Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos says “there’s no urge for food to make fewer movies” on the streamer underneath the brand new movie chief Dan Lin, disputing a latest New York Occasions article that stated Netflix would transfer ahead valuing high quality over amount and viewers engagement over auteurs.
Sarandos on Thursday’s Netflix Q1 earnings name responded to a chunk this week within the New York Occasions that stated “the intention is to make Netflix’s films higher, cheaper and fewer frequent.”
“That was not a quote from Dan, and I’d say that nor did we take part in that article. There is no such thing as a urge for food to make fewer movies,” Sarandos responded. “However there may be an infinite urge for food to make higher movies all the time, though we have now made and are making nice movies, we need to make them higher in fact.”
Lin joined Netflix at the beginning of April to switch Scott Stuber, who had been movie chief at Netflix for seven years and helped legitimize the corporate within the eyes of filmmakers. Lin’s observe report because the producer of films like “Aladdin” and “The Lego Film” franchise advised to some round city that Lin can be chasing extra franchises and hits quite than auteurist Oscar-bait. Earlier this month, Lin re-organized the Netflix movie staff to be based mostly on style, quite than funds, resulting in a handful of layoffs. And the NYT article additionally advised that Netflix sources stated Lin desires to be extra aggressive in growing the corporate’s personal materials as a way of high quality management quite than watch for producers to come back to them.
Sarandos on the decision defended Lin’s observe report as somebody who produced each the live-action “Avatar: The Final Airbender” sequence for Netflix and the Oscar-nominated “The Two Popes,” and reiterated that the “technique stays selection and high quality.”
“We’re tremendous excited to have Dan be part of the corporate. He simply joined us a pair weeks in the past and he joined us operating 100 miles an hour,” Sarandos stated. “Bela [Bajaria] has stated this publicly, our technique stays selection and high quality, and she or he’s doing a tremendous job bringing new contemporary pondering to our content material and our content material group, bringing Dan on board is a good instance of that. We need to have numerous films, we would like them to thrill our audiences, all of them have completely different tastes, and we would like them to be nice. So we take a really viewers centric view of what high quality is and Dan is aware of that from having produced for us.”
The New York Occasions piece gave the instance that a number of administrators who initially made films for Netflix like Martin Scorsese, Maggie Gyllenhaal, or Scott Cooper are actually working elsewhere. It additionally claimed Netflix declined to bid on a brief story from Netflix staple Millie Bobby Brown, that it was demanding funds cuts on a brand new movie from “All Quiet on the Western Entrance” director Edward Berger, and that it was now not transferring ahead with a brand new movie referred to as “Aurora” by director Kathryn Bigelow, who reportedly left the undertaking a number of months in the past.
Netflix added over 9 million subscribers this previous quarter, bringing them simply shy of 270 million globally. However this would be the final yr such quarterly subscriber updates shall be reported by Netflix, the streamer additionally introduced to buyers at present.