What a scathing take on Netflix

Over the past decade, Netflix, which first emerged as a destroyer of video stores, has developed a powerful business model to conquer television, only to unleash its strange and destructive power on the cinema. In doing so, it has brought Hollywood to the brink of irrelevance. Because Netflix doesn’t just survive when no one is watching — it thrives.

Film studios have always released duds: movies that fail to gain traction and are shuttled to the studios’ archives, where they disappear into obscurity. Until recently, for most studios, a forgotten film was a sign of failure. But Netflix, uniquely, seemed to relish making its films vanish as soon as they were released, dumping them onto its platform and doing as little as possible to distinguish one from the next.

There’s also a searing criticism on the “Typical Netflix Movie” having a generic approach that one can spot fairly easily

The editors of these films seem to have just given up, too. The cutting between shots is frenetic. The lighting is terrible. The TNM looks both oversaturated and flat, with the blacks brightened and the highlights dulled, a result of Netflix’s insistence that its originals be shot with powerful digital cameras that compress poorly on viewers’ laptops and televisions. (Netflix might be the first studio in Hollywood history to consistently make daylight look bad.)

They also scorched the executives for the amount of garbage production they push out

But high output alone can’t account for Netflix’s garbage quality. In the 1920s and ’30s, studios like Paramount and Warner Bros. put out as many as seventy movies per year. Around its peak in the ’90s, Miramax tried releasing a new film almost every week. The difference between Netflix and its predecessors is that the older studios had a business model that rewarded cinematic expertise and craft. Netflix, on the other hand, is staffed by unsophisticated executives who have no plan for their movies and view them with contempt.

Closing this with questions from a Hollywood producer:

“What are these movies?” the Hollywood producer asked me. “Are they successful movies? Are they not? They have famous people in them. They get put out by major studios. And yet because we don’t have any reliable numbers from the streamers, we actually don’t know how many people have watched them. So what are they? If no one knows about them, if no one saw them, are they just something that people who are in them can talk about in meetings to get other jobs? Are we all just trying to keep the ball rolling so we’re just getting paid and having jobs, but no one’s really watching any of this stuff? When does the bubble burst? No one has any fucking clue.”

Lots more in the article.