Casual Viewing : Why Netflix looks like that
Will Tavlin
Until recently no Hollywood studio had ever released two movies with the same name at the same time. At most studios, such a strategy would be unthinkable. Audiences might accidentally buy tickets to the wrong film, and the PR fallout would be disastrous: snipes from trade-magazine writers; angry calls from investors questioning the studios’ business acumen; angrier calls from agents demanding to know why their clients’ images were being intentionally sabotaged.
Netflix, however, is not most studios. On April Fools’ Day, 2022, the company released a Judd Apatow comedy titled The Bubble, which takes place on the set of a Hollywood dinosaur franchise that’s forced to quarantine in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. Four weeks later, it released an animated film by Tetsurō Araki, director of the popular Japanese anime shows Death Note and Attack on Titan, about a postapocalyptic world in which the law of gravity ceases to exist. Araki’s film was called Bubble.
There were no box office mix-ups, no snipes from the press, no angry calls. The few critics who bothered to write about it panned Apatow’s Bubble, an unfunny comedy that’s duller than the blockbuster franchises it makes fun of. Nobody had anything to say about Araki’s Bubble, a TV movie better suited to a graveyard slot on a children’s cable network. Like all Netflix movies, Bubble and The Bubble floated away as quickly as they appeared, becoming tiles in the company’s sprawling mosaic of content, destined to be autoplayed on laptops whose owners have fallen asleep.
For years Ted Sarandos, the Netflix co-CEO who pioneered this distribution strategy, has been hailed by the press as a visionary. Even after the streaming giant faltered in 2022, recording an overall loss of subscribers for the first time in a decade, the podcast impresario Scott Galloway raced to Sarandos’s defense in the New York Times, comparing him and Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings to “A-Rod and Barry Bonds.” He added, “You don’t want to bet against these guys.” Galloway had apparently forgotten that the two baseball players he named had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs at the height of their careers. In this way his comparison was more accurate than he intended. Netflix is a steroidal company, pumped up by lies and deceit, and has broken all of Hollywood’s rules.
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/
**Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful; Netflix rewarded them for being mindless**
Disturbing business models and capitalism.