16 ms·

Netflix’s Movie Blitz Takes Aim at Hollywood’s Heart

74 points by Element_ 8y ago

garyclarke27 8y ago
Netflix should comply with the 90 Theatre window for some films, grand films that need huge screens for the best experience. I’m a subscriber, their subscription fee is so cheap compared to Sky it hardly registers. I mainly watch TV shows not films on Netflix, I won’t leave if a few films a year are shown in Theatre first, I might even get of my backside and go to the cinema - if Netflix enables a decent film like Gravity to be produced - instead of the usual inane superhero nonsense. I’m curious though, how does Netflix manage to spend so much money and produce so much crap?? Recently I’ve noticed myself watching more Amazon Prime, they seem to have a higher quality to volume ratio, they seem to get much more bang for their buck.
newscracker 8y ago
Anecdotally, I believe Netflix needs to up its game on original movies. Compared to its original shows that have many fantastic ones, many Netflix original movies I’ve seen have been mediocre to bad. The larger concern still is every large content producer wanting to have their own streaming service and not wanting to sell content to others. It’s bad for consumers, and it will turn out to be bad for the streaming companies too, because consumers will balk at subscribing to several individual services and just go back to pirating content. Add the so-silly-we-still-have-this-in-2018 geographical content restrictions, piracy is still the viewer’s best friend.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
tuxxy 8y ago
I can definitely empathize with some of the points made regarding the "filmmaker's vision" as applied to Netflix. Ultimately, I think feelings like this will degrade and leave those unwilling to change to be forgotten. Art, in particular, is interesting to see how it adapts to those who consume it. This puts Netflix and artists in a unique position to make art that can entirely utilize this medium of delivery. Whether or not this makes better content is to be seen, imho.
- shrimpx 8y ago
  I'm curious what you mean by "art." In my experience what is referred to as successful artists on the internet are bootstrapped startups selling branded content and products.
  - justtopost 8y ago
    Most of those 'artists', are just people playacting on instagram as artists. I suspect few will find any relevance for that reason alone. The number of people who want to appear as artists have always outnumbered actual creators by several orders of magnitude. Actual artists are loathe to do such marketing of 'branded content' ouside desperation and subtrafuge. Personality marketing on social media might be an art in itself, but it sure isn't pretty up close.
adrianN 8y ago
I find this development very sad. For a short number of years it looked like the Internet would enable me to legally watch any movie I want whenever I want it. But Hollywood did not want it that way. Instead streaming services are slowly but surely becoming just another TV station. Everything is siloed again and unless I want to pay ten bucks a month per movie studio I'm again left choosing between movies I don't really want to see. Not long now and it'll become strictly worse than renting DVDs in all dimensions but the small inconvenience of having to go to a physical store.
- nradov 8y ago
  The majority of movies from all major studios are available for rent on Apple iTunes and Google Play.
  - fipple 8y ago
    And Amazon Video.
  - chrisper 8y ago
    This assumes you are in a region Hollywood approves of. And even then often not all languages are available. Some movies even become available much later than in the US for example. So far piracy is still more convenient and accessible even if I am willing to pay for movies and TV shows. Good thing it's legal in my country.
    - Semaphor 8y ago
      I remember spending 2 hours trying to buy a new TV show in Germany but in English (so on Amazon.com and not .de). VPN, fake US address, virtual gift card sent from one account to another. Nothing worked. In the end, I pirated the show.
      - chrisper 8y ago
        Yes. That's exactly my issue. Often they also only have English in Stereo.
charliecurran 8y ago
Just tweeted this thread // this is a weird flex. Fun time to be a filmmaker rn. 2/ I've been a longtime reader of @stratechery, especially @benthompson's analysis of Netflix // can't recommend enough his posts on aggregation theory when thinking the future of media distribution, especially re: Netflix. 3/ So…it wasn’t new or surprising to read that Netflix is debt financing a larger slate than Universal, and competing for zero-sum prestige films courting top talent and mounting a massive award campaign to check off their first best picture nom on the strength of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. 4/ What felt new and “infrared” was the reach for Lew Wassermann’s lineage. 5/ “After graduating from the University of Arizona with a film degree…Mr. Stuber got a job at Universal in 1992 as a publicity assistant. His duties included delivering news clippings at 8 a.m. daily to the studio’s all-powerful chief, Lew Wasserman. 6/ “After about six months, Mr. Wasserman, apparently impressed by Mr. Stuber’s punctuality, spoke to him for the first time. “He said, ‘Hey kid, what do you want to be when you grow up?’” Mr. Stuber recalled. The young Mr. Stuber’s quick reply? “You.” 7/ For those less geeked on Hollywood history, Lew was the man responsible for dismantling the Studio System as it had been known, and with the invention of film packaging gave birth to the start system we’re living the end times of. 8/ That’s why connecting Netflix’s disruption back to the coup that reconfigured Hollywood for me sounds like a formal challenge. What a time to be alive.
