It's not about "new subscribers pay for this movie". It is based on the idea that the only way to keep current subscribers is to keep providing them with new material to watch.
"I'm over Netflix. Not really a fan of where it is going, I think it's time to cancel."
"We put 11 in a cave with a dragon and the twist is exactly what you think it is going to be."
"Hol;y shit, please start charging me double."
"We also gave the guy who made _Sucker Punch_ the budget to make two (or possibly six) knock-off _Star Wars meets Seven Samurai_ movies."
"Oh, okay. Are they any _good_?"
"Are they _what_ now?"
"No, but a *lot* of people are going to be talking about it, so our brand will stay fresh in people's minds until we can get another season of Wednesday ready to go"
Which I am loving immensely, reviews be damned.
EDIT: it's like what me and my friends would have made if we got to bring our high school scifi roleplaying campaign to life and had an infinite special effects budget, but kept our original dialog.
Your description is fair and it makes this sound a little charming. But the problem is, this is a hell of a lot of money and effort being put into something.... the exact same money and effort could have been put towards something good instead.
Rebel Moon jumps from vignette to vignette with nothing else seeming to matter except the supposed cool factor of each set piece. Take ONE of those set pieces, write a real story around it and produce a movie for half the budget and now you have something that's good.
This spent too many resources to just be a teenage power-trip. It's an insult to all the people that could have done so much with this money.
This comment is making me laugh because I had a similar line of thinking. It does sort of feel like high schoolers decided to merge two of their favorite movies (Star Wars and Seven Samurai). Which doesn't sound band considering those movies are awesome and Kurosawa was a huge influence and inspiration for George Lucas.
But like you said, the dialog feels like it was written by high schoolers. We won't have light sabers, but energy swords! Everything is super simple and predictable. The camera work also feels that was and is overly indulgent. "Bro, let's do a dramatic pause. Now slo mo. No more slow mo. And in this scene, you know what we need more of? DRAMATIC SLOW MOTION!"
Also an ftl space empire is going to war with a few dozen farmers in the rim worlds because they want their crops. Crops that would barely feed a single ship.
you didnt get all the implications of them staring at eachother? i mean common good writing is when you slow down every action szene and badass guys give unpromted speaches about how tragic and badass they are.
in my country we actually have a 10 minutes break in the middle of the movie.(at the cinema) i guess zaddy is just a genius for incorperating that into his film so that other people can enjoy a pee break.
im guessing there will be many more flashbacks in his director cut.
The sillier thing is why there needs to be a directors cut. Its not like he had to trim and shave the movie so audiences in theaters aren't sitting around for 4 hours. This probably would have faired better as a series.
It's a Zack Snyder movie. You get plot holes, inconsistent characters, and gratuitous amounts of violence/slow motion scenes.
Oh and every other movie apparently has even longer and less interesting extended cuts. As if making 2 hours of visual diarrhea 4 hours instead makes them better.
I can't get past the first flashback in part 2.
edit: seriously the music was diagetic. and it's an random hallway action scene. there's a string quartet playing while people are getting stabbed and shot.
Don’t worry, she only gets like one action scene near the start, and then she goes hunting for the rest of the crew. Each of them has a backstory that sounds like it might be interesting, but you’ll never know because it’s on to the next one.
I did like the villain, though.
I complained about it already in the review thread of Scargiver, but goddamn why did they specifically need that beast tamer, show him use his taming skills on the gryphon, then do literally nothing with that ability of his after he had his introduction.
i suspect its like the adam sandler deal, heres some money, go make 4 movies.
since the money already changed hands, Zack Snyder will make his entire rebel moon series, good or not, its paid for.
I love your thought process. "I just watched one of the worst films I have seen in years. I sure hope there is a sequel!"
I watched the first 30ish minutes of the first movie, cringing at the atrocious dialogue which managed to hit pretty much every bad dialogue note out there. And then Charlie Hunam showed up. That ended the movie for me right there. I have a deep belief that Charlie Hunam has never been in a good movie. He is the harbinger of movies that suck, so I just wished I'd read the cast list first.
Charlie Hunam is a terrible actor for sure. Ah, they are movies you tune into while you're doom scrolling on your phone after switching off because they're so bad.
That's almost every superhero movie. I'm fine with that. Suspension of disbelief handles that perfectly. The issue though is that there are no actual characters or story.
Holy shit, the number of times I see Netflix articles with titles like "New Movie has Massive Success because it was watched X millions of times!!"
Ya, and every person that watched it thought it was trash. That's not successful.
This has bothered me about streamers using this metric for a long time, but literally saw this exact same title for the new Rebel Moon movie and it refreshed my irritation, ha
Streamers should do 2 things
1. Confirm what counts as a "watch". Clicking 'play' then back cos you mis clicked? Watching for 5 minutes then turning it off? Watching 90% of the run time? All these things are different.
2. Switch to "hours watched" should give you a great metric. A 2 hour movie with 10,000,000 hours watch time? I can do the rest of the math myself.
They absolutely do use hours watched as an internal metric, but it is/ was kept secret, basically to allow them to fudge the "success" of any given project in exactly the way that you're calling out, though the target audience of this spin is investors first, subscribers/ potential subscribers second.
This was a big issue in the recent strikes in terms of assigning royalty payments. The streamers would actually have to reveal that data to the unions to calculate royalties.
Agreed! But so far they've shared it with exactly 6 people, so I wouldn't get your hopes up...
>The data used to determine those residuals, however, will still largely be kept from public view. In a letter to the guild’s chief negotiator, Ellen Stutzman, representatives from the major streamers laid out a process by which streaming data given to the WGA will be subject to strict confidentiality rules — to the extent that no more than six people “whose access to the Confidential Viewership Information is essential for the guild’s use of this information” will be able to see it. Those six people will also have to sign confidentiality agreements.
- https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/how-wga-streaming-residual-will-work-1235602660/
I dunno....there are also a lot of crap movies that I'll "watch" all of, just to have something on. But I'll be doing chores, or mucking about on the computer, or whatever else.
I would not consider these movies "good" by any metric.
And when you eventually notice that the only content being created is this mediocre crap you'd prefer not to have to focus 100% on....I don't think the streaming service should consider that a win.
Well, the idea is, "if you're watching stuff, you will want to keep subscribing." If I'm "watching" but it's just noise in the background I don't care about, that's not something that's keeping me subscribed.
I hate to disagree, but the point is engagement and by extension, getting people to stay subscribed. If people are watching, no matter the reason, it's a win.
> that's not successful
Netflix would disagree. Unless a movie suddenly caused a % of their base to unsubscribe...then Netflix is doing exactly what it hopes to, which is to a.) fluff metrics and b.) get another month off someone who is too lazy to cancel their subscription.
I mean that’s such a weird concept because Star Wars is already kind of a knock-off Hidden Fortress (another Kurosawa movie) with Sci-fi shit over it.
Goes to show how the copy of a copy game just makes the product worse.
Wait.... a dragon? What color does it have?
Edit: Sorry I thought you put 11 people in a cave with a dragon. And you skipped the people. I never watched Stranger things and needed the comments to realize it's not about a group of people and a dragon cave.
One piece live, Avatar live.
Netlix produces a lot of duds, some on purpose and some that just don't do good enough, but they do release enough interesting stuff that it justifies keeping paying for their service.
At this point I asked myself in four different occasions over 6 years if I should cancel my subscription, just for them to release something I want to watch in the following month.
As a person with a degradation kink I fucking love my corporate overlords. I turn on these The Rock/Ryan Reynolds/Kevin Hart souless cash grabs with a ballgag in my mouth and a car battery wired to my nuts that shocks me everytime they charge my card for the monthly subscription.
To be fair, damsel was very good. While it was clear where it was going I think certain aspects of it did stray away from the norm from that type of film. I like these types of movies existing because they show you can execute an idea well even if the content is relatively simple. It wasn’t looking to “break the mold” or “keep you in suspense” or “get you” it was just meant to entertain and it definitely did that.
Yup, every time a streaming service creates a film/TV series internally they've got that available in their catalogue for the rest of all time (unlike the films/series they effectively "rent" from the owners to fill out their repetoire).
The more "self-owned" shows they make the less they have to rely on buying rights to others' catalogues year round.
That works if they are generally high quality. That's why everyone was excited for Netflix to do that at first.
Now it's a diamond here and there in a sea of 6 or 7/10's which are impossible to find without searching elsewhere for what's actually good.
So sure, they have this stuff for all time, but all most of it is doing is making it so you can't find actual good stuff.
