Netflix is ​​changing the way it makes movies to compete with Disney Plus

In the first quarter of 2022, it finally happened: Netflix’s quarter was bad. He. She I lost over 200,000 subscribers He acknowledged that new competitors like Disney Plus and HBO Max were effectively putting an end to the way the company had been doing business for nearly a decade. Now, Netflix is ​​moving away from the frenetic release pace and mid-size movies that made it a near-critical darling with a new plan to produce “bigger movies” at a less “gluttonous” pace, according to The New York Times. report from The Hollywood Reporter.

You know, kind of what most Hollywood already does.

Main takeaway from The Hollywood Reporter The piece is that while Netflix doesn’t seem quite sure what it wants, it just wants to make it more thoughtful than it has been in the past decade.

But the past decade hasn’t just been about flooding the region with content in an effort to quickly build a library that might try to rival those of Disney and Warner Bros. It was also about Netflix trying to bring a bit of a tech mindset into Hollywood. In Hollywood, caution is key. The reason why Hollywood shy away from mid-range movies, Netflix made its bread and butter for a while is because Hollywood has found bigger and more consistent returns on blockbuster movies (usually involving some type of superhero or actor playing a superhero in another franchise).

Netflix, with its never-ending cash back and no need to please distributors or theaters, could produce more diverse content to try and secure people’s subscriptions each month. And it could further rationalize huge spending because it was trying to better understand the audience through careful analysis of viewer data that its competitors could not access.

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Netflix was meant to transform Hollywood. Instead, it turns to the same practices that made its competitors giants, only without the lucrative perks, massesand huge backlink catalogs that these same competitors enjoy.

Netflix is ​​already creating a file Ad-supported subscription A layer to secure more subscribers who are reluctant to spend money in Streaming Wars. Peacock and Paramount Plus already have similar tiers, and Disney Plus and HBO Max plan to add ad-supported tiers as well.

Netflix too Strict action on password sharingwhich is a practice that claims More than 100 million families Use to avoid additional subscriptions. Previously, password sharing seemed to be ignored by the company – and Sometimes even tacitly supported. HBO Max, meanwhile, Has password sharing mitigations built in.

But the biggest way Netflix is ​​now chasing down the competition is how it chooses which movies to produce. CEO Ted Sarandos indicated on Netflix’s latest earnings call that it will focus on “big-event movies,” and the company has spent the past two months erasing large portions of divisions such as animation (which are usually more expensive to produce with lower returns), original independent features, and family live action movies.

You’ll notice that two of those, animation and family live action, are also areas where Netflix’s biggest competitor, Disney, is doing great. It’s as if Netflix is ​​doing what many movie companies have done before: moving away from competing with the House of the Mouse in areas it has historically dominated.

but given Disney is the largest producer and distributor of films in the United States by a very large margin, has a near-monopoly on theaters, and has a library of the largest franchises in film history.Withdrawing from the competition may not help Netflix. And structuring itself like Hollywood might not help either. When Bob Chuck took over as CEO of Disney, he hurried I started to reorganize the company to operate more like a tech company.

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Attempting to bring the spirit of technology to Hollywood may end up not being a huge win for Netflix, but the same can’t be said for its competitors.

disclosure: the edge She is currently producing a series with Netflix.

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