If Netflix Doesn't Care, Why Should You?

In the months ahead, Netflix will raise it prices again. Their standard plan currently sits at $15.49 per month, and Netflix would likely argue that such price increases are necessary to stay competitive in the streaming marketplace. Of course, when it comes to Netflix Originals, it seems harder to justify the cost as Netflix, while willing to spend freely on these titles, is indifferent to actually promoting the movies and TV shows they produce. You can see this on Netflix’s own Top 10 list, where today 6 of the 10 titles are non-Netflix. The picture is a little sunnier on the TV side—and perhaps that’s where Netflix is always going to shine, as people like binging series and spending time with characters for longer durations. However, with so many TV shows and movies constantly being added to Netflix, it’s incredible that anything even stands out in the first place.

Netflix’s strategy for years has been one of quantity-wins-out. Rather than making any efforts at curation, they’ve simply greenlit a bunch of content and then left promotion to its algorithm. Due to rising licensing fees, they have less and less of the familiar favorites that users want to see—but they try to solve the problem with imitation. So if I search for “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Netflix doesn’t have it right now. But they do recommend the musical of Matlida, which is also based on a Roald Dahl book. They recommend Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, which is also stop-motion animation. They also recommend…Superbad, which I don’t really get. 2000s comedies, maybe? The point is that when it comes to finding a movie you want, Netflix’s response tends to be, “Is Pepsi okay?”

However, this doesn’t solve the basic problem that Pepsi is typically not okay because people have preferences. Maybe if you have no taste or all things taste the same, then you’ll pop on the 2022 Netflix movie The House because it hits the keywords of “Adult Animation”, “Anthology Films”, and “Satires” and “This movie is: Mind-Bending” but none of this is useful if you know what you want to watch (or that none of those keywords really applies to Fantastic Mr. Fox). Netflix has a half-hearted answer to that question, so you would think they would really make more of a case for encouraging you to watch something you haven’t seen beyond, “We don’t have what you wanted.” And yet that would be an act of curation and advocacy done by human beings, which is against Netflix’s ethos.

Which gets us to four new Wes Anderson movies landing on Netflix with barely any fanfare.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More

Whether you like his movies or not, Wes Anderson is a name director with an instantly recognizable style. The fact that he’s just as popular now if not more so than he was over 20 years ago when The Royal Tenenbaums came out speaks to his longevity and following. And yet when he did four short films for Netflix based on Roald Dahl short stories—The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison—the service barely gave them much attention. Henry Sugar played at Venice and received a trailer, but you’d be forgiven for overlooking the other three because apparently Netflix overlooked them as well. They debuted on Netflix in the days following Henry Sugar, but you’d have to either have them as a recommendation or know they were there in the first place. Again, this is Wes Anderson making movies based on an acclaimed author starring major actors including Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, Richard Ayoade, Rupert Friend, and Sir Ben Kingsley. This isn’t like Stephen Soderbergh dropping a sci-fi series on his website with no notice. This is our biggest streamer treating everything it does like an afterthought.

The story I like to tell about Netflix is that the two biggest hits in their history—Stranger Things and Squid Game—were surprises to Netflix. They now foster these shows, but they only became hits through virality, not through any in-house Netflix efforts beyond the bare minimum they give to just about everything: a trailer, a press release, and maybe some interviews or previews to critics. While it may sound crