Netflix Plans To Move Away From Auteur Movies As It Enters Austere Era
Dan Lin started his tenure as head of Netflix Film on April 1, and his master plan for the future of the feature division is already well underway. Last week, it was reported that he’s now reorganizing the entire department and delegating specific genres to individual executives. But that was only the beginning in the post-Scott Stuber (former film chief at the streamer) era, it seems.
The New York Times published a lengthy report over the weekend on the new Netflix strategy, which is already in full effect. During Stuber’s tenure, Netflix solidified its place on the Hollywood map thanks to their grow-at-all-cost policies: by extending big checks to everyone who would listen, they got people like Martin Scorsese, Alfonso Cuarón, or Guillermo del Toro, but also Dwayne Johnson, the Russo Bros., and Michael Bay through the door. They promised to both finance your passion project and also invest $200M+ in the latest action blockbuster.
But the economics of spending Marvel-level budgets on a movie that is going directly to streaming, and that will be offered for the same subscription fee as an indie film with no movie stars made for pocket change, never made any sense. Once Stuber and his bosses at Netflix established their place on the map, they realized as much. It’s not about getting people into the service anymore, it’s all about retention. And to keep them entertained maybe we don’t have to pay Ryan Gosling’s backend, we just have to make good movies.
That’s the main directive that new film boss Dan Lin has at Netflix. No more supersized movies anymore, because even though Red Notice may be the biggest film they’ve ever released, at the end of the day it didn’t entice that many new subscribers to make up for the huge budget. The 2021 strategy of releasing 80+ movies is also gone. Now, they are going to focus more on quality than quantity. It looks like Lin wants his team to be more aggressive in developing their features, actively producing them from scratch rather than waiting to hear pitches.
The report even said that chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, called members of the film division (around 150 people) at Netflix into a conference room and told them that the quality of movies needed to improve, and those who disagreed were invited to leave. At the end of the day, quality control measures when handling 80 movies are much harder to implement than when developing 20-30.
That mentality has been clear ever since Stuber left the job, or even before then. But still, we thought that the new film chief would be ordered to make some awards movies so that Netflix can compete at the Oscars and earn that coveted Best Picture prize. Well, that may or may not be the case, but according to The New York Times, they are more focused on keeping the audience engaged than they are on financing indie movies for the sake of it.
Kathryn Bigelow, for instance, was reported two years ago to be developing an adaptation of David Koepp’s Aurora for the streamer. That project has been dead at Netflix for a few months, according to NYT. Elsewhere, Edward Berger, who directed the remake of All Quiet on the Western Front last year, winning four Oscars for it, has been complaining that he’s getting a lot of budget notes while putting together a new film with Colin Farrell. Berger could see a second Oscar campaign this year for his new papal thriller Conclave that was showcased to CinemaCon audiences last week.
In the future, then, it seems like the streamer will be prioritizing mid-budget movies that are considered to be appealing to mass audiences. Whether this gets them Oscar nominations or not, doesn’t matter for now. The Knives Out threequel that will shoot this year could be the best of both worlds, and it seems like we’ll be getting more of those than another Red Notice or Maestro. Still, we know that CEO Ted Sarandos desperately wants that Oscar. The question now becomes: will he develop the film that wins it, or will he buy it at one of the festivals?
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