- jessedhillon 8y ago
  How is the bidding for, and production of, prestige films zero-sum?
  - charliecurran 8y ago
    Scorsese can only make so many films at a time.
    - charliecurran 8y ago
      That's why Lew Wasserman's innovation in building the modern talent agency at MCA / packaging films was the death of the former studio system, and genesis of the contemporary star system.
foolfoolz 8y ago
This is classic disruption but in a very high cost of entry market. Great if netflix can pull it off. There’s so much nostalgia tied to movie theaters and distributing movies on a streaming app alone can be foreign to some people. But it’s definitely the future, it’s what people want.
mortenjorck 8y ago
It's fascinating to see Netflix's transition from the data-driven insights that led them to the perfectly targeted, yet ultimately artistically-bankrupt House of Cards to the critically-acclaimed, yet hard-to-target Roma. Comparing a prestige TV series to a feature film may be apples-to-oranges, but it's hard to miss the contrast between a show that seemed to be triangulated from the successes of other networks' prestige dramas and a film that really has no popular successes to support it (apart from Cuarón's pedigree). Roma is the kind of personal, auteur work that algorithms work against. It's an incredible credit to Netflix's new content strategy that it was produced, and furthermore, promoted.
- paganel 8y ago
  > yet ultimately artistically-bankrupt House of Cards House of Cards did a lot of things right (granted, I haven't watched their latest season). First and I think most important of all it informed the general public about what politics really is, i.e. a social activity involving very enterprising men and some women that more closely approaches the works of Machiavelli than those of Rousseau. In other words, it made us aware that we live in the world of Putins, Bibis and Trumps and not in the world of Bill Clintons and Obamas, the latter's world being better described by a show like "The West Wing", which looks totally passé right now.
  - mac01021 8y ago
    But the West wing is an order of magnitude more enjoyable to watch. In house of cards, it gradually becomes impossible to emotionally invest oneself in the welfare of any of the characters, or any any outcome of the meandering plot.
    - paganel 8y ago
      > But the West wing is an order of magnitude more enjoyable to watch I totally agree, which probably means that public life has become a lot less enjoyable to watch since “West Wing” used to air. As they say: ars imitatur naturam.
unixhero 8y ago
Dont torget Alibaba Pictures. It's here (last installment of Mission Impossible)
sxp62000 8y ago
Netflix is churning out TV shows at an astonishing rate, some are great, most aren't. This has lead me to avoid clicking on thumbnails that have "Netflix" written on them unless I've already heard of the show. Netflix is good at making shows that are satisfying to watch, but hardly interesting or innovative. It's like ordering fast food. Hope they don't do this to their movies. Quality-wise HBO is still the best.
- the_duke 8y ago
  > some are great, most aren't Which is true for all content out there. The crap people willingly watch on TV astounds me. As they grow, it's only natural to produce mediocre content that will still have a large enough audience. Not everything can be a high quality hit show (and most aren't even supposed to be).
- ByThyGrace 8y ago
  > some are great A little OT but how do you find the great ones? Netflix teasers just don't cut it and in most cases make things worse. Surely people craft reliable curated lists... somewhere?
- RunningDroid 8y ago
  > some are great, most aren't Sturgeon's law* strikes again. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
  - RunningDroid 8y ago
    Double newlines strike again
- rchaud 8y ago
  My fear is that Netflix is trying to hit the level of content volume where they no longer have to license shows/movies belonging to other studios/networks. They can finally turn into their own silo. While Netflix's original content initially yielded huge hits (House of Cards, Narcos, Stranger Things), it's purely a game of quantity over quality now. There is also the risk of Netflix falling into the same trap that Spotify is in now, being pigeonholed as focusing only on a certain type of "chill" music because that's what listening data points to. Netflix's selection would be awful if they created long-term commitments for shows that reflect today's tastes, and not necessarily what tomorrow will bring.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
shrimpx 8y ago
Netflix has become nearly useless for me. The match score is useless. The homepage is full of content that's not up my alley. They removed public reviews? That was the only remotely useful thing to let me gauge if I want to watch something I haven't known about via other channels. Netflix is just a search bar for movies where 90% of searches yield no results.
- midasz 8y ago
  If I want to watch a specific movie or TV show I'll let my Plex server handle it. If I just want something on the background, or browse around, I'll fling on Netflix. I don't even bother searching around on Netflix anymore.
- rchaud 8y ago
  They remove public reviews because they can't have their million-dollar properties soiled by negative reviews. To be fair, sometimes the reviews (like Yelp reviews) are not about the show/movie itself, but about how the company is bad because they stopped carrying "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" on some markets. The nature of Netflix attracts that kind of audience.

