Tech Won't Save Us - What Netflix Has Done to Movies w/ Will Tavlin

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Will Tavlin to discuss how the Netflix model transformed film into the Typical Netflix Movie and how the company uses claims about data to deceive the public.Will Tavlin is a New York-based writer who has written for n+1, Bookforum, and the Columbia Journalism Review.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham.Also mentioned in this episode:Will wrote about Netflix and the Typical Netflix Movie for n+1.Support the show

The decision to make crap and garbage is one that they would say that, you know, the data tells us that we have to do that. But ultimately, they're the ones who are choosing to invest in that kind of stuff. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks. I hope you enjoyed the holidays. You know, we're able to have a little bit of a break over the end of December, early January. I hope you enjoyed the two premium episodes that we made public for you to discuss AI and data centers and the power that these cloud companies

are able to accumulate as we become more dependent on these cloud services and on these very energy and resource intensive AI services that they're all trying to push on us. So I think that they were conversations that made an important contribution to this conversation that we're trying to have. So yeah, I hope you

were able to check them out over the break. But we have a bit of a different conversation today. Will Tavlin, who has been on the show in the past, is a writer based in New York City, and who has written for N Plus One, the Columbia Journalism Review and Book Forum. He has a great new piece on the way that Netflix is changing the type of cinema and television that we consume, how that is a product of the streaming model that it really pioneered and that so many other Hollywood and tech companies have adopted as a result, but how that does have consequences for what is made when it is supposed to be something that is just on in the background while you're using your phone rather than something that you're really

expected to engage with and try to take something out of. So I was really happy to have Will back on the show. I feel like to a certain degree, I was like having to remember exactly how to do an interview after three or four weeks of not recording anything new. But I think we had a really fascinating conversation about these topics getting into the history of Netflix and the lies and deceptions that are in its origin story and what it has told to the public. And then also how, of course, you know, the types of things that we often watch on these platforms are becoming degraded as there's this incentive on the one hand to cut costs, but also to make sure that there's always something new being added to the platform

that is not going to cause controversy. And that might kind of grab somebody's attention and at least have them watching for a while so that Netflix or any of these other platforms can say that they have all these great viewership numbers as they, you know, have these autoplay features that just keep playing new things over and over again, regardless of whether you're actually watching them. I would just say before we get into the episode, I have some big plans for 2025, you know, a lot of great guests lined up and who I'm hoping to have on the show, but also hopefully some more exciting things throughout the year that I'll be able to announce and tell you about as things move forward. So I would just say, you know, 2025 is probably going to be a terrible year for a whole lot of reasons, especially when we look at the tech industry and how these tech billionaires are leveraging and wielding their power against so many of us. But Tech Won't Save Us will be here to guide you through that to make sure that you continue to have a critical perspective on everything that the tech industry is doing so that you can understand, you know, what all this means for

your life and for our wider society. And hopefully what opportunities exist to push back on these things and, you know, hopefully steer us in a bit of a better direction than the one that these very powerful individuals are trying to push us toward. So with that said, if you do enjoy this conversation with Will, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week, so I can keep having these critical conversations and we can do everything else that Tech Won't Save Us does, you can join supporters like Steph in Dallas, Bria in Durham, North Carolina, Jess from Austin, Texas, and Nin from Copenhagen by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation.

Will, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much for having me back on. I'm very pleased to be here. Absolutely. We were overdue for another conversation about streaming and Hollywood and all these things. And then, of course, you released a fantastic new essay in M Plus One. So I said, ah, here's the opportunity to dig into all this again. So I think, you know, a lot of people have been probably watching a lot of movies. Maybe they went to the cinema. Maybe they were just like watching Netflix or Amazon Prime Video or something like that over the holidays.

And, you know, we have the Golden Globes just happened and we're entering the season where there's going to be a lot of talk about awards and what the biggest movies of 2024 were and all this sort of thing. So I think it's a good opportunity to kind of dig into all this, right? Definitely. It's always a good time to talk about Netflix. Yeah, this is true. You know, I wanted to start with Netflix because in the piece that you wrote, you talk about

the origin story, right? Where Netflix came from. And Reed Hastings, you know, I guess one of the co-founders he was of the company, told this specific story about how Netflix came to be and how he came up with this idea. That is probably not totally accurate. So can you give us some insight into what went on there? Yeah. So what happened was Reed Hastings co-founded Netflix with a guy named Mark Randolph in the late 90s. What happened was they were at a company that Reed Hastings started that was

purchased for a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars, something around $700 million. They were basically commuting to work every day together. They were carpooling and they were sort of thinking about a new business idea, what to do next. And they wanted to do something specifically over the internet because they had seen what Amazon was basically doing with books. And Reed Hastings asked this question, well, why can't we do the same thing with movies? The way that he tells it is that he had rented a VHS tape around this time from Blockbuster of the movie Apollo 13. And he basically forgot about it. When he eventually did find the tape like under some papers in his dining room, he returned it and he was shocked to learn that he owed $40 in late fees.

And he described this process of feeling embarrassed and humiliation and also like anger at having to pay so much money. And Reed Hastings like was not alone in the sense there's a lot today I think of kind of blockbuster nostalgia which I think is misplaced because what people are actually nostalgic for is the normal video store the neighborhood video store not necessarily the franchise video store and the franchise video store epitomized in Blockbuster was notoriously despised by most of its customers. The late fees were ridiculous. They could fetch as much.

A lost tape from Blockbusters could cost as much as like $200 back then. There were all these class action lawsuits near the company's peak around, I think, the year 2000. Blockbuster collected something like $800 million in a single year in late fees. It was unbelievable. And it wasn't just that. I cite in the essay from this journalist, Gina Keating, who wrote a history of Netflix. Often another common Blockbuster experience was like walking in and seeing like 50 copies of a movie you never want to see and then nothing else. Basically, the selection was really bad. But you did get your free popcorn, right? So.

