Netflix has long enjoyed its lofty seat atop the mountain of streaming services, but recent years have seen the company facing increased competition. Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+, HBO Max, Apple TV+, and more have begun challenging Netflix for supremacy, and the once-mighty company actually lost more than 200,000 subscribers earlier this year. This has led Netflix to take cost-cutting measures and reevaluate its strategy for its movies and TV shows moving forward.
According to a report from THR, we haven’t seen the end of big-budget Netflix movies, but perhaps we won’t see them quite so frequently. The outlet states that Netflix will be focusing on “making bigger movies, making better movies, and releasing fewer than it previously did at a gluttonous pace.” Rather than simply flooding the service with content, it would seem that Netflix is going to be more selective moving forward. Part of Netflix’s cost-cutting has seen large portions of their family live-action film division as well as the original independent film division “cleaned out,” but one insider told THR that “small movies are not going to go away,” they may just become more niche.
The “bigger, better” mandate doesn’t mean that we’ll be seeing Netflix diverting its budget to multi-million dollar movies like The Gray Man or the Knives Out sequels. “Expect to a see a more subtle change,” reads the THR report, “instead of making two movies for $10 million, as an example, the company will make one for $20 million.” Netflix will look to event movies to drive their subscriber growth, but the “era of expensive vanity projects” is over, with Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman given as an example. “This tendency to do anything to attract talent and giving them carte blanche is going away,” states one insider. It remains to be seen just how this new mandate will affect Netflix, but they’re fighting to stay ahead of the competition.
Is Netflix wise to become more selective with their movies moving forward?