74 points by Element_ 8y ago

Netflix should comply with the 90 Theatre window for some films, grand films that need huge screens for the best experience. I’m a subscriber, their subscription fee is so cheap compared to Sky it hardly registers. I mainly watch TV shows not films on Netflix, I won’t leave if a few films a year are shown in Theatre first, I might even get of my backside and go to the cinema - if Netflix enables a decent film like Gravity to be produced - instead of the usual inane superhero nonsense. I’m curious though, how does Netflix manage to spend so much money and produce so much crap?? Recently I’ve noticed myself watching more Amazon Prime, they seem to have a higher quality to volume ratio, they seem to get much more bang for their buck.

newscracker 8y ago

Anecdotally, I believe Netflix needs to up its game on original movies. Compared to its original shows that have many fantastic ones, many Netflix original movies I’ve seen have been mediocre to bad. The larger concern still is every large content producer wanting to have their own streaming service and not wanting to sell content to others. It’s bad for consumers, and it will turn out to be bad for the streaming companies too, because consumers will balk at subscribing to several individual services and just go back to pirating content. Add the so-silly-we-still-have-this-in-2018 geographical content restrictions, piracy is still the viewer’s best friend.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

tuxxy 8y ago

I can definitely empathize with some of the points made regarding the "filmmaker's vision" as applied to Netflix. Ultimately, I think feelings like this will degrade and leave those unwilling to change to be forgotten. Art, in particular, is interesting to see how it adapts to those who consume it. This puts Netflix and artists in a unique position to make art that can entirely utilize this medium of delivery. Whether or not this makes better content is to be seen, imho.

shrimpx 8y ago
I'm curious what you mean by "art." In my experience what is referred to as successful artists on the internet are bootstrapped startups selling branded content and products.
- justtopost 8y ago
  Most of those 'artists', are just people playacting on instagram as artists. I suspect few will find any relevance for that reason alone. The number of people who want to appear as artists have always outnumbered actual creators by several orders of magnitude. Actual artists are loathe to do such marketing of 'branded content' ouside desperation and subtrafuge. Personality marketing on social media might be an art in itself, but it sure isn't pretty up close.

adrianN 8y ago

I find this development very sad. For a short number of years it looked like the Internet would enable me to legally watch any movie I want whenever I want it. But Hollywood did not want it that way. Instead streaming services are slowly but surely becoming just another TV station. Everything is siloed again and unless I want to pay ten bucks a month per movie studio I'm again left choosing between movies I don't really want to see. Not long now and it'll become strictly worse than renting DVDs in all dimensions but the small inconvenience of having to go to a physical store.

nradov 8y ago
The majority of movies from all major studios are available for rent on Apple iTunes and Google Play.
- fipple 8y ago
  And Amazon Video.
- chrisper 8y ago
  This assumes you are in a region Hollywood approves of. And even then often not all languages are available. Some movies even become available much later than in the US for example. So far piracy is still more convenient and accessible even if I am willing to pay for movies and TV shows. Good thing it's legal in my country.
  - Semaphor 8y ago
    I remember spending 2 hours trying to buy a new TV show in Germany but in English (so on Amazon.com and not .de). VPN, fake US address, virtual gift card sent from one account to another. Nothing worked. In the end, I pirated the show.
    - chrisper 8y ago
      Yes. That's exactly my issue. Often they also only have English in Stereo.

charliecurran 8y ago

Just tweeted this thread // this is a weird flex. Fun time to be a filmmaker rn. 2/ I've been a longtime reader of @stratechery, especially @benthompson's analysis of Netflix // can't recommend enough his posts on aggregation theory when thinking the future of media distribution, especially re: Netflix. 3/ So…it wasn’t new or surprising to read that Netflix is debt financing a larger slate than Universal, and competing for zero-sum prestige films courting top talent and mounting a massive award campaign to check off their first best picture nom on the strength of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. 4/ What felt new and “infrared” was the reach for Lew Wassermann’s lineage. 5/ “After graduating from the University of Arizona with a film degree…Mr. Stuber got a job at Universal in 1992 as a publicity assistant. His duties included delivering news clippings at 8 a.m. daily to the studio’s all-powerful chief, Lew Wasserman. 6/ “After about six months, Mr. Wasserman, apparently impressed by Mr. Stuber’s punctuality, spoke to him for the first time. “He said, ‘Hey kid, what do you want to be when you grow up?’” Mr. Stuber recalled. The young Mr. Stuber’s quick reply? “You.” 7/ For those less geeked on Hollywood history, Lew was the man responsible for dismantling the Studio System as it had been known, and with the invention of film packaging gave birth to the start system we’re living the end times of. 8/ That’s why connecting Netflix’s disruption back to the coup that reconfigured Hollywood for me sounds like a formal challenge. What a time to be alive.