Totally. And internally, the company executives at Blockbuster referred to their business model as, quote, managed dissatisfaction. So the way that Reed Hastings tells this is basically like they saw this business model that wasn't working. And basically this new DVD technology had emerged around this time. This is around 1997. And they did this test where they took a disc and put it through the mail, USPS, and it came back fine. And they were like, great, we have a business model. Now the business model that Netflix became famous for was like basically in opposition to the blockbuster model of late fees, which was this idea of like no late fees and doing a subscription model instead. And basically how it worked was you would pay a monthly fee for Netflix and you would be able to rent up to three DVDs

at a time, and you could keep them as long as you want. The catch was that if you wanted a new DVD, a fourth DVD, a fifth DVD, you would have to send one of the three that you had rented. So you can only have three out at a time, but no late fees. And Reed Hastings, again, the way it was presented was very much like I had this terrible experience with Blockbuster. And then I came up with this idea for this business model of no late fees, which became immensely popular. What actually happened was that the Apollo 13 story was made up. Mark Randolph has given interviews about this over the years. It was a lie. And actually, Blockbuster sometime in the mid-2000s basically looked through their database

when they were coming under attack from Netflix and found that there was never evidence of such a transaction and told Reed Hastings at one point to stop telling the story in public. What actually happened is when Netflix was first founded by Reed Hastings and Mark Randolph, the unlimited subscription model only came like a couple years later, I think around 1999. Initially, they were selling and renting DVDs out to customers a la carte, basically, the way you would from Blockbuster, but just over the internet. And how they came up with the unlimited model,

though, is really interesting because it says a lot about the company and also where the company would head in the future. How it happened was they weren't really growing as fast as Hastings would have liked them to grow. And they also had this kind of logistical problem, which was because they had no brick and mortar stores, they had basically the centralized warehouse where they kept all of their DVDs. It was like hundreds of thousands of DVDs. And this was great in a sense for Netflix's customers because their selection was great. That was one of the reasons why it was so much better from Blockbusters because you'd find

crazy stuff on there, like Mario Bava movies, like all sorts of just like weird things that a brick and mortar store like Blockbuster, which would be incentivized to carry, you know, like 30 copies of Steven Spielberg's AI that they would just never have. But they had this warehouse of all these DVDs. And Mark Randolph gave this interview where he was talking about how him and Hastings were basically riffing one day about how it was really inefficient because there were all these DVDs that they had that were not in circulation, essentially. And this is where the idea for no late fees came about, was that Mark Randolph was like, well, what if we just rent these DVDs and then people can keep them as long as they want and we'll have this subscription model? And the idea is that by doing so, they would increase the amount of time that people would actually hold on to their DVDs. And then there would be fewer shipping costs essentially. And there would be fewer DVDs for them to manage and store because

people would just naturally kind of like hold on to things for a longer amount of time. And in fact, in the years following this decision, Netflix started tracking heavy users of the service and they labeled them internally as, quote, pigs and basically throttled their deliveries. And this was like if you were renting DVDs out at just kind of like a normal pace, essentially. I enjoyed that little like anecdote in there about how it identified these people who were using it a lot. But I did think it was really interesting how, you know, they kind of like turn the customers into these like mini warehouses where all of these DVDs could be stored, you know, to kind of change up the model, but also, I guess, in their eyes, make it more efficient.

And I guess I'm wondering then through the piece, you kind of chart how Netflix progressed from targeting the video store initially and Blockbuster to then once it had kind of achieved that and started to launch its streaming service to taking on television, and now more recently to going after the film industry. And so I wonder, you know, why it's important to understand that trajectory and what it tells us about Netflix as a company and how it has changed over time. Yeah, that's a great question. What you said about turning customers into like mini warehouses is really accurate, because I found one of the most interesting things about this is the way that this Netflix business model like preceded all of these other tech companies that would come in like 10 years later, like Airbnb and Uber, which got people to basically leverage their assets in order to create a more like streamlined and efficient

business model. Netflix was doing this a decade before all of those people, having people leverage their homes basically into mini Netflix warehouses. And the difference between Netflix and Blockbuster is really this. And what I say in the piece is that like Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful in their business model and Netflix basically rewarded them for being mindless. This distinction in Netflix's business model set the stage for really what they would become in the future, essentially. That makes a lot of sense. And I do think it's interesting to understand those distinctions between the two models, right? And then how that helps to inform, you know, the direction that Netflix takes as it launches the streaming service, you know, in I believe it's 2007. And then, you know, really kind of takes off down the path that we have seen it progressing through over the past almost two decades since the launch of the streaming service. So as I was saying, you know, there was this progression from like the video store to television to the film industry.