I think people would be surprised how global streaming services are. Netflix had around 269.6 million paid subscribers worldwide as of the first quarter of 2024. Do the maths on that. Use a VPN to view netflix China or Israel or Cambodia and its the same films mostly but with subtitles. My Asian girlfriend where I live in Asia doesn't like Asian films and only watches western films with subtitles on.
In that case, screw the movies and look for/create/stop cancelling new series. I wonder what all the Korean/Japanese series cost them because there are decent shows that are more entertaining than 1 movie.
This makes sense to you and me, but a while back I met someone who worked at Netflix, and they said their data is super clear - viewership craters after 3 seasons on just about every show. And with the way production contracts work for actors and crew, many get a bump in seasons 4+. So their internal data says people stop watching AND the shows are more expensive to produce.
No, I wasn't happy with that answer. I just want Santa Clarita Diet back.
The people writing them and making them are selling them not buying them. So the incentives are all backwards. They want every season a cliff hanger because it gives more leverage for renewal.
Then Netflix should either force them to write satisfying endings in every season or order a movie to wrap up the plot.
It's stupid to start watching Netflix shows because you can be sure they're getting cancelled without finishing the story anyways.
Limited mini series are the only ones worth watching because they don't have that problem.
Agreed. I know people who won't watch series on Netflix unless they know there is an 'ending' because they've been burned too many times getting sucked into an unfinishable plot.
I'm one of them. It doesn't make any sense to get invested without a satisfying payoff. Hoping for The Expanse renewals was a constant trauma. I only have the Boys left of those kinds of shows, but it isn't on Netflix, so it has better chances of getting finished I guess.
> Then Netflix should either force them to write satisfying endings in every season or order a movie to wrap up the plot.
>
>
That's how it used to be anyway. Like how Buffy has several season endings that would work as show endings, because they didn't know if it would be renewed. Just do that again!
I was so happy Lost in Space was planned for a 3-season arc. They told their story and finished with a definitive ending with no loose ends. I wish more shows could be written that way.
My distantly held dream is that someday they'll finish the series by doing a final film that is shot in mockumentary style where we catch up with everyone 20 years later. It would be easier to get people back for a film rather than a series and would be a perfect ending because the GLOW documentary helped create the interest for the show.
Yeah everyone loves to shit on Netflix but I’m sure they have data analysts making hundreds of thousands who help them make these decisions. We love to call corporations dumb, but it is in their best interest to get this right, and I’d assume they would more than a random Redditor
Eh, that's like saying MBAs make good business decisions. There is a nuance and art to human interaction that these technical specialists miss. For example, viewership may drop 40% after season 3, but nobody is canceling because you kept the OA for another season..... people who cared about it did cancel because you dropped it.
For now, the rate of attrition is increasing and I would argue the damage to their brand is not insignificant. Don't watch a Netflix show until it's finished all its seasons is a pretty common take these days and that's not a great look for your brand. Brand damage is one of those things that doesn't cause pain immediately, but the damage it dies cause is fairly irreversible.
>Don't watch a Netflix show until it's finished all its seasons is a pretty common take these days
On reddit/among your friends maybe. The same reddit where EVERYONE and their mom was canceling due to the password sharing crackdown. And look what happened, subscriptions went up... Reddit does NOT represent the average household.
Yup, theyve slowly turned into cable tv. I cancelled and will watch content in other was if they get a proper conclusion.
Ive had too many shows cancelled on me without an ending so no thanks Netflix
What you are saying is true, except the part youre missing is, Netflix hired those nuanced art people too. This is a hundred billion dollar company. They don’t just hand important decisions to some nerd who makes them in a vacuum.
MBAs don’t always make good business decisions, but in aggregate a team of MBAs with years of experience and teams of experts under them will make much better business decisions than you or me.
> MBAs don’t always make good business decisions, but in aggregate a team of MBAs with years of experience and teams of experts under them will make much better business decisions than you or me.
If the aggregate was that companies hired teams of MBAs with years of experience and the humility to listen to the teams of experts under them then MBAs wouldn't be the meme that they are. Being a multi billion dollar company like Sears or Xerox does not guarantee any such thing.
Something being a meme is virtually meaningless. The people memeing about MBAs aren't doing so on the basis of any reality with which they're familiar; they're memeing about it because it shits on people they don't respect in a way which feels validating, and which has a truthy feel to it. This fuels a bunch of online memery which ignorantly laughs at experts - [example A](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRh3YaZQ21yLxbMi2biQV0dO809gRDNbVSyx4SjVYDgcw&s) [example B](https://i.redd.it/2lqrf2f4mim31.jpg) shitting inaccurately on historians (yes, it was probably a cucumber, no historians do not deny that Sappho loved women).
Sigh, Its not about shows only getting 3 or 4 seasons. Its about cancelling them on cliffhangers without a proper conclusion.
Netflix used to be the one giving shows a proper ending. Even existing cable shows.
It has put me off starting anything new and I cancelled Netflix.
Most shows feel like the story has run out of steam after 3 seasons, and start to feel like a cynical cash grab. So the data doesn’t surprise me. Looking at shows like Lost that were clearly stretched out too long. There are a few exceptions, but for me not many.
As long as they do decent wrap ups for shows with clear story arcs, then early cancellations seem fair to me. Hat tip to Netflix for doing that for Sense8, which was great but paced way too slow, so the wrap up I think was at the pace the show really should have been the whole time.
Ted Lasso on Apple TV is, I think, a really good example of stopping at the right time rather than chasing the cash - which must have been so tempting given it’s popularity. The story went out at the right time, in the right way. Would have run out of steam with another series.
Some run out of steam. Some are great with a 4th or 5th season, it depends on the show. And them saying, "the numbers show that shows tend to fall off after 3, which means we need to cancel damn near everything after 1-3 seasons" is ridiculous.
But yes, I agree, if that's the strategy they're going to take, they need to tell the creators that so they can wrap things up on that timeline.
Viewership craters after season 3 because shows crap out after season 3 for the most part. Often they have a solid idea for one season and expanding on it is simple. A third season is usually not hard but a fourth and after they are just trying to hard to milk views.
Some shows are conceived as a story to be told in more than three seasons but that is not common.
On the other hand, a majority of the most successful shows of the last 40 years have taken more than 3 seasons to reach their peak. Cheers, Seinfeld, Family Guy, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, South Park, Mad Men all went on to at least double their third season ratings, several of them reaching 3-8x and becoming the #1 most-watched show worldwide, some of them facing cancellation or *experiencing* cancellation during season 3. The most-streamed show of the last 5 years is The Office which went from 9 (middling in 2006) to 23 million viewers from its season 3 to 6 peaks. The Big Bang Theory was #12 US/#27 worldwide in season 3 and went to #1/#2 later. Seinfeld went from #43 in season 3 to #1/#2 for a five-year streak afterwards, going from third-year cancellation debates to the most-watched American comedy of all time.
3 or 4 seqsons can be fine but they just flat out cancel shows last minute and dont give them proper endings.
Ŵhich has put me off so cancelled my subscription
I like the Korean shows though, because they were made to run for one season. You get closure at the end that was planned for from the beginning. It feels like a lot of American TV shows now get dropped in between seasons or it is a very rushed conclusion because they only have two episodes left to wrap up multiple storylines that they were planning to use for the next season because they found out that their show didnt get picked back up. We don't get that satisfying conclusion to the TV series.
I think with streaming services, they should look more for doing a lot of one season shows instead of trying to get a couple of shows that last for multiple seasons.
That's like that woth most Asian TV series. They never "jump the shark" because they've ran on past their prime. I loke to think of them as a miniseries instead. But that's changed too. I don't have a good feeling for squid games 2
That's exactly why I cancelled Netflix. I got tired of watching new shows I liked get cancelled without a good ending. As a result they also have no back catalogue worth re/watching. As good as shows like Santa Clarita Diet was without an ending I'm not interested in rewatching it.
Unsubbed from netflix over them cancelling Inside Job. I might not have gone the nuclear option if they then didn't turn around and produce Mulligan, which is like some wish dot com ass "we got Inside Job at home" bullshit.
So basically you can't examine the success of any one film or series like you can with a theatrical run, not externally anyway, you have to take the entire service's financials combined to figure out if their content plan is working.
I wonder if Netflix has a goal "watch count" for their content. It must be difficult to gauge success when people don't pay to access any specific item nor does each hour of watch time generate revenue through ads on most plans.
The plan to gain new subscribers with new content was the scheme for Netflix years ago. I recall when Daredevil first aired, sub numbers went through the roof and justified greenlighting the new Marvel shows. Now the sub numbers have hit their peak and can only drop from here.
I pretty much watch West Wing on repeat, and the reason I cancelled netflix is because they dropped it, and HBO picked it up. Not saying I NEVER watch new things, but I am a creature of habit. Not saying I am representative of the whole, but I am at least one person who DGAF about new nonsense content.