jessedhillon 8y ago
How is the bidding for, and production of, prestige films zero-sum?
- charliecurran 8y ago
  Scorsese can only make so many films at a time.
  - charliecurran 8y ago
    That's why Lew Wasserman's innovation in building the modern talent agency at MCA / packaging films was the death of the former studio system, and genesis of the contemporary star system.

foolfoolz 8y ago

This is classic disruption but in a very high cost of entry market. Great if netflix can pull it off. There’s so much nostalgia tied to movie theaters and distributing movies on a streaming app alone can be foreign to some people. But it’s definitely the future, it’s what people want.

mortenjorck 8y ago

It's fascinating to see Netflix's transition from the data-driven insights that led them to the perfectly targeted, yet ultimately artistically-bankrupt House of Cards to the critically-acclaimed, yet hard-to-target Roma. Comparing a prestige TV series to a feature film may be apples-to-oranges, but it's hard to miss the contrast between a show that seemed to be triangulated from the successes of other networks' prestige dramas and a film that really has no popular successes to support it (apart from Cuarón's pedigree). Roma is the kind of personal, auteur work that algorithms work against. It's an incredible credit to Netflix's new content strategy that it was produced, and furthermore, promoted.

paganel 8y ago
> yet ultimately artistically-bankrupt House of Cards House of Cards did a lot of things right (granted, I haven't watched their latest season). First and I think most important of all it informed the general public about what politics really is, i.e. a social activity involving very enterprising men and some women that more closely approaches the works of Machiavelli than those of Rousseau. In other words, it made us aware that we live in the world of Putins, Bibis and Trumps and not in the world of Bill Clintons and Obamas, the latter's world being better described by a show like "The West Wing", which looks totally passé right now.
- mac01021 8y ago
  But the West wing is an order of magnitude more enjoyable to watch. In house of cards, it gradually becomes impossible to emotionally invest oneself in the welfare of any of the characters, or any any outcome of the meandering plot.
  - paganel 8y ago
    > But the West wing is an order of magnitude more enjoyable to watch I totally agree, which probably means that public life has become a lot less enjoyable to watch since “West Wing” used to air. As they say: ars imitatur naturam.

unixhero 8y ago

Dont torget Alibaba Pictures. It's here (last installment of Mission Impossible)

sxp62000 8y ago

Netflix is churning out TV shows at an astonishing rate, some are great, most aren't. This has lead me to avoid clicking on thumbnails that have "Netflix" written on them unless I've already heard of the show. Netflix is good at making shows that are satisfying to watch, but hardly interesting or innovative. It's like ordering fast food. Hope they don't do this to their movies. Quality-wise HBO is still the best.

the_duke 8y ago
> some are great, most aren't Which is true for all content out there. The crap people willingly watch on TV astounds me. As they grow, it's only natural to produce mediocre content that will still have a large enough audience. Not everything can be a high quality hit show (and most aren't even supposed to be).
ByThyGrace 8y ago
> some are great A little OT but how do you find the great ones? Netflix teasers just don't cut it and in most cases make things worse. Surely people craft reliable curated lists... somewhere?
RunningDroid 8y ago
> some are great, most aren't Sturgeon's law* strikes again. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
- RunningDroid 8y ago
  Double newlines strike again
rchaud 8y ago
My fear is that Netflix is trying to hit the level of content volume where they no longer have to license shows/movies belonging to other studios/networks. They can finally turn into their own silo. While Netflix's original content initially yielded huge hits (House of Cards, Narcos, Stranger Things), it's purely a game of quantity over quality now. There is also the risk of Netflix falling into the same trap that Spotify is in now, being pigeonholed as focusing only on a certain type of "chill" music because that's what listening data points to. Netflix's selection would be awful if they created long-term commitments for shows that reflect today's tastes, and not necessarily what tomorrow will bring.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

shrimpx 8y ago

Netflix has become nearly useless for me. The match score is useless. The homepage is full of content that's not up my alley. They removed public reviews? That was the only remotely useful thing to let me gauge if I want to watch something I haven't known about via other channels. Netflix is just a search bar for movies where 90% of searches yield no results.

midasz 8y ago
If I want to watch a specific movie or TV show I'll let my Plex server handle it. If I just want something on the background, or browse around, I'll fling on Netflix. I don't even bother searching around on Netflix anymore.
rchaud 8y ago
They remove public reviews because they can't have their million-dollar properties soiled by negative reviews. To be fair, sometimes the reviews (like Yelp reviews) are not about the show/movie itself, but about how the company is bad because they stopped carrying "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" on some markets. The nature of Netflix attracts that kind of audience.