What does that tell us about Netflix as a company and why is it important to understand? Well, they targeted specifically businesses that people hated. And I think there's a tendency to kind of ascribe a kind of master plan, like an evil genius type thing to some of these companies, especially tech companies sometimes. But Netflix really found its extremely dominant business model in stages and did so by experimenting with launching into different types of entertainment and basically crushing it. And the sort of natural next business for them to get into was television and specifically cable television. And once again, cable television was a business that was widely despised by most people. Cable providers are notoriously some of the most despised types of businesses

in the United States. They have these vast monopolies. They basically charge an arm and a leg for a service that is often subpar. And actually, something that is true that Reed Hastings has said over the years publicly, and also people I spoke to who heard this from him firsthand, is that streaming was always one of Reed Hastings' ambitions. He's talked about this publicly, is that Netflix, in his eyes, DVDs was always just like a pit stop on the road to streaming, and that streaming was a business that they knew they wanted to get into in the late 90s. But basically, like the infrastructure wasn't good enough, internet speeds weren't fast enough, the technology wasn't there to be able to do it. And so a lot of the years from like 2000 to 2007 was them sort of biding their time,

and also successfully destroying Blockbuster. But by 2007, they were able to launch their first streaming service, which was called Watch Now. And it was really primitive. It was like only a thousand titles were on it. And you can only use it, I think, on Internet Explorer, on PCs. Everyone's favorite web browser. Yeah, exactly. You had to pay for a certain number of hours to stream in advance. But in fact, streaming made perfect sense for the company because Netflix had always, the sort of premise of even when they were a DVD service of the company was like hoarding customer data to basically improve recommendation algorithms for users so that, you know, to find things in their vast catalog of titles better, essentially. And the streaming platform allowed them eventually to ascertain data in real time, these kind of like minute decisions that

users would make about like stopping when they started, when they stopped, once Netflix went to like iPhones and tablets and whatnot, you know, they can tell how they were viewing all sorts of data, you know, having this kind of like bird's eye view of the user. I think that's a really important point that I just want to put a pin in, right? Because I feel like when we talk about You know, having this kind of like bird's eye view of the user. developing these recommendation systems that, yes, exist in the DVD business, but then come to be very consequential and important to the streaming business as it takes off. And, you know, the amount of data that is collected just becomes so much vaster as a result. Yeah, totally. And it's really important to note just how much of like Netflix is fundamentally just like a tech company. I mean, the analogy that I often think about is the way

like Uber, for instance, I think in certain court battles it's had with like the state of California, one thing you could say about Uber is that it's a transportation company. And one thing that they argue often in these court battles to avoid certain kinds of regulations is, oh, we're not a transportation company. We're like a tech company. We're a data company or whatever. Netflix is kind of, and has always been essentially the opposite, which is like a fundamentally, they are a tech company that poses as a Hollywood studio. The data is really important for them. And as they grew and moved into making original content, the data became especially important. And specifically, their first big show that they produced originally was House of Cards, which they paid a huge amount of money for. And there was this line often that they said at the time,

which was like, oh, basically data, then our ability to ascertain data, you know, is the reason why this show exists. We saw that, you know, people love Kevin Spacey. And so we want to do a project with Kevin Spacey and people love David Fincher. So we want to do a project with David Fincher. And of course, it also helped with the release of that show as well, because Netflix executives and engineers observed how people often watched television on their platform in these large batches, which was known as binge watching. And Ted Sarandos at the time decided basically to like indulge that and released all, I forget how many episodes were in the first season of House of

Cards, but it was somewhere around 10, I think, released all of them at once, as opposed to doing like the normal appointment style television viewing. He was like, we're giving users what they want, essentially. And that show was a success. It got a lot of attention. And, you know, they were stating to investors at the time, like this is the future of entertainment, our ability to basically be more flexible with things like the length of a season of television, the fact that they didn't have to abide by all these rules that had been established by broadcast networks, that this would let them get all these subscribers in the future, people would be hungry for this new kind of innovative Netflix content. Their algorithms were extremely powerful and could ascertain certain trends and then make great shows out of that, which of course ended up being BS. And one of the things that I think a lot

of people forget about in these instances is like, especially when they cite the data is like, there's always somebody, a human being at the end of this interpreting the data. It's not just the data becomes the show in this kind of like one-to-one thing. A lot of the things that Netflix said about itself at this time were disingenuous and didn't really turn out to be true. And in fact, its approach to television was really less about changing the content itself and way more about changing the underlying structure about how television got made. Yeah, well, I think that's a key point, right?

And as you're talking about with House of Cards, when Netflix makes that step into original content, I guess, and of course, I don't believe it was the first show, but it was the big one. It was its big introduction where it really started pushing these narratives about how it was funding original content and what Netflix was going to be and where filmmakers and artists are going to have so much more freedom. And it's this like superior model to what existed before. And only on streaming are you going to be able to see these, you know, much more original stories and these stories that have these perspectives that you won't see on like broadcast or cable or whatever. And it seems like for a few years, that is really like the dominant way that a lot of people talk about Netflix and streaming where you have these like originals like House of Cards and later, you know, Netflix really gets into like buying

independent films and other streamers do as well. And it kind of all plays into this narrative. And then by the end of the 2010s, we're seeing all of that really go away because the commercial incentive to sell this story seems to have evaporated. So can you talk to us a bit more about what Netflix was doing there and what the ultimate outcome of falling for all that was? Yeah, for sure. And this would be a good place to maybe talk about how Netflix got into movies. It started making television first, but then quickly stepped into movies and specifically acquiring independent films. They also funded some more big projects. They signed this very splashy deal with Adam Sandler. But really, their focus around 2015 was acquiring independent films from

top festivals and funding small projects, basically, which was met with a lot of excitement from indie filmmakers, specifically. The reason being is because the American independent film business, while it had this basically, I write about this in the piece, this commercial boom basically in the 90s, which was funded a lot through this explosion of distribution channels that emerged in specifically home video. And also this rising generation of indie auteurs, people like Alison Anders and Gus Van Zandt and Quentin Tarantino, who had this, you know, provided these kinds of very fresh perspectives in the film industry. The emergence of home video really led to this commercial boom and also the spread and demand

for American films in countries all across the world. And I talked to some producers from this time about how, you know, one was able back then to basically like fund an indie film, basically by selling territorial rights, foreign and also ancillary rights in these different countries. And there were all these ways to, there were basically more commercial possibilities to make a film because, you know, I talked to Ted hope, for instance, who was a producer in the nineties and then eventually worked at Amazon later on.