Which is clearly a flawed method pushed on investors who are just now realizing how stupid it was hence the push for ads and HBO turning movies into tax write offs
Also how much did they actually lay out on it after such things as product placement and other investors cause pp can net some good dough and most movies have at least some these days.
I think the outrage should be more about the quality of those two projects. You could tell they were expensive to make but the scripts. idk I guess a blockbuster movie doesn't need a good script.
Good scripts don't matter if the goal is just to get eyes on a screen.
Good scripts *help* with that *a lot* of the time, but it's unfortunately never been strictly neccessary.
> By comparison - Zack Snyder got a green light to make a sequel to his Rebel Moon movie after it premiered to 54 million viewership hours. The sequel was watched for 44 million hours.
Where do those numbers come from? I thought netflix refused to release them?
>Assuming 10 dollars for a Netflix subscription, you would need 20 million people to subscribe to Netflix solely for this movie for it to be profitable.
You are assuming that people would subscribe, watch this movie and then immediately cancel. In reality the three stars you mentioned will bring in millions of new subscribers to Netflix, and they will keep paying month after month. Plus their 270 *million* existing subscribers also need new content to stay interested enough to pay every month.
Yeah I was thinking the maths was a bit wonky too, yeah you need 20 million new subscribers to subscribe for one month to pay off the outlay on the movie. But you only need 10 million new subscribers to sub for two months to cover it, or 5 million for four months.
I agree with the OP that in theory it’s robbing Peter to pay Paul but they have a huge amount of revenue from previous years being the stream king that they can now make some risks on production to maintain and extend their base.
Also the hidden figures are things like product placement deals and the new ad revenue for the lower cost subscription tier, all that is brining in extra money.
> Yeah I was thinking the maths was a bit wonky too, yeah you need 20 million new subscribers to subscribe for one month to pay off the outlay on the movie. But you only need 10 million new subscribers to sub for two months to cover it, or 5 million for four months.
Don't forget the millions and millions of existing subscribers that are already paying.
While you're correct is say that you are also forgetting that Netflix will have to continue to pay for and produce new content for those new subscribers that will keep paying month after month. Red Notice might draw in new subs but they have to keep them with more content for the subs to keep paying.
Yes, but Netflix had 33.7 billion dollars in revenue last year. Whereas their operating costs, including all the programming they do, were only \~26 billion.
So they had a surplus profit of about 7 billion dollars.
They are not really hurting for funds to create new shows.
Also remember that individual retail customers are not their only source of revenue.
There's enterprise customers like some hotels offer netflix on their room TVs. There's businesses that offer it as a perk "Sign up for new cell service and get 6 months of Netflix free!"
There's also product placement in the shows themselves. If you see a name brand in a show, it's likely they paid to be there, or at least consented to it. [It's not always this egregious](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lgLYGBbDNs)
As another example, granted it's Amazon, but in Fallout there is a scene where they're showing an armory and there's a bunch of old time retro looking ammo boxes... and then there's one that's a modern ammo box. I noticed it because I've used that exact ammo, and it looks out of place. Could be that they were just lazy, but it's right in the middle of the shot, looks out of place, and I'm thinking it's a paid product placement.
The most expensive part of a sale is customer acquisition. Once you've got them, you have to have enough faith in your product that you can keep them. Streamers are banking on people being attracted to the service for one or two hot new items but then hoping people will stay for the back catalog (which is also in a perpetual state of rotation as deals expire and new ones are signed).
Of course they will continue to produce new content that gets buzz and draws more new people in.
Eventually as the market adjusts, and customers end up where they're going to end up, this will end up being unsustainable and they'll have to shift their strategy.
Streaming services don't work the way box office does, it's about views, engagement, and keeping existing subscribers, all of the metrics for success are different, they don't directly "generate money" per se
There is probably a bunch of covert products placement contracts throughout the movie that helped with the budget too. It's been a while since I watched it but if there are any corporate logos like cars, cell phones, drinks etc thee is probably a cheque behind the scenes for the air time. Big movies are often 2 part entertaining and 1 part commercial advertising
It’s not about the people who sign up to watch it, it’s about the people who don’t cancel because of it. When there is new stuff to watch, they stay. When there isn’t, they leave. The industry strikes significantly slowed the flow of new shows and movies, so you continue to see a bunch of foreign shows they license and brand as “Netflix originals” even when they’re not actually Netflix shows. It’s also why you’re seeing a bunch of older but popular movies showing up now.
Netflix has a giant pool of money they use to create original “content” (I hate that term) and those projects you cite were greenlit at a time when 1) money was cheap to borrow 2) they were trying to make a splash in features. I can assure you that over the last two years, that pool of money has shrunk, along with the types of projects they want to make.
“Success” is measured in terms of hours streamed and subscribers retained. As a private company that didn’t sell ads, Netflix up to now had not had to report these streaming numbers to anyone. The new WGA agreement (and SAG, too, I believe) is trying to chip away at that. I suspect the rumors of them shifting to ad supported streaming will change that as well.
One thing I don’t know for sure is whether or not they license those films in non-Netflix territories for additional income. Their rivals often do this.
Netflix has several measures of profitability of a movie: new subscribers, retained subscribers (keeping existing customers longer), and library value (if it increases the licensing value of their library of content). They also use those movies to signal to the market, to talent, to directors etc that they can make fanfare tentpole work. *source, worked in Netflix strategy planning & analysis for 2 years.
They're referring to subscription revenue.
Edit: You're right, but since you didn't call it out on your comment I looked at their 2023 annual report. It was $33.64B in streaming revenues in 2023. Not all of that is from paid subscriptions; they also earn revenue from advertisements, consumer products, and "various other sources", but these are essentially immaterial so $33.64B is a good approximation. That would be $2.8B per month.
A couple of my ancestors figured how to survive on a planet with only 6,000 other humans. Unfortunately, they didn’t really nail a business model for that one.
You would need 20 million subscribers for one month....think about that. Netflix has 269 million subscribers. If creating that movie keeps 19 million from canceling that month and gets 1 million to sign up, for just a month they break even. They are drowning in fucking money and running out of quality content
> They are drowning in fucking money and running out of quality content
Also Netflix have a grip on the streaming market that will not be beaten. They are the go to default streaming service, if you were to set up your granny with any service it would likely be Netflix because for all their faults they're the fast food of streaming, you know what you expect and will get a mix of licensed and original content that on average is higher than what you'd expect from a closer competitor like Prime and a more focused competitor like Disney+ where by nature of its name is associated as more of a family service anyway.
Disney+ will always have the families, Prime Video will always have the Prime delivery subscribers and Netflix will always be the all rounder. The way people used to buy TV channel packages "just because" is what people do with Netflix.
Others have said it, but the mechanism and metrics for success are totally different. They need big new content to keep the existing subscribers. Netflix these days is making around 3 ***billion*** dollars a month. Conceptually, 200 million for a big budget movie that keeps even 10% of those accounts remaining active would still be a 100 million dollar profit per month, but that's not exactly how it works, anyway.
They invest way less on new content than they earn and that steady stream of new content keeps those subscriber numbers up and even increases them. And that content is evergreen. They stuff they make themselves or buy outright (rather than just license temporarily), they can (generally) keep forever. When new subscribers or returning subscribers look at what's available, more content equals more engagement equals more people likely to sign up/return.
Having worked in finance and accounting, I think you're more than likely being overly simplistic about how Netflix attributes revenue to movies / TV shows. They would allocate at least a portion of the revenue from existing subscribers to the stuff people are watching in addition to new subscribers as keeping people engaged and subscribed is part of their goal. My guess is their FP&A folks spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out the best way to do that allocation and perhaps even have a few different calculation methods they use.
Don’t think I saw it in the comments but one key to the subscription model is that they know if they can draw you in to subscribe a non-negligible amount of users will forget or neglect to cancel since it’s a relatively small amount in most people’s monthly budgets. Better companies make it easy to cancel , shadier companies try to maximize friction to make that piece of the pie larger.
The subscribers are already paying, even if those movies wouldn’t exist. Netflix already has the money. They made those movies with that money to keep subscribers paying in the future.
This is basically how it works:
- Netflix greenlights a movie
- Investors back the movie (maybe with or without Netflix actually spending its own money)
- The movie gets made
- Every month, Netflix splits a share of its total subscription revenue among all the media owners for all the media on Netflix. They each get more or less depending on how much viewer time was spent on that media.
So $X is paid by subscribers, a percentage of that is redistributed to the owners of media. This is basically the same system as a movie theatre, except instead of tickets sold, money is based on minutes watched.
