. From a story perspective we’re focusing on local stories in creating our platform and taking them to the 200-million plus people across the world but the focus is on local first and then the world can enjoy the stories that South Africans have to tell.”
Director of film for Africa Tendeka Matatu is quick to point out that Netflix’s investment extends beyond its hunger for profitable local content believing that “it’s also important that as we start increasingly working with more and more local filmmakers and telling these local stories that we also grow the industry. We’re very active in our industry development and training ... so the two aren’t mutually exclusive, they’re symbiotic and they need to grow together”.
Matatu adds that since joining Netflix’s Africa team seven months ago, he has been given a mandate “to build a slate of great, local, impactful movies. From next year we’ll start seeing some of those movies launching and hopefully we’ll get to a steady phase of big, local movies coming out, making people excited about movies and getting them excited about local film”.
While Netflix’s investment offers welcome and much-needed support to local content creators, it is still also motivated by the streamer’s quest for market expansion and its need to show consistent growth on the continent to its shareholders.
Amadasun says that so far the investment in African content has translated into increased subscriber numbers and that “even though we’ve been available in SA since 2016, we’ve only started to programme [local content] since late 2019-early 2020 so we’re still only two years in [but] I see Africa being a big contributor to overall Netflix in terms of growth in the future and we want to be a big entertainment destination of choice going forward”.
Though Netflix does not release detailed subscriber numbers for markets outside the US, independent research conducted last year estimated that SA has in the region of 350,000 paid subscribers and it is projected that this will increase to more than 2-million in the next five years.
That projected increase will have to occur in the face of competition from MultiChoice’s streaming service Showmax, which is also betting big on original local content with series such as The Wife and Devilsdorp and on the international content front from Disney+ when it launches here next month.
Ghettuba says that as far as competition is concerned “we talk a lot about this and I think it’s a good thing. More stories will be told and they’ll be shared around the world. I think we can all exist together. For us, what we’re interested in is just telling these amazing stories”.
And of course, as Matuta adds, “making sure that filmmakers love working with us and that we treat people really well. We definitely don’t prescribe and we really help people achieve their vision and that’s the most important thing”.
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