And he was telling me about how, you know, back then you could have five distributors, you know, clamoring for a film in a foreign territory. And he gave this quote about how if you picture five different outlets and a hundred different territories, you have like all 500 different ways to find success and 500 bites at the apple, essentially. And as I said, this was good for

indie film in the sense that you could sell territorial rights before you made the movie, you could fund the movie. It took a lot of risk out of the equation. And basically, what happened in the 2000s, though, is that the largest Hollywood studios basically stamped out this commercial boom as they shifted more to like IP projects, these larger blockbusters, think of like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean. And these things that, you know, if you booked them on thousands of screens and it was successful, you could make like a billion dollars at the box office, essentially. This model of sort of IP-driven blockbusters was preferred by studios who saw it as less of a risk than indie films made by auteurs, even if they were commercially successful.

And I guess we see like a lot of the consequences of that in some senses today as well, where it feels like we can't get away from those types of films, like at all. Oh, yeah, totally entrenched themselves as just like the dominant movie in Hollywood. And it's a process that even intensified after 2008, as executives essentially found a kind of new cash cow in the superhero movie, essentially. So by the time that Netflix and also Amazon, the other streamer that's a big player in the film business around this time in 2015, like came into the American independent film industry, people were really excited. I mean, filmmakers were excited. Journalists were excited because they saw these tech companies as, you know, these potential saviors of indie film. Netflix and the other

streamers didn't necessarily believe in like the idea of like territorial rights and foreign rights. They were global platforms, essentially, that wanted the global rights to the distribution of films that they acquired, which wasn't true in all cases and became more common as the years wore on, essentially, acquiring global distribution rights. But that was essentially their goal, because they wanted to keep all viewing confined to their exhibition platforms. There was essentially no business sense to Netflix to selling the films abroad because they owned an exhibition platform, which other studios did not. People watched on Netflix.com and wanted to keep all that viewing confined to Netflix.com.

Yeah, I think some of the only times I've seen like exceptions to that is when they have like co-productions or they're like getting the rights to something that was made in a specific territory. And so like, you know, if they buy something that say CBC made in Canada, then CBC probably has it in Canada, but globally, like outside of Canada, it's on Netflix platforms. Exactly. And early on, that wasn't true in all cases, but it was definitely that became truer as Netflix and Amazon acquired more films and as their subscriber bases exploded, basically. And they became these huge global players. So when they went to festivals, the idea was like, eventually what it became was like, we're going to acquire this for this lump sum and basically guarantee that the financier makes a

profit. We'll cover the budget of the film plus a premium essentially. And that number has varied, but at its peak, I think was somewhere around like 30% of the production budget. So this model was really welcomed by a lot of people, filmmakers, especially because Netflix, first of all, was spending tons of money. They were just splashing huge amounts of cash at all these festivals, hoovering stuff up. And they were buying things for their platform, ensuring that the companies that funded these films made a profit, making sure that filmmakers got paid, and then putting them on their platforms, which were global, and basically telling filmmakers like your indie film is going to

be seen by like our huge audience. And there was also this role of journalists as well, who I quote from in the essay about this idea that like Netflix with its huge subscriber base. And it's sort of this like Chris Anderson long tail theory of audience and viewership and business, which is like with these platforms that have all these viewers and the internet, like you can make something for 10,000 people instead of like a million people and it will still be successful essentially.

It can still be like profitable in some ways which is not necessarily true on the netflix platform but true in other kinds of business models essentially and all these journalists were excited that like oh well these indie films that traditionally have like smaller audiences they will be able to like find you know netflix will be able to use its algorithms to like push this niche film to this particular niche, which they've found through their algorithm, you know, and, and then all these people will watch it and it'll be great. And filmmakers will get their audiences and they're getting paid. It was this sort of like naive utopian idea of what the future of

indie film was going to be, which it did not end up like that at all. I guess it's like by the end of the 2010s, like that optimism kind of starts to dissipate, right? Like it's only a few years, is it? Yeah, only a few years. And that optimism dissipates for a number of reasons, one of which is that the idea that Netflix's global viewership is going to mean global audiences just turns out to be completely bunk. And also the power of Netflix's algorithms, being able to deliver these things to people also just turns out to be not what people expect it to be.

And the reason that is, is because essentially Netflix doesn't market these movies at all. Netflix acquired some great movies in this period. Like two of the pieces I name in the piece are Bong Joon-ho's Okja. They also acquire Aliche Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazaro, which it's insane that this movie is on Netflix. They acquired it, I think, only for US distribution, I think. But it's insane that this movie is available on Netflix. They acquired it, I think, only for US distribution, I think. But it's insane that this movie is available on Netflix. It's also basically trapped on Netflix. Because all viewing is

confined to the Netflix platform, there's really no way for films, once they go on there, to circulate in the way that movies have circulated for all of their history, which is in like these ancillary forms, whether it's like rep theaters or home video or on airplanes. Netflix doesn't really allow for any of that. Yeah, because there's very few Netflix movies that get shown, you know, in the cinema. I know now there's like increasingly they might show something for a few weeks, but there's a lot of cinemas that still won't show Netflix films because of its business decisions and because it has kind of not wanted to deal with cinemas for so long. And then of course, it also very rarely releases physical copies of what goes onto the platform. So it's like, if you're not subscribing to Netflix, you can't access this unless I guess

you pirated or something. Yeah, exactly. And then the other big reason, of course, was the lack of marketing because Netflix had this belief that, oh, well, the platform is doing all the marketing. It's delivering things to us. But I got this good quote from Ted Hope in the piece where he was talking about how one of the great inefficiencies back in the old days of distributing a movie was whether your movie was crap or good, you still had to tell people about it because you had to get people to buy tickets to come to the theater. And marketing has always been kind of the lifeblood, part of the lifeblood of cinema, which is like advertising, essentially. runs getting, you know, just think of