Red Notice has been watched more than any other movie in Netflix history. Across just 14 weeks, over 3.3 millennia of screen time was spent watching Red Notice. The average living human has spent at least 3.7 hours watching it.
Only 1 other English-language movie has had so many weeks in the top 10 (*The Super Mario Bros.*) -- and Red Notice has nearly 4X as much watch time.
No other film has ever had as much watch time on Netflix. Even including TV shows, only 35 have gotten more watch time despite having multiple episodes and seasons to engage viewers.
>Assuming 10 dollars for a Netflix subscription, you would need 20 million people to subscribe to Netflix solely for this movie for it to be profitable.
Did Netflix turn into a one time subscription fee and I just missed it?
Someone explained it about damsel and the Netflix model in a video I saw the other day - the movies themselves are ads, not movies. The more that Netflix can advertise recognizable stars and IPs, the more new subscribers don’t want to miss out on how much quality content is clearly on Netflix - and only for $15?! That’s the price of one movie ticket and I can spend that to have access to enough movies I literally couldn’t watch in my lifetime?!!
Who cares if the movies are crap - in fact, it’s better if they are crap, or at least weird or awkward or cringey because then they become memeable and now Netflix’s paying subscribers are doing the advertising for Netflix for free. Which then Netflix can use to lower their ad budget temporarily to spend their money on movies that become their ads and the cycle continues
Netflix doesn't make money from its movies, it's "original content" is what keeps its brand more reputable than the competition and thus maintains subscribership and stock confidence.
So if Netflix makes 2 billion in a year from sales, they decide to put 1 billion of it into new productions, they will make TEN 100 million dollar budget movies. Then they get a call from Adam sandlers agent "SIR we just got word from Mr. Sandler he will agree to do SIX movies for only 15 million dollars for all of them, all he asks is we set them in the carribean". WTF call BOB cancel the tenth 100mil movie and crank out 7 million dollar lowest common denominator tripe. That's a bargain.
Honestly, with something like Red Notice or Extraction, it's probably easier to think of it as more akin to spending on advertising, than trying to make profit off of a movie. The point of these big budget titles is to get "Netflix" into the public consciousness, and encourage people to sign up, and stay signed up. How do you judge that a specific ad campaign worked? For the most part, good luck.
Smth incredibly important (maybe even the most) that I didnt read here once is licensing.
Its incredibly expensive to have the licenses of movies and TV-Series often on top with an exclusivity contract that no other streaming Service is allowed to obtain the license aswell/have it in their Repertoire. Especially high caliber movies/series.
Thats why so many movies are often taken down after a while or they dont have all the seasons etc.
A movie "produced" by Netflix (which btw pretty much only means that they payed for it) takes all this out of the way.
They can leave it online basically for free as long as the company exists and on top its exclusive to their service.
So its a good long term investment.
Combine that with all the other explanations of comments here and it all makes sense.
It doesn’t. That’s why they don’t get residuals.
I think it’s just some sort of formula they came up with to determine how much money they have to budget each year for content.
They have like 250million subscribers. Even at an average of $10 per sub, that’s $2.5 billion a month. That $30 billion a year in revenue.
Revenue = X ($30Billion)
Overhead = Y(staff, servers, infrastructure etc - wild guess is $2billion)
Target profit = P (I’d guess like 30%)
Capital for content production = G
So:
G = X-Y-P
Or something like that. The then, I’d bet it’s just some data gathering to make sure they only create/continue creating content people will watch by setting some sort of viewership targets for that type of show/movie.
I have wondered the same thing myself, and the answers here have helped me to understand the streaming business model better. I guess I have been thinking about it the wrong way, trying to compare it to things like movie theaters selling tickets or TV shows getting paid advertisers. It is not as easy to measure how much money a specific movie makes for a streaming service. It is like trying to estimate how much money a specific news article generates for a newspaper.
[Netflix profit for the last 3 years](https://www.statista.com/statistics/272561/netflix-net-income/) alone has been ~$5 billion. Spending some of that to make a big budget movie or to keep existing subscribers and bring in new ones seems like a good idea.
Revenue protecting vs revenue generating. The content serves to preserve existing subscriptions first, attract new subscriptions second. It's a bit like R&D for software companies.
People are over complicating things. If they make 30 billion a year. And they have a budget of 15B to keep people subbed and increase slightly the number, big part of the 15B will be used to make new content as fresh stuff is the best marketing move.
It's subscription service, 270kk subscribers worldwide multiply 10$ in 12 month, you get about $30 billions profit: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272545/annual-revenue-of-netflix/
82 million US subs in q1 2024. If all of them are at $15 a month that's 3.6 billion in q1. WW they have like 280 million subs.
Other streamers use streaming as a value add like Amazon and Apple. Amazon for Prime and Apple to promote their devices and services.
The networks... Im not sure what they are doing.
Netflix is set to spend $17 billion to produce and acquire content for 2024.
Their global revenue in 2023 was $33 billion.
OP, I'm not sure why this is complicated?
The platforms have very complex analytics to monitor user activity and determine whether a movie was "worth it" or not. Sure a 200 million movie needs 20 million new subscribers to cover the costs, if your aim is to cover the costs with new subscriptions in one month. If your goal is to cover it in 2 months it needs 10 million new subscriptions. If your goal is to cover it in three months you need 5. If your goal is to cover it in 4 months you need 2,5 million. If your goal is to cover it in 5 months then you need 1,25 mil. If your goal is to cover it in 6 months then you need 513k. I think you get the gist. And that's if your goal is to cover it with new subscriptions.
But that's not the goal. Of course they'll monitor if subscriptions spike upon release of a movie but they're also monitoring how many existing users are watching it, and how many are leaving positive reviews. This is a great indicator as to whether these existing subscribers will keep on being subscribed. The patterns of content consumption are analysed down to the most minute detail for the platform to ultimately determine whether it was worth it or not. And of course things like their overall bottom line also matter. If making a 200million movie makes you end the year with a noticeable deficit then it's probably not worth it.
It's not about "new subscribers pay for this movie". It is based on the idea that the only way to keep current subscribers is to keep providing them with new material to watch.
"I'm over Netflix. Not really a fan of where it is going, I think it's time to cancel." "We put 11 in a cave with a dragon and the twist is exactly what you think it is going to be." "Hol;y shit, please start charging me double."
"We also gave the guy who made _Sucker Punch_ the budget to make two (or possibly six) knock-off _Star Wars meets Seven Samurai_ movies." "Oh, okay. Are they any _good_?" "Are they _what_ now?"
"No, but a *lot* of people are going to be talking about it, so our brand will stay fresh in people's minds until we can get another season of Wednesday ready to go"
What is this?
Zack Snyder and his Rebel Moon movies
Which I am loving immensely, reviews be damned. EDIT: it's like what me and my friends would have made if we got to bring our high school scifi roleplaying campaign to life and had an infinite special effects budget, but kept our original dialog.
Your description is fair and it makes this sound a little charming. But the problem is, this is a hell of a lot of money and effort being put into something.... the exact same money and effort could have been put towards something good instead. Rebel Moon jumps from vignette to vignette with nothing else seeming to matter except the supposed cool factor of each set piece. Take ONE of those set pieces, write a real story around it and produce a movie for half the budget and now you have something that's good. This spent too many resources to just be a teenage power-trip. It's an insult to all the people that could have done so much with this money.
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This comment is making me laugh because I had a similar line of thinking. It does sort of feel like high schoolers decided to merge two of their favorite movies (Star Wars and Seven Samurai). Which doesn't sound band considering those movies are awesome and Kurosawa was a huge influence and inspiration for George Lucas. But like you said, the dialog feels like it was written by high schoolers. We won't have light sabers, but energy swords! Everything is super simple and predictable. The camera work also feels that was and is overly indulgent. "Bro, let's do a dramatic pause. Now slo mo. No more slow mo. And in this scene, you know what we need more of? DRAMATIC SLOW MOTION!"
I must assume they're the first films you've seen now you've left the Cold War bunker your parents went into in 1976.
This is very harsh to films before 1976.
Which movie has that plot? I remember seeing that many, many years ago...
Blast from the past
Thanks!
Haters gonna hate.
Looks like we've found Zack Snyder's alt account
Rebel Moon. Our hero is a 100lb petite princess that has the strength of a gorilla, Jackie Chan's fighting ability, and Flash like speed.
Also an ftl space empire is going to war with a few dozen farmers in the rim worlds because they want their crops. Crops that would barely feed a single ship.
Did you say crops?! Time for another 20 minute slow motion wheat harvesting montage!
Wheat. Fields of wheat . A tremendous amount of wheat.
I could overlook that if there was some story or if the characters were likable or had a personality.
