4 ms·

I can't tell if this is a profile or satire: > But Hastings told me that she impressed him, during a business trip to Delhi early in her tenure, by insisting t

I can't tell if this is a profile or satire: > But Hastings told me that she impressed him, during a business trip to Delhi early in her tenure, by insisting that they leave the grounds of the five-star Imperial Hotel to eat at a “hole-in-the-wall that had epic food.” Is this the person they've set to take the fall for Netflix shovelware?

tyingq 4y ago
Ah, yeah that's a terrible analogy for what's happening at Netflix. The complaints aren't about low production budgets. They are about the end result. "Beasts of No Nation" was a great low budget film, for example. They haven't produced something cheap, but good like that for some time.
- jfengel 4y ago
  It seems to me that they produce cheap-but-good stuff all the time. What they're hoping for is cheap-but-great stuff, and that's going to be more about serendipity rather than effort. It's hard to tell which project is going to be disproportionately brilliant before you've greenlit it. It happens from time to time, but as far as I can tell there's nobody with a special talent for knowing it beforehand. It's more about survivorship bias: somebody got lucky, and maybe they're a bit better at picking good stuff than the average person, but odds are their next effort will revert to the mean. I'm OK with that. I'd rather have that then them funding a bunch of the same stars to parade around being famous rather than specially talented. That model does turn out a lot of hits, not great films but certainly popular ones. There should be room for both, but many more low-budget ones just because you can.
  - tyingq 4y ago
    I see that, but I do think there's a fair amount of predictability for cheap-and-lousy-as-expected. Personal opinion, I suppose, but they seem to greenlight a lot of things with terrible writing, or casting, etc.
    - jfengel 4y ago
      Yeah, there does seem to be an awful lot of "how did that ever get greenlit?" I suspect that most of them seemed like a good idea at the time, and then got bogged down in process. I'm an actor, and I've seen that happen. A few mistakes and now you're committed to a process with too many sunk costs to abandon and no way to get back to "good". Some of them probably seemed like possible big hits that just didn't pan out. Others seem to have been striving for low-budget mediocrity, and failing to hit that.

tyingq 4y ago

Ah, yeah that's a terrible analogy for what's happening at Netflix. The complaints aren't about low production budgets. They are about the end result. "Beasts of No Nation" was a great low budget film, for example. They haven't produced something cheap, but good like that for some time.

jfengel 4y ago
It seems to me that they produce cheap-but-good stuff all the time. What they're hoping for is cheap-but-great stuff, and that's going to be more about serendipity rather than effort. It's hard to tell which project is going to be disproportionately brilliant before you've greenlit it. It happens from time to time, but as far as I can tell there's nobody with a special talent for knowing it beforehand. It's more about survivorship bias: somebody got lucky, and maybe they're a bit better at picking good stuff than the average person, but odds are their next effort will revert to the mean. I'm OK with that. I'd rather have that then them funding a bunch of the same stars to parade around being famous rather than specially talented. That model does turn out a lot of hits, not great films but certainly popular ones. There should be room for both, but many more low-budget ones just because you can.
- tyingq 4y ago
  I see that, but I do think there's a fair amount of predictability for cheap-and-lousy-as-expected. Personal opinion, I suppose, but they seem to greenlight a lot of things with terrible writing, or casting, etc.
  - jfengel 4y ago
    Yeah, there does seem to be an awful lot of "how did that ever get greenlit?" I suspect that most of them seemed like a good idea at the time, and then got bogged down in process. I'm an actor, and I've seen that happen. A few mistakes and now you're committed to a process with too many sunk costs to abandon and no way to get back to "good". Some of them probably seemed like possible big hits that just didn't pan out. Others seem to have been striving for low-budget mediocrity, and failing to hit that.