like actors and directors on like late night shows, right? Like college screening tours, that used to be more of a thing, radio spots, press junkets, you know, all of this was part of the calculus of especially an indie film, you know, taking a low budget picture movie and turning it into a hit and something that can be exploited in the future, you know, and put into rep theaters and continue to make money and really like make it part of, you know, what some people will say, like the zeitgeist and cementing it in the minds of the public. And none of that happened on Netflix. Basically, you know, when a movie went onto Netflix, they basically dumped it on the platform and maybe perhaps pushed it to people. And this is something that like, I had to watch a lot of movies while researching this piece,

a lot of movies that Netflix acquired in this period. And so many of them, it's like, the thing that I compare it to is like the trove of, you know, lost silent movies from the 1910s and 20s that we don't have today because Hollywood hadn't standardized film preservation at that time. Netflix's archive of films from this period is like that. It's like, you know, these movies that I write about, like, you know, this movie that Brie Larson directed with Samuel L. Jackson and Hamish Linklater called Unicorn Store or Fun Mom Dinner or Pocah King with Jack Black, these movies have effectively just disappeared. Unlike the lost trove of silent movies, what's weird about the situation is that these movies actually still

exist and can be watched on Netflix's website. And for the most part, you know, nobody watches them. And I think this was something that Netflix executives, if they learned anything from this period, it was this idea that actually, like, whether or not people are watching these movies doesn't necessarily, like, impact one's success as a streaming platform because Netflix's subscribers, you know, shot up basically between the years of 2015 and 2020 around 2019, around the time that they really abandoned indie film altogether. Although some people would say it

was earlier than that. Like if there's anything that these executives learned, it was like to have this successful streaming business, you didn't even need people to be watching the films at all. But like, how does that make any sense? So you have a company like Netflix, right, that is buying all these independent films is, you know, paying a ton of money for some like big kind of blockbuster like movies to put on its platform. And then so many of them, okay, they might, for the first little while that they're out get a little bit platform. And then so many of them, okay, they might for the first little while that they're out, get a little bit of a push, but some of them don't even get that. And they just kind of disappear into this library of movies that a lot of people don't

really go searching through, right? They look at the tiles that are on the home screen. Maybe they'll go into like one of the subcategories or something and take a look at some of the stuff there. But in general, what you are watching, what you are seeing is what Netflix puts in front of you, not like actually going to do a deep search of this, you know, deeper archive and deeper library. So how does it make any like business sense for them to be spending so much money buying these things, and then they just drop them on the platform. Hardly anyone watches it and it disappears and that's it. Yeah. Well, I think they realized it made little sense for them in terms of like what they

were trying to be. And what I mean by that is like, as they got more and more subscribers, they increasingly, you know, went after this kind of like lowest common denominator filmmaking in a number of ways. In that case, would you say that all of this money that they spent on independent films and getting people like Martin Scorsese to make these like really expensive films that just allow him to like do whatever he want? Is this then just like kind of marketing money? Like in the sense that, you know, they're spending all this money to acquire this project

so that all of these journalists and, you know, the media will kind of marketing money, like in the sense that, you know, they're spending all this money to acquire this project so that all of these journalists and, you know, the media will kind of cover the streaming services in a certain way and say, look, they're spending all this money to let these auteurs do their thing and blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, like the real direction that Netflix is heading in is what you're about to talk about, which is like, you know, this really kind of very kind of basic data driven stuff that's like kind of, you know, basically like content slop to throw onto the platform. An important part of like their dip into indie film was always like funding these established big name auteurs like Alfonso Cuaron and Jane Campion and Martin Scorsese and basically

giving them like blank checks to do whatever they wanted. And that was always a means of legitimacy, basically, and nothing more. I mean, that was always a way to convince top Hollywood talent and their business representatives that, you know, the company was essentially the opposite of what it is, which is like to telegraph that they are like this grand star making enterprise that has like the interests of cinema writ large and wants to fund, you know, great art with like great commercial appeal, which is never what they were really doing at all. And this is kind of, you can see this in the fact that like, when these movies are released, the biggest auteurs on Netflix are able to get some kind of semblance of like a

marketing campaign and some kind of semblance of a theatrical release, usually a couple, two to three weeks exclusive in the select number of theaters, some of which Netflix owns or operates, like the Paris here in New York, and then basically dumping them onto the streaming platform where they languish, essentially. Some of those movies, it's important to note, have found a way out of the Netflix's platform in the sense that if you're Martin Scorsese, you're like, powerful enough to negotiate for like a criterion collection, physical media release, and whatnot. But for the most part, you know, these movies don't circulate. And Netflix doesn't have the interest of cinema at all, what it has the interest of is making, you know, essentially content, which is what it really transitions to doing in full

force kind of around 2019, 2020. Yeah. And so, you know, as opposed to those like independent films and those auteur films in the piece, you talk about a style that you term the typical Netflix movie, you know, that increasingly, as you say, around 2019 becomes much more prominent and much more common. How would you define what those are? And why does a company like Netflix really start to shift to making that kind of a film to fill its platform with? Yeah. And it's not just Netflix. It's the other streamers as well, which by this point includes all the major Hollywood studios who have basically launched their own streaming platforms in an attempt to catch up with Netflix. And I was thinking a lot about this thing that once again, that Ted Hope

told me about how he was basically brought on to Amazon around 2015, I think, to sort of like acquire sort of like these excellent filmmakers in Hollywood. And what happens is that it goes to this idea that like what these streaming platforms are, are customer acquisition companies and not actually Hollywood studios. They make money from acquiring customers who become monthly subscribers. And for Netflix and the streamers, as their subscriber bases grow, they increasingly want to basically make stuff or acquire stuff that is kind of the bottom of the barrel, lowest common denominator, mass audience crap, basically, that they can, instead of pleasing the niche, long tail, 10,000 people or whatever, they increasingly want stuff that will be watched by 20 million people instead of 200 people or 2,000 people. You can really see this in the movies that they start making. The typical Netflix movie is, I write about like a bunch of different qualities of it.