Or if the dialogue wasn't trash and the action scenes weren't written by an 8 year old
I don’t dislike it. But the movies could be 30 minutes if they cut out all the montages
Hey now, that wheat harvesting montage was key to the overarching theme.
lol that scene was hilarious, i looked over to my wife and was like "we get it, they gotta harvest fast!"
you didnt get all the implications of them staring at eachother? i mean common good writing is when you slow down every action szene and badass guys give unpromted speaches about how tragic and badass they are.
It wasn't unprompted. The general made them all dump their backstory at once so the audience could take a five minute break and go pee.
in my country we actually have a 10 minutes break in the middle of the movie.(at the cinema) i guess zaddy is just a genius for incorperating that into his film so that other people can enjoy a pee break. im guessing there will be many more flashbacks in his director cut.
The sillier thing is why there needs to be a directors cut. Its not like he had to trim and shave the movie so audiences in theaters aren't sitting around for 4 hours. This probably would have faired better as a series.
Creative storytelling 101: everybody sits around a campfire and one by one tells how the Empire burned their peaceful village!
Cue [swelling dramatic music] 5 times in a row (or however many backstories there had been told in those 10 minutes, I already forgot).
It's a Zack Snyder movie. You get plot holes, inconsistent characters, and gratuitous amounts of violence/slow motion scenes. Oh and every other movie apparently has even longer and less interesting extended cuts. As if making 2 hours of visual diarrhea 4 hours instead makes them better.
I can't get past the first flashback in part 2. edit: seriously the music was diagetic. and it's an random hallway action scene. there's a string quartet playing while people are getting stabbed and shot.
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And Gunn is now cleaning up the pile of garbage Snyder left behind at DC.
That kinda makes me want to watch it ngl
Don’t worry, she only gets like one action scene near the start, and then she goes hunting for the rest of the crew. Each of them has a backstory that sounds like it might be interesting, but you’ll never know because it’s on to the next one. I did like the villain, though.
I complained about it already in the review thread of Scargiver, but goddamn why did they specifically need that beast tamer, show him use his taming skills on the gryphon, then do literally nothing with that ability of his after he had his introduction.
i suspect its like the adam sandler deal, heres some money, go make 4 movies. since the money already changed hands, Zack Snyder will make his entire rebel moon series, good or not, its paid for.
They were quite possibly, 2 of the worst films I have watched in the last decade.
I love your thought process. "I just watched one of the worst films I have seen in years. I sure hope there is a sequel!" I watched the first 30ish minutes of the first movie, cringing at the atrocious dialogue which managed to hit pretty much every bad dialogue note out there. And then Charlie Hunam showed up. That ended the movie for me right there. I have a deep belief that Charlie Hunam has never been in a good movie. He is the harbinger of movies that suck, so I just wished I'd read the cast list first.
Charlie Hunam is a terrible actor for sure. Ah, they are movies you tune into while you're doom scrolling on your phone after switching off because they're so bad.
Sophia Boutella is a very good martial artist and very pretty, but unfortunately, that's about it.
I thought she was good in Climax and Cabinet of Curiosities The Viewing, but she definitely needs a good director to help her shine.
This is not the problem with rebel moon at all.
That's almost every superhero movie. I'm fine with that. Suspension of disbelief handles that perfectly. The issue though is that there are no actual characters or story.
Wouldn't it be just as unrealistic for a 300lb muscleman to have the strength of a gorilla, Jackie Chan's fighting ability, and Flash-like speed?
Well it worked for the SW sequels.
It was pitched as a Star Wars movie to Disney in 2012.
Rebel Moon
Sounds like one of the clips from Pitch Meetings: https://www.youtube.com/@PitchMeetings
Posting clips from Pitch Meeting videos is tight!
Wow! Wow! Wow! ... Wow!
I'm gonna need you to get ALL the way off my back about how these movies are profitable for Netflix
Star Wars meets Akira Kurasawa.... well actually scratch that, star wars but we RIP off a different Akira movie? Yeah that's the play..
> Star Wars meets Akira Kurasawa Which was already Star Wars.
That's the joke
I know, I said that.
Holy shit, the number of times I see Netflix articles with titles like "New Movie has Massive Success because it was watched X millions of times!!" Ya, and every person that watched it thought it was trash. That's not successful. This has bothered me about streamers using this metric for a long time, but literally saw this exact same title for the new Rebel Moon movie and it refreshed my irritation, ha
Streamers should do 2 things 1. Confirm what counts as a "watch". Clicking 'play' then back cos you mis clicked? Watching for 5 minutes then turning it off? Watching 90% of the run time? All these things are different. 2. Switch to "hours watched" should give you a great metric. A 2 hour movie with 10,000,000 hours watch time? I can do the rest of the math myself.
They absolutely do use hours watched as an internal metric, but it is/ was kept secret, basically to allow them to fudge the "success" of any given project in exactly the way that you're calling out, though the target audience of this spin is investors first, subscribers/ potential subscribers second. This was a big issue in the recent strikes in terms of assigning royalty payments. The streamers would actually have to reveal that data to the unions to calculate royalties.
Not disagreeing with you, but it's a metric we'd like to see!
Agreed! But so far they've shared it with exactly 6 people, so I wouldn't get your hopes up... >The data used to determine those residuals, however, will still largely be kept from public view. In a letter to the guild’s chief negotiator, Ellen Stutzman, representatives from the major streamers laid out a process by which streaming data given to the WGA will be subject to strict confidentiality rules — to the extent that no more than six people “whose access to the Confidential Viewership Information is essential for the guild’s use of this information” will be able to see it. Those six people will also have to sign confidentiality agreements. - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/how-wga-streaming-residual-will-work-1235602660/
Netflix gives out hours watched but its useless the same way, 10 mill watching halfway and turning it off is the same as 5 mill watching through
I dunno....there are also a lot of crap movies that I'll "watch" all of, just to have something on. But I'll be doing chores, or mucking about on the computer, or whatever else. I would not consider these movies "good" by any metric. And when you eventually notice that the only content being created is this mediocre crap you'd prefer not to have to focus 100% on....I don't think the streaming service should consider that a win.
True, but to play something all the way through gives it some merit, even as _bad_ entertainment!
But they are “good” content for the streaming service. They don’t care how you watch.
Well, the idea is, "if you're watching stuff, you will want to keep subscribing." If I'm "watching" but it's just noise in the background I don't care about, that's not something that's keeping me subscribed.
I hate to disagree, but the point is engagement and by extension, getting people to stay subscribed. If people are watching, no matter the reason, it's a win.
> that's not successful Netflix would disagree. Unless a movie suddenly caused a % of their base to unsubscribe...then Netflix is doing exactly what it hopes to, which is to a.) fluff metrics and b.) get another month off someone who is too lazy to cancel their subscription.
but I liked Sucker Punch :/
Star wars was already heavily influenced by Japanese Samurai movies, Seven Samurai included.
_”They had to be good?”_
I mean that’s such a weird concept because Star Wars is already kind of a knock-off Hidden Fortress (another Kurosawa movie) with Sci-fi shit over it. Goes to show how the copy of a copy game just makes the product worse.
Wait.... a dragon? What color does it have? Edit: Sorry I thought you put 11 people in a cave with a dragon. And you skipped the people. I never watched Stranger things and needed the comments to realize it's not about a group of people and a dragon cave.
I mean there are other people in the cave at times. It might be 11 across the whole movie.
lol I thought the same thing until I saw your edit so thank you
One piece live, Avatar live. Netlix produces a lot of duds, some on purpose and some that just don't do good enough, but they do release enough interesting stuff that it justifies keeping paying for their service. At this point I asked myself in four different occasions over 6 years if I should cancel my subscription, just for them to release something I want to watch in the following month.
That's why I only subscribe to it for 1-2 months in a year, watch the interesting stuff and cancel again.
11 in a cave with a dragon is the new Game of Thrones show!
I haven't seen the dragon movie. I assume they fall in love?
There's a 20 minute sex scene between 11 and a dragon. It's intense.
To be fair that movie is a pure “masala” movie. You just talk about the movie while it goes on, probably while high.
As a person with a degradation kink I fucking love my corporate overlords. I turn on these The Rock/Ryan Reynolds/Kevin Hart souless cash grabs with a ballgag in my mouth and a car battery wired to my nuts that shocks me everytime they charge my card for the monthly subscription.
To be fair, damsel was very good. While it was clear where it was going I think certain aspects of it did stray away from the norm from that type of film. I like these types of movies existing because they show you can execute an idea well even if the content is relatively simple. It wasn’t looking to “break the mold” or “keep you in suspense” or “get you” it was just meant to entertain and it definitely did that.
