Ted Sorandos was asked on Tuesday’s quarterly earnings call about Netflix’s opposition to its current reluctance to give its movies traditional theatrical releases, a stance that has now put the company at odds with most of its streaming competition. put in. Short answer: don’t stop the horse in mid-stream.
Sarandos said, “The film department is doing a good job.” “They’re making some really great movies. Success at the Oscars [like “All Quiet on the Western Front”] was great but even better [was that] The films that won such a big win were also very popular among the fans. We are really happy with the investment in the film.
The comments came as rival streaming companies, including Apple TV+ and Amazon’s Prime Video, reportedly made moves to invest about $1 billion a year in theatrically targeted movies. Along with David Zaslav’s reported preference for theatrical titles, this makes Netflix still more than a token theatrical commitment in prioritizing streaming premieres.
“Remember that there are many ways to create and collect demand for film,” he continued. “It’s not our job to take people to the theater.”
Netflix’s reluctance to embrace theatricality for its feature films is slowly becoming a potential sore spot in terms of generating revenue and chasing awards season glory. However, going direct-to-consumer isn’t entirely illogical when you have a subscription base as large as Netflix’s.
“It’s really leaning toward a phenomenon and a profit,” Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said. “We are providing that value to our members. Because of the scale of our reach and our over 230 million paying members on average revenue per member, it provides an opportunity to invest in these big movies.
Netflix’s biggest advantage over its rivals, as well as being first on the block and having a company name synonymous with streaming, is the size of its relatively reliable audience base. Its rivals chase just a fraction of the market and mostly rely on massive titles from their biggest IPs, like Paramount+ or The Taylor Sheridan Show for Marvel and “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” for Disney+. Consider.
“I think it’s tempting to make comparisons between services,” Sarandos continued, “but other services don’t have that scale … they don’t have the revenue base or the audience base that we have.” Single window support Can also support big budget movies with single window on Netflix.
Netflix’s rivals rely mostly on theatrical titles — think “The Batman” on HBO Max or “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” on Paramount+, which in turn rely on IPs, marquee characters and an industry dominated by previously successful franchises. Netflix could get massive audiences from star-driven originals like Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston’s “Murder Mysteries,” Ryan Reynolds’ “The Adam Project” and Sandra Bullock’s “The Unforgivable.”
Nonetheless, if Netflix perseveres and becomes the sole outsider, they may have a greater challenge in nabbing high-end talent that still warrants the awareness and prestige that comes with a theatrical release. In addition, many of Netflix’s biggest movies are either star vehicles for big-screen movie stars like Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Gosling, and even Leonardo DiCaprio, or in the case of “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” a streaming service. Smash is. The sequel to a theatrical blockbuster.
It’s a strange disconnect for anything other than a brief promotional tool, capitalizing on actors, filmmakers and genres popularized through theatrical exposure. And that doesn’t even account for the theatrical flops like “The Snowman” or forgotten blockbusters like “Bad Teacher” that dominate the daily top ten. Netflix needs theatrical films, even if they leave the multiplexes for their house projections. Right now, Netflix doesn’t need theaters to have top-tier viewership, but eventually, the people who make movies for them want massive viewership over a few weeks.
