Netflix Should Stop Making Movies

A recent interview with Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos shows the company doesn't understand the medium.

Last week, I read a great article on Pajiba breaking down Netflix’s recent data dump of its movie and television performance. Moving through the streamer’s Top 10 films, you can see a lot of views for original films that were critically unpopular and quickly forgotten. While Netflix can make a dent in the social consciousness with its original TV shows, with movies they still don’t know how to crack that market despite spending billions of dollars to create films that range from auteur-backed dramas to algorithmically-generated slop. Movies are a thing Netflix has and does, but they rarely seem to have any lasting impact. No one talks about Heart of Stone (the second-most watched Netflix movie for the back half of 2023) as much as they do TV shows like One Piece or Lupin.

Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos, who has been with the company for almost its entire existence, received a glowing profile in The New York Times this past weekend. Interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro gushed over how Netflix has won the streaming wars (they are still the dominant streamer, although Sarandos wisely cautions that there’s no reason to believe that will always be the case) and marvels at how the platform’s algorithm serves up recommendations (in my experience, they show you something in the same genre or with a similar premise but Netflix created it so you go from watching a great movie another studio created like Her and then Netflix asks if you want to watch Jexi).

I want to give Netflix credit where credit is due. They’ve been a forward-thinking company. They essentially eliminated Blockbuster with the one-two punch of DVDs by mail (thus outpacing Blockbuster on inventory and selection) and then streaming. Older companies dragged their feet on the Internet, and Netflix took advantage of their reluctance. That head start has been huge as studios not only propped up Netflix by licensing huge swaths of their catalog to provide content to the streamer but then were racing to catch up with their own streaming platforms. At the same time, Netflix was comfortably ensconced in the minds of consumers as the default destination for watching movies and television online.

But where Sarandos shows he has a core failure to understand the movie business is when Garcia-Navarro asks him about two of 2023’s biggest hits, Barbie and Oppenheimer, and he replies:

Both of those movies would be great for Netflix. They definitely would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix. And so I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that certain kinds of movies do or don’t work. There’s no reason to think that the movie itself is better in any size of screen for all people. My son’s an editor. He is 28 years old, and he watched “Lawrence of Arabia” on his phone.

Let me go through all of the ways this is wrong.