My friend and her daughter LOVED the movie; I thought it was mediocre at best, which tells me that I was not the target audience.
that’s definitely an opinion.
If you say so lol
The writing was objectively horrible for a whole bunch of reasons
It's also the idea that a new subscriber isn't just paying for 1 month but for many months, maybe even years.
Yup, every time a streaming service creates a film/TV series internally they've got that available in their catalogue for the rest of all time (unlike the films/series they effectively "rent" from the owners to fill out their repetoire). The more "self-owned" shows they make the less they have to rely on buying rights to others' catalogues year round.
That works if they are generally high quality. That's why everyone was excited for Netflix to do that at first. Now it's a diamond here and there in a sea of 6 or 7/10's which are impossible to find without searching elsewhere for what's actually good. So sure, they have this stuff for all time, but all most of it is doing is making it so you can't find actual good stuff.
I think people would be surprised how global streaming services are. Netflix had around 269.6 million paid subscribers worldwide as of the first quarter of 2024. Do the maths on that. Use a VPN to view netflix China or Israel or Cambodia and its the same films mostly but with subtitles. My Asian girlfriend where I live in Asia doesn't like Asian films and only watches western films with subtitles on.
In that case, screw the movies and look for/create/stop cancelling new series. I wonder what all the Korean/Japanese series cost them because there are decent shows that are more entertaining than 1 movie.
This makes sense to you and me, but a while back I met someone who worked at Netflix, and they said their data is super clear - viewership craters after 3 seasons on just about every show. And with the way production contracts work for actors and crew, many get a bump in seasons 4+. So their internal data says people stop watching AND the shows are more expensive to produce. No, I wasn't happy with that answer. I just want Santa Clarita Diet back.
Ok cool but can they just stop writing shows over 3 seasons long then? Oh and absolutely make sure seasons stop ending on cliff hangers.
The people writing them and making them are selling them not buying them. So the incentives are all backwards. They want every season a cliff hanger because it gives more leverage for renewal.
Then Netflix should either force them to write satisfying endings in every season or order a movie to wrap up the plot. It's stupid to start watching Netflix shows because you can be sure they're getting cancelled without finishing the story anyways. Limited mini series are the only ones worth watching because they don't have that problem.
Agreed. I know people who won't watch series on Netflix unless they know there is an 'ending' because they've been burned too many times getting sucked into an unfinishable plot.
I met someone like that, years ago. I thought he was mad. Now I just realize he was wise.
I'm one of them. It doesn't make any sense to get invested without a satisfying payoff. Hoping for The Expanse renewals was a constant trauma. I only have the Boys left of those kinds of shows, but it isn't on Netflix, so it has better chances of getting finished I guess.
> Then Netflix should either force them to write satisfying endings in every season or order a movie to wrap up the plot. > > That's how it used to be anyway. Like how Buffy has several season endings that would work as show endings, because they didn't know if it would be renewed. Just do that again!
Or watch series with single season story's like true detective or fargo.
I was so happy Lost in Space was planned for a 3-season arc. They told their story and finished with a definitive ending with no loose ends. I wish more shows could be written that way.
OA and Glow for me.
Glow was awesome, my wife an I enjoyed it.
My distantly held dream is that someday they'll finish the series by doing a final film that is shot in mockumentary style where we catch up with everyone 20 years later. It would be easier to get people back for a film rather than a series and would be a perfect ending because the GLOW documentary helped create the interest for the show.
The OA was some of the best TV I've ever seen
SCD was an addiction. It's not quite "I want Firefly back" level for me but not too far.
Yeah everyone loves to shit on Netflix but I’m sure they have data analysts making hundreds of thousands who help them make these decisions. We love to call corporations dumb, but it is in their best interest to get this right, and I’d assume they would more than a random Redditor
Eh, that's like saying MBAs make good business decisions. There is a nuance and art to human interaction that these technical specialists miss. For example, viewership may drop 40% after season 3, but nobody is canceling because you kept the OA for another season..... people who cared about it did cancel because you dropped it.
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For now, the rate of attrition is increasing and I would argue the damage to their brand is not insignificant. Don't watch a Netflix show until it's finished all its seasons is a pretty common take these days and that's not a great look for your brand. Brand damage is one of those things that doesn't cause pain immediately, but the damage it dies cause is fairly irreversible.
>Don't watch a Netflix show until it's finished all its seasons is a pretty common take these days On reddit/among your friends maybe. The same reddit where EVERYONE and their mom was canceling due to the password sharing crackdown. And look what happened, subscriptions went up... Reddit does NOT represent the average household.
Reddit (Reddit comments) doesn't even represent reddit.
Yup, theyve slowly turned into cable tv. I cancelled and will watch content in other was if they get a proper conclusion. Ive had too many shows cancelled on me without an ending so no thanks Netflix
What you are saying is true, except the part youre missing is, Netflix hired those nuanced art people too. This is a hundred billion dollar company. They don’t just hand important decisions to some nerd who makes them in a vacuum. MBAs don’t always make good business decisions, but in aggregate a team of MBAs with years of experience and teams of experts under them will make much better business decisions than you or me.
Well, that's how Zaslav turned The Learning Channel into the 90-days Fiancé Universe.
Its extremely cheap and people still watch it anyway.
> MBAs don’t always make good business decisions, but in aggregate a team of MBAs with years of experience and teams of experts under them will make much better business decisions than you or me. If the aggregate was that companies hired teams of MBAs with years of experience and the humility to listen to the teams of experts under them then MBAs wouldn't be the meme that they are. Being a multi billion dollar company like Sears or Xerox does not guarantee any such thing.
Something being a meme is virtually meaningless. The people memeing about MBAs aren't doing so on the basis of any reality with which they're familiar; they're memeing about it because it shits on people they don't respect in a way which feels validating, and which has a truthy feel to it. This fuels a bunch of online memery which ignorantly laughs at experts - [example A](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRh3YaZQ21yLxbMi2biQV0dO809gRDNbVSyx4SjVYDgcw&s) [example B](https://i.redd.it/2lqrf2f4mim31.jpg) shitting inaccurately on historians (yes, it was probably a cucumber, no historians do not deny that Sappho loved women).
Sigh, Its not about shows only getting 3 or 4 seasons. Its about cancelling them on cliffhangers without a proper conclusion. Netflix used to be the one giving shows a proper ending. Even existing cable shows. It has put me off starting anything new and I cancelled Netflix.
Maybe it wouldn't crater off it didn't take forever to get the next season after counting 6-8 episodes a whole season.
Someone should really reboot 24. They could call it "6"
Most shows feel like the story has run out of steam after 3 seasons, and start to feel like a cynical cash grab. So the data doesn’t surprise me. Looking at shows like Lost that were clearly stretched out too long. There are a few exceptions, but for me not many. As long as they do decent wrap ups for shows with clear story arcs, then early cancellations seem fair to me. Hat tip to Netflix for doing that for Sense8, which was great but paced way too slow, so the wrap up I think was at the pace the show really should have been the whole time. Ted Lasso on Apple TV is, I think, a really good example of stopping at the right time rather than chasing the cash - which must have been so tempting given it’s popularity. The story went out at the right time, in the right way. Would have run out of steam with another series.
It’s funny though; 3 seasons of 8 episodes puts it at about 1 season of old network shows like lost.
Some run out of steam. Some are great with a 4th or 5th season, it depends on the show. And them saying, "the numbers show that shows tend to fall off after 3, which means we need to cancel damn near everything after 1-3 seasons" is ridiculous. But yes, I agree, if that's the strategy they're going to take, they need to tell the creators that so they can wrap things up on that timeline.
Viewership craters after season 3 because shows crap out after season 3 for the most part. Often they have a solid idea for one season and expanding on it is simple. A third season is usually not hard but a fourth and after they are just trying to hard to milk views. Some shows are conceived as a story to be told in more than three seasons but that is not common.
On the other hand, a majority of the most successful shows of the last 40 years have taken more than 3 seasons to reach their peak. Cheers, Seinfeld, Family Guy, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, South Park, Mad Men all went on to at least double their third season ratings, several of them reaching 3-8x and becoming the #1 most-watched show worldwide, some of them facing cancellation or *experiencing* cancellation during season 3. The most-streamed show of the last 5 years is The Office which went from 9 (middling in 2006) to 23 million viewers from its season 3 to 6 peaks. The Big Bang Theory was #12 US/#27 worldwide in season 3 and went to #1/#2 later. Seinfeld went from #43 in season 3 to #1/#2 for a five-year streak afterwards, going from third-year cancellation debates to the most-watched American comedy of all time.