One of the things about it is the title of it, just to start with, which is like always this like really dumb sort of SEO title that says exactly what it is, like a murder mystery, literally called like murder mystery, for instance. What about the one that seems to dominate the holidays, Hot Frosty? Oh yeah frosty i haven't seen that one yet actually no i don't plan to watch it or like you know there's this other one that i talked about which was like a romantic comedy about a wine executive called a perfect pairing there's this sense of like the movie is made so that when you come across the tile or whatever and watch the 30 second trailer that you can recognize aspects of it and sort of ascertain what it's about immediately. There's a certain look to these

films as well. I mean, they look like crap, but they have a lot of drone shots in them. That's the thing about them. They're kind of cut in this insane way. They're very frenetic. Another thing I noticed in watching all these Netflix movies is just even like the title credits, you know, the sort of things that you would see appear, the titles at the start of the movie, you know, when it says the name of the movie and who's in it, they look just completely like thrown together in Adobe After Effects using like these templates. Would you say that it's like the update of the Hallmark movie for like the streaming era? There's definitely an analog in the Hallmark movie. And of course, Netflix increasingly in the last couple of years now invests a lot of money into making their version

of like the Hallmark Christmas movie. It's this kind of movie, I call it anti-cinema, that like anybody who has had a Netflix account and come across this stuff kind of knows it instantly by sight. There's all this weird dialogue as well. Like I quote in the piece from one of these Adam Sandler movies, he's talking to a friend of his and he says, want to catch a beer, like as if like want to go to a bar and get friend of his and he says, want to catch a beer, like want to go to a bar and get a beer. But he says, want to catch a beer. There's this kind of like automated sense that the movies are kind of on autopilot, a kind of screensaver quality to them. They managed to both look very expensive and cheap at the same time. They're very saturated, but also bland. They

have a very small dynamic range. They're very dark, but they'll have these colors, like reds will be like lipstick red. They'll also be very green as well. A lot of this comes about from Netflix's insane requirements around their technical requirements that they require things to be shot with these ultra powerful digital cameras, oftentimes at really high resolution. Although resolution is not necessarily the reason why these things look bad, but they'll be compressed for televisions and laptops, which has a lot to do with the reason why both colors are saturated, but then there's also this very small dynamic range. They look very low contrast. They look like garbage, essentially. This is what not only Netflix, but all of the streamers begin producing.

And it's seen to be a lot more efficient than the older model of acquiring movies from independents, which also were risky and at times got them into trouble. I mentioned the movie Cuties, for instance, which was an acquisition from France and which sparked this baseless right-wing panic, essentially, that Netflix was sexualizing children. Also, making these movies from scratch allowed Netflix to ensure that they would keep global distribution rights in perpetuity, which was also extremely important for them. And so that they could lock down this growing number of movies to the platform and not share rights with anyone, essentially. Is the goal then, I guess like on the one hand to reduce the

cost of having new content, whether it's acquiring or creating or whatnot, but also to make sure that there is like this constant pipeline of new things that are low cost that are being added to the platform. So instead of like, you know, something big that's coming every month, it's like every week there's this new like crappy movie or TV show or something like that, that at least is like, look, there's something new to watch because our goal is not to give you good cinema or to get you to go to a theater every now and then and buy a ticket, but to keep your Netflix subscription or your Amazon subscription or whatever, like active. So you're paying every month. Yeah. I mean, that's exactly right. Cadence,

keeping a regular cadence of content is crucial to the customer acquisition business, even if those movies aren't good at all, because what's important is basically keeping a customer interested just enough to keep subscribing. Although it is important to note that Netflix is still spending in this period tons of money on some select projects, but instead of $200 million or whatever for the Irishman, it becomes like $200 million for some Ryan Reynolds pseudo blockbuster, essentially, which makes no sense on the Netflix platform. And which is basically this giant burning pile of money that nobody cares about or remembers. Yeah, it's fascinating. And, you know, we talked about earlier how data is so important to Netflix and the next Netflix model and has been

since before the streaming platform. I'm sure Netflix would talk about that its content decisions are being informed by data and stuff like that. Do you have anything to suggest whether or not that's actually the case? Whether these shitty movies that it's making to keep people subscribed are actually shaped by the data on the platform, or if that's kind of like an overblown sort of thing that it wants you to believe, but it's not actually totally true? Yeah. I mean, Netflix has always said that, you know, data informs its decision making, but an important thing to always remember is that there's like a human at the end of that, who is making decisions ultimately about how to interpret that data.

There was actually an article that came out in 2022 by Elaine Lowe, who used to write for Business Insider, where she interviewed a bunch of Netflix executives who were basically talking about how data informed their decision making, but only up to a point. And this is in the television realm, but like Netflix gave, you know, this nine figure, huge production deal to Shonda Rhimes. I forget the year now. It was, I think, around 2018. And one of the things that she's reporting in the piece is how when it's Shonda, she can kind of make whatever she wants and Netflix will be fine with it. When it's anyone else, Netflix will come in and note the thing to death or cancel the show altogether.

Which is just to say that I think Netflix's data, the way it uses data has always been ideological and they would pretend otherwise. And they would say, well, people want this crappy Lindsay Lohan Christmas movie that looks like garbage. Ted Sarandos says this in interviews. He's like, well, people watch it. 60 million people watched it within the first week. And perhaps we'll talk soon, shortly about how those numbers are basically bogus. But that's ultimately ideological.

And it's like, well, people want good movies also. People want movies made by good directors. The Irishman was, in my opinion, like the best movie that Netflix has produced. A lot of people watched it. The decision to make crap and garbage is one that they would say that, you know, the data tells us that we have to do that. But ultimately, they're the ones who are choosing to invest in that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's fair. And you kind of like preempted my next question, which is of course about the viewership data, right? We hear a lot about how, you know, a different Netflix show or movie has had a ton of views. If, you know, Netflix wants us to think it's something that is like really consequential or that we should go watch. And it started to like sort of share some data, but not really. You know, it's still very limited

what they provide in these like six monthly reports. So how would you describe what Netflix is actually doing there and what the views metric actually means? Netflix has always withheld data basically from the public. And for a while, this was a flex for them. Withholding that data was very good when it came to dealing with talent, directors, producers, actors, in basically allowing them to pay everybody less. If you don't know how much your show or movie is actually being watched, it gives you less leverage in negotiations when you're trying to ask for more pay. They so-called opened the black box in various ways. Throughout the 2010s, in lieu of data, they often relied on basically making ridiculous statements to the press with basically no pushback

whatsoever. The instance that always comes to my mind is this New York Magazine profile of Netflix back around 2017, where Ted Sarandos was going on about how this crap movie had just come out, The Kissing Booth, with Jacob Elordi and Joey King. And Netflix was really touting the popularity of this. And he wouldn't give any numbers to the journalist who was writing the article. But instead of the real numbers, he cited the data from something called the star-o-meter, which is basically a user-derived metric to measure the popularity of celebrities on imdb.com. And he's going on about how, like, oh, Jacob Elordi, you know, the other week, he was number 25,000 on the star meter. And this week, he's like number one.

An important thing here is also that like, the story of a lot of tech companies is that like the media or traditional media played a huge role in kind of co signing Netflix's self described success over the years by basically not really questioning these kinds of statements in any kind of serious or meaningful way. But going to like 2020, around that time, Netflix started doing this thing of releasing the number of quote unquote views of certain stuff. And, you know, they started releasing all these numbers about how, like, you know, this movie that you've never heard of is like the number one watched movie in like

all of South America. And this other movie is like the number two of all time. You know, every week it seemed like Netflix movies were kind of like breaking these new arbitrary records that came from Netflix itself. And a lot of those records were based on this stat of views that Netflix had come up with, which was basically a view was if anyone watched more than two minutes show, the two minutes was long enough to show that the choice was intentional. They use this word intentional, which is funny because the Netflix platform, Netflix.com, the entire viewing experience is designed to be completely unintentional. An essential part of it, of course, is the autoplay feature, which launches users into the next movie or show seconds after something ends, sometimes before something officially ends. I've gotten that before. And anyone who's had a

Netflix account knows it's very possible. In fact, it's common to kind of let the platform essentially just run and you can be watching something for a few minutes that you never chose and that you have no interest in continuing to watch. They were actually kind of lampooned for this by a lot of people. And they ended up switching up their viewership metrics over the next couple of years. And more recently, listeners might remember, I think it was late 2023, I believe, they announced there was this big hubbub about Netflix announcing it was going in a full transparency mode. They were opening the black box of data. Ted Sarandos did this press conference or this call with journalists where he was describing the way that basically Netflix would start releasing these Excel spreadsheets every six months that show the total number of views from the previous six months

for every single title, both television and movies that appears on Netflix. This was more BS though. There's basically two things that appear in these spreadsheets, which anyone can download online on their website, one of which is, it'll say views. And the other thing it will say is viewing hours. And viewing hours is actually this kind of crucial statistic that Netflix now organizes everything around. And basically how they come up with the number of views for a movie is they first tally the number of viewing hours for that movie. So, like, you know, if the Kissing Booth, you'll see on these spreadsheets, it might have, they measure it in number of hundreds of thousands. And there's a lot of rounding involved as well, which makes it even less accurate. Basically, what the company is doing is measuring every single second that Netflix's customers spend watching The Kissing Booth. Like if you click on it and you watch it for like a couple of seconds or you play it at 1.5 speed,

like Netflix is measuring all of that and lumping it and rolling it into this total viewing hours, essentially. And then what they do is they basically divide the viewing hours by the runtime. So if it's 100 million viewing hours and the movie is 90 minutes long, that's 1.5 hours. 100 million viewing hours divided by 1.5 is around 66 million and 666,000 views, essentially. So it's a situation where you can have, if two people watch 45 minutes of The Kissing Booth, for instance, and then close their laptops, which anyone who has watched a Netflix movie knows how easy it is to not finish a Netflix movie, that would equal in Netflix's eyes one full view. 90 people who watch one minute of a movie also equal one full view. It's this completely opaque way of understanding viewership. And it's also a kind of devaluing of what a movie is essentially

from something that was once traditionally consumed in full in a theater, you know, and really paid attention to this kind of trench of pixels that Netflix can kind of sweep into piles and put one over here and one over there to kind of give the illusion that this thing is more popular than it actually is. So I guess that gets us to like, you know, the biggest question of your piece then, right? You know, if we examine what the effect of the Netflix model has been and how Netflix is changing the type of, you know, film and television that we watch to serve its bottom line and its incentives and what have you, then what is the wider consequence of all these changes on film as a medium as you begin to have the typical Netflix movie and as you have this deceptive views metric

and all these sorts of things? What does that do to film as a whole and how we understand it? This was a big part of the reason why I wanted to write the piece because Netflix has been written about, I mean, it's been covered so much over the years and especially in the last couple of years in the aftermath of the overlapping strikes with the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild, there are a lot of media outlets started writing about like more of the late, like how Netflix basically devalued kind of the labor side of things and how everybody started getting paid less, which we haven't really spoken about, but it's obviously a big part of it. And that's been well reported on

at this point. And reading a lot of these accounts, I felt kind of maybe frustrated or not frustrated, but like something I felt that was never really quite captured in these accounts of how Netflix changed the industry is how one of the main goals and effects of Netflix was to essentially devalue the cinema specifically and to make movies more like television, and more like something that just kind of exists in the background, which has historically, you know, been the great dividing line between the cinema and television is that like, movies happen in the theater in a place where you're really like forced to pay attention to them. Obviously, people walk out of movies. I

saw a complete unknown the other night and I watched somebody walk out like 45 minutes in, which was an interesting time to walk out, but they were the only ones who walked out, right? Like most people who buy a ticket to a movie, stay in the movie and watch the whole thing. And Netflix is when people, especially people in the business, talk about the way that, you know, tech companies, these tech companies, these streamers, Amazon and Netflix have devalued the industry. One of the things that they're also talking about is the way that movies have been transformed. Movies, which, you know, this business that has historically been like the center of the world's attention and was really based on this idea of like grabbing one's attention have now been relegated to this thing that basically exists in the background and in fact is latched onto in the essay is this quote that I got from a bunch

of screenwriters who I talked to who've worked for Netflix, who all said this common note, essentially, from one of the things that people have really latched onto in the piece is this quote that I got from some screenwriters I talked to who have worked for Netflix, where they describe the most common note from Netflix executives is this thing of like, have characters announce what they're doing so that people who have it on in the background can still follow along. And this is actually something that is not necessarily like novel. Like I first learned about this actually in an interview that the actress and director Justine Bateman, who's very anti-AI, gave to The Hollywood Reporter like a year ago. And also pro-Trump, surprisingly.

Yeah. She has very complicated politics, you might say. In this interview, she described this phenomenon of executives increasingly searching out what they called quote second screen content, which is probably how people, especially who work in Hollywood are more, they're more familiar with this term. The idea of the second screen being like, okay, so you have like you're on audiences are like on their phone, they're scrolling, and then they have something on in the background in their on television, just so that they have it basically exist in the background. What's really interesting about the way that term is now being used is that second screen is a term that's been around Hollywood for a little while. And it really came to prominence in like the early 2010s with television executives.

But it meant something different back then. And what it, how it was often used was to describe this phenomenon with the rise of things like Twitter and Facebook, but really specifically Twitter and the phenomenon of like people like live tweeting television shows as they were watching them. And when they use this term second screen, what it meant was like, oh, the second screen was like social media essentially. And it was used to describe the way that social media could help these television shows and help with the publicity and marketing. So that like when there was an episode of Mad Men on, if people were using the second screen, you know, there'd be this relationship between the two screens where like the second screen was helping the primary screen in the business sense. What has happened with the development of streaming platforms and what

Netflix really pioneered over the last 10 plus years or so is a kind of reversal of these screens. So that now in the kind of minds of executives today, the second screen is actually the television show or the movie and the phone is considered to be, or whatever the laptop or the tablet is considered to be the primary screen. And that is like really the shift that Netflix augured with respect to movies was transforming this thing into a kind of background noise into a second screen. I find that really fascinating because I feel like it, you know, reflects why I feel like I find myself more drawn to the cinema even more than I used to be. Because if I

watch something at home, I'll often find myself drawn to like pick up my phone or something like that, even if I want to, you know, concentrate on what's happening. But if I'm in the cinema, if you know, you're just in this space where like the expectation is at least supposed to be, I feel like it's changing more and more that you don't have your phone out in this kind of collective space where you're experiencing this piece of film. And I feel like I don't 100% remember what viewing movies was like at home before the advent of smartphones. But I feel like even then, you could still zone into something in a way that you really don't now because there's all these devices and there are all these like, you know, things trying to grab your time where it makes the cinema

experience so much more valuable because it is this like opportunity to give yourself to just like ignore everything else and consume this piece of art for an hour and a half, two hours or so. Yeah. I mean, this is really the reason why, you know, you hear the word content used by all of these studio executives is because in this business model that they're pursuing, where like movies basically become content and this kind of background noise, you know, they see it as financially advantageous for them to pursue this because there's only, you know, 200,000 cinema screens around the world. And there's something like 20 billion internet connected devices, which I'm sure can't all connect to streaming platforms, but, you know, billions, right?

So from their perspective, and also from the perspective of like Wall Street investors, a platform that contains content essentially is seen as more valuable than a film that plays in theaters because of just the sheer number of eyeballs that, you know, they think that these things can attract essentially. I feel like we're seeing this growing kind of public turn against social media and other aspects of, you know, what this kind of digital revolution or whatever you want to call it has brought to us. And I wonder if in 2025, that really starts to extend even more to the streaming platforms as well, as people see the growing like consequences of this, the price is going up, you know, the kind of crap that exists there and how you're missing out on.

Increasingly, you're missing out on like, you know, good television and good movies. You know, there are some exceptions to that, obviously, but a lot of stuff that's being made for these things are really not great. And I wonder if that starts to shift. Will, it's always fascinating to talk to you about all this stuff, to dig into it. Really good to talk to you again. Thanks for coming back on the show. Thank you so much for having me on.

I hope the listeners enjoyed it. Will Tavlin is a writer based in New York City whose most recent essay on Netflix was published by MplusOne. I hope the listeners enjoyed it. join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week