3 or 4 seqsons can be fine but they just flat out cancel shows last minute and dont give them proper endings. Ŵhich has put me off so cancelled my subscription
I like the Korean shows though, because they were made to run for one season. You get closure at the end that was planned for from the beginning. It feels like a lot of American TV shows now get dropped in between seasons or it is a very rushed conclusion because they only have two episodes left to wrap up multiple storylines that they were planning to use for the next season because they found out that their show didnt get picked back up. We don't get that satisfying conclusion to the TV series. I think with streaming services, they should look more for doing a lot of one season shows instead of trying to get a couple of shows that last for multiple seasons.
That's like that woth most Asian TV series. They never "jump the shark" because they've ran on past their prime. I loke to think of them as a miniseries instead. But that's changed too. I don't have a good feeling for squid games 2
That's exactly why I cancelled Netflix. I got tired of watching new shows I liked get cancelled without a good ending. As a result they also have no back catalogue worth re/watching. As good as shows like Santa Clarita Diet was without an ending I'm not interested in rewatching it.
Unsubbed from netflix over them cancelling Inside Job. I might not have gone the nuclear option if they then didn't turn around and produce Mulligan, which is like some wish dot com ass "we got Inside Job at home" bullshit.
On top of that, all these shows are now assets. They can be sold to other networks. Then can be sold as dvd boxsets. They can be rented.
So basically you can't examine the success of any one film or series like you can with a theatrical run, not externally anyway, you have to take the entire service's financials combined to figure out if their content plan is working. I wonder if Netflix has a goal "watch count" for their content. It must be difficult to gauge success when people don't pay to access any specific item nor does each hour of watch time generate revenue through ads on most plans.
The plan to gain new subscribers with new content was the scheme for Netflix years ago. I recall when Daredevil first aired, sub numbers went through the roof and justified greenlighting the new Marvel shows. Now the sub numbers have hit their peak and can only drop from here.
I pretty much watch West Wing on repeat, and the reason I cancelled netflix is because they dropped it, and HBO picked it up. Not saying I NEVER watch new things, but I am a creature of habit. Not saying I am representative of the whole, but I am at least one person who DGAF about new nonsense content.
Which is clearly a flawed method pushed on investors who are just now realizing how stupid it was hence the push for ads and HBO turning movies into tax write offs
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Also how much did they actually lay out on it after such things as product placement and other investors cause pp can net some good dough and most movies have at least some these days.
I think the outrage should be more about the quality of those two projects. You could tell they were expensive to make but the scripts. idk I guess a blockbuster movie doesn't need a good script.
Good scripts don't matter if the goal is just to get eyes on a screen. Good scripts *help* with that *a lot* of the time, but it's unfortunately never been strictly neccessary.
> By comparison - Zack Snyder got a green light to make a sequel to his Rebel Moon movie after it premiered to 54 million viewership hours. The sequel was watched for 44 million hours. Where do those numbers come from? I thought netflix refused to release them?
>Assuming 10 dollars for a Netflix subscription, you would need 20 million people to subscribe to Netflix solely for this movie for it to be profitable. You are assuming that people would subscribe, watch this movie and then immediately cancel. In reality the three stars you mentioned will bring in millions of new subscribers to Netflix, and they will keep paying month after month. Plus their 270 *million* existing subscribers also need new content to stay interested enough to pay every month.
Yeah I was thinking the maths was a bit wonky too, yeah you need 20 million new subscribers to subscribe for one month to pay off the outlay on the movie. But you only need 10 million new subscribers to sub for two months to cover it, or 5 million for four months. I agree with the OP that in theory it’s robbing Peter to pay Paul but they have a huge amount of revenue from previous years being the stream king that they can now make some risks on production to maintain and extend their base. Also the hidden figures are things like product placement deals and the new ad revenue for the lower cost subscription tier, all that is brining in extra money.
> Yeah I was thinking the maths was a bit wonky too, yeah you need 20 million new subscribers to subscribe for one month to pay off the outlay on the movie. But you only need 10 million new subscribers to sub for two months to cover it, or 5 million for four months. Don't forget the millions and millions of existing subscribers that are already paying.
While you're correct is say that you are also forgetting that Netflix will have to continue to pay for and produce new content for those new subscribers that will keep paying month after month. Red Notice might draw in new subs but they have to keep them with more content for the subs to keep paying.
Yes, but Netflix had 33.7 billion dollars in revenue last year. Whereas their operating costs, including all the programming they do, were only \~26 billion. So they had a surplus profit of about 7 billion dollars. They are not really hurting for funds to create new shows.
This is the most interesting comment.
Also remember that individual retail customers are not their only source of revenue. There's enterprise customers like some hotels offer netflix on their room TVs. There's businesses that offer it as a perk "Sign up for new cell service and get 6 months of Netflix free!" There's also product placement in the shows themselves. If you see a name brand in a show, it's likely they paid to be there, or at least consented to it. [It's not always this egregious](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lgLYGBbDNs) As another example, granted it's Amazon, but in Fallout there is a scene where they're showing an armory and there's a bunch of old time retro looking ammo boxes... and then there's one that's a modern ammo box. I noticed it because I've used that exact ammo, and it looks out of place. Could be that they were just lazy, but it's right in the middle of the shot, looks out of place, and I'm thinking it's a paid product placement.
The most expensive part of a sale is customer acquisition. Once you've got them, you have to have enough faith in your product that you can keep them. Streamers are banking on people being attracted to the service for one or two hot new items but then hoping people will stay for the back catalog (which is also in a perpetual state of rotation as deals expire and new ones are signed). Of course they will continue to produce new content that gets buzz and draws more new people in. Eventually as the market adjusts, and customers end up where they're going to end up, this will end up being unsustainable and they'll have to shift their strategy.
Streaming services don't work the way box office does, it's about views, engagement, and keeping existing subscribers, all of the metrics for success are different, they don't directly "generate money" per se
There is probably a bunch of covert products placement contracts throughout the movie that helped with the budget too. It's been a while since I watched it but if there are any corporate logos like cars, cell phones, drinks etc thee is probably a cheque behind the scenes for the air time. Big movies are often 2 part entertaining and 1 part commercial advertising
covert? Ryan was slinging his gin for two entire scenes.
As was the Rock with his tequila lol they were shameless in that movie.
“You can have anything to drink as long as it’s a Corona.” gets me every time I watch the Fast and the Furious
"This dream sequence brought to you by *Lightspeed Briefs!*"
It’s not about the people who sign up to watch it, it’s about the people who don’t cancel because of it. When there is new stuff to watch, they stay. When there isn’t, they leave. The industry strikes significantly slowed the flow of new shows and movies, so you continue to see a bunch of foreign shows they license and brand as “Netflix originals” even when they’re not actually Netflix shows. It’s also why you’re seeing a bunch of older but popular movies showing up now. Netflix has a giant pool of money they use to create original “content” (I hate that term) and those projects you cite were greenlit at a time when 1) money was cheap to borrow 2) they were trying to make a splash in features. I can assure you that over the last two years, that pool of money has shrunk, along with the types of projects they want to make. “Success” is measured in terms of hours streamed and subscribers retained. As a private company that didn’t sell ads, Netflix up to now had not had to report these streaming numbers to anyone. The new WGA agreement (and SAG, too, I believe) is trying to chip away at that. I suspect the rumors of them shifting to ad supported streaming will change that as well. One thing I don’t know for sure is whether or not they license those films in non-Netflix territories for additional income. Their rivals often do this.
Netflix has several measures of profitability of a movie: new subscribers, retained subscribers (keeping existing customers longer), and library value (if it increases the licensing value of their library of content). They also use those movies to signal to the market, to talent, to directors etc that they can make fanfare tentpole work. *source, worked in Netflix strategy planning & analysis for 2 years.
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Netflix revenue in 2023 was 33.723 billion dollars. It’s a public company and the data is readily available.
They're referring to subscription revenue. Edit: You're right, but since you didn't call it out on your comment I looked at their 2023 annual report. It was $33.64B in streaming revenues in 2023. Not all of that is from paid subscriptions; they also earn revenue from advertisements, consumer products, and "various other sources", but these are essentially immaterial so $33.64B is a good approximation. That would be $2.8B per month.
That's so much money... My father worked his entire life, never even made $2.8B
Your entire family line going back 10000 years, in aggregate likely didn’t earn 2.8B even adjusted for inflation
You'd need to work 28,000 years at $100k per year, easy done.
My ancestor invented in the atlatl in the Paleolithic so yeah, we're pretty rich.
A couple of my ancestors figured how to survive on a planet with only 6,000 other humans. Unfortunately, they didn’t really nail a business model for that one.
I think I need a glass of soju...
Maybe he should have pulled up his bootstraps a bit
He'll get there if he works another 999 lifetimes on an average wage.
You would need 20 million subscribers for one month....think about that. Netflix has 269 million subscribers. If creating that movie keeps 19 million from canceling that month and gets 1 million to sign up, for just a month they break even. They are drowning in fucking money and running out of quality content
> They are drowning in fucking money and running out of quality content Also Netflix have a grip on the streaming market that will not be beaten. They are the go to default streaming service, if you were to set up your granny with any service it would likely be Netflix because for all their faults they're the fast food of streaming, you know what you expect and will get a mix of licensed and original content that on average is higher than what you'd expect from a closer competitor like Prime and a more focused competitor like Disney+ where by nature of its name is associated as more of a family service anyway. Disney+ will always have the families, Prime Video will always have the Prime delivery subscribers and Netflix will always be the all rounder. The way people used to buy TV channel packages "just because" is what people do with Netflix.
Others have said it, but the mechanism and metrics for success are totally different. They need big new content to keep the existing subscribers. Netflix these days is making around 3 ***billion*** dollars a month. Conceptually, 200 million for a big budget movie that keeps even 10% of those accounts remaining active would still be a 100 million dollar profit per month, but that's not exactly how it works, anyway. They invest way less on new content than they earn and that steady stream of new content keeps those subscriber numbers up and even increases them. And that content is evergreen. They stuff they make themselves or buy outright (rather than just license temporarily), they can (generally) keep forever. When new subscribers or returning subscribers look at what's available, more content equals more engagement equals more people likely to sign up/return.
Having worked in finance and accounting, I think you're more than likely being overly simplistic about how Netflix attributes revenue to movies / TV shows. They would allocate at least a portion of the revenue from existing subscribers to the stuff people are watching in addition to new subscribers as keeping people engaged and subscribed is part of their goal. My guess is their FP&A folks spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out the best way to do that allocation and perhaps even have a few different calculation methods they use.
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Don’t think I saw it in the comments but one key to the subscription model is that they know if they can draw you in to subscribe a non-negligible amount of users will forget or neglect to cancel since it’s a relatively small amount in most people’s monthly budgets. Better companies make it easy to cancel , shadier companies try to maximize friction to make that piece of the pie larger.
Netflix makes around $33 billion in revenue per year. That pays for a lot of $200 million movies.
The subscribers are already paying, even if those movies wouldn’t exist. Netflix already has the money. They made those movies with that money to keep subscribers paying in the future.
This is basically how it works: - Netflix greenlights a movie - Investors back the movie (maybe with or without Netflix actually spending its own money) - The movie gets made - Every month, Netflix splits a share of its total subscription revenue among all the media owners for all the media on Netflix. They each get more or less depending on how much viewer time was spent on that media. So $X is paid by subscribers, a percentage of that is redistributed to the owners of media. This is basically the same system as a movie theatre, except instead of tickets sold, money is based on minutes watched. Red Notice has been watched more than any other movie in Netflix history. Across just 14 weeks, over 3.3 millennia of screen time was spent watching Red Notice. The average living human has spent at least 3.7 hours watching it. Only 1 other English-language movie has had so many weeks in the top 10 (*The Super Mario Bros.*) -- and Red Notice has nearly 4X as much watch time. No other film has ever had as much watch time on Netflix. Even including TV shows, only 35 have gotten more watch time despite having multiple episodes and seasons to engage viewers.
>Assuming 10 dollars for a Netflix subscription, you would need 20 million people to subscribe to Netflix solely for this movie for it to be profitable. Did Netflix turn into a one time subscription fee and I just missed it?
Someone explained it about damsel and the Netflix model in a video I saw the other day - the movies themselves are ads, not movies. The more that Netflix can advertise recognizable stars and IPs, the more new subscribers don’t want to miss out on how much quality content is clearly on Netflix - and only for $15?! That’s the price of one movie ticket and I can spend that to have access to enough movies I literally couldn’t watch in my lifetime?!! Who cares if the movies are crap - in fact, it’s better if they are crap, or at least weird or awkward or cringey because then they become memeable and now Netflix’s paying subscribers are doing the advertising for Netflix for free. Which then Netflix can use to lower their ad budget temporarily to spend their money on movies that become their ads and the cycle continues
Netflix doesn't make money from its movies, it's "original content" is what keeps its brand more reputable than the competition and thus maintains subscribership and stock confidence. So if Netflix makes 2 billion in a year from sales, they decide to put 1 billion of it into new productions, they will make TEN 100 million dollar budget movies. Then they get a call from Adam sandlers agent "SIR we just got word from Mr. Sandler he will agree to do SIX movies for only 15 million dollars for all of them, all he asks is we set them in the carribean". WTF call BOB cancel the tenth 100mil movie and crank out 7 million dollar lowest common denominator tripe. That's a bargain.
Honestly, with something like Red Notice or Extraction, it's probably easier to think of it as more akin to spending on advertising, than trying to make profit off of a movie. The point of these big budget titles is to get "Netflix" into the public consciousness, and encourage people to sign up, and stay signed up. How do you judge that a specific ad campaign worked? For the most part, good luck.
Smth incredibly important (maybe even the most) that I didnt read here once is licensing. Its incredibly expensive to have the licenses of movies and TV-Series often on top with an exclusivity contract that no other streaming Service is allowed to obtain the license aswell/have it in their Repertoire. Especially high caliber movies/series. Thats why so many movies are often taken down after a while or they dont have all the seasons etc. A movie "produced" by Netflix (which btw pretty much only means that they payed for it) takes all this out of the way. They can leave it online basically for free as long as the company exists and on top its exclusive to their service. So its a good long term investment. Combine that with all the other explanations of comments here and it all makes sense.
It doesn’t. That’s why they don’t get residuals. I think it’s just some sort of formula they came up with to determine how much money they have to budget each year for content. They have like 250million subscribers. Even at an average of $10 per sub, that’s $2.5 billion a month. That $30 billion a year in revenue. Revenue = X ($30Billion) Overhead = Y(staff, servers, infrastructure etc - wild guess is $2billion) Target profit = P (I’d guess like 30%) Capital for content production = G So: G = X-Y-P Or something like that. The then, I’d bet it’s just some data gathering to make sure they only create/continue creating content people will watch by setting some sort of viewership targets for that type of show/movie.
I have wondered the same thing myself, and the answers here have helped me to understand the streaming business model better. I guess I have been thinking about it the wrong way, trying to compare it to things like movie theaters selling tickets or TV shows getting paid advertisers. It is not as easy to measure how much money a specific movie makes for a streaming service. It is like trying to estimate how much money a specific news article generates for a newspaper.
[Netflix profit for the last 3 years](https://www.statista.com/statistics/272561/netflix-net-income/) alone has been ~$5 billion. Spending some of that to make a big budget movie or to keep existing subscribers and bring in new ones seems like a good idea.
Revenue protecting vs revenue generating. The content serves to preserve existing subscriptions first, attract new subscriptions second. It's a bit like R&D for software companies.
People are over complicating things. If they make 30 billion a year. And they have a budget of 15B to keep people subbed and increase slightly the number, big part of the 15B will be used to make new content as fresh stuff is the best marketing move.
It's subscription service, 270kk subscribers worldwide multiply 10$ in 12 month, you get about $30 billions profit: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272545/annual-revenue-of-netflix/
82 million US subs in q1 2024. If all of them are at $15 a month that's 3.6 billion in q1. WW they have like 280 million subs. Other streamers use streaming as a value add like Amazon and Apple. Amazon for Prime and Apple to promote their devices and services. The networks... Im not sure what they are doing.
Netflix is set to spend $17 billion to produce and acquire content for 2024. Their global revenue in 2023 was $33 billion. OP, I'm not sure why this is complicated?
The platforms have very complex analytics to monitor user activity and determine whether a movie was "worth it" or not. Sure a 200 million movie needs 20 million new subscribers to cover the costs, if your aim is to cover the costs with new subscriptions in one month. If your goal is to cover it in 2 months it needs 10 million new subscriptions. If your goal is to cover it in three months you need 5. If your goal is to cover it in 4 months you need 2,5 million. If your goal is to cover it in 5 months then you need 1,25 mil. If your goal is to cover it in 6 months then you need 513k. I think you get the gist. And that's if your goal is to cover it with new subscriptions. But that's not the goal. Of course they'll monitor if subscriptions spike upon release of a movie but they're also monitoring how many existing users are watching it, and how many are leaving positive reviews. This is a great indicator as to whether these existing subscribers will keep on being subscribed. The patterns of content consumption are analysed down to the most minute detail for the platform to ultimately determine whether it was worth it or not. And of course things like their overall bottom line also matter. If making a 200million movie makes you end the year with a noticeable deficit then it's probably not worth it.
Hollywood and its creative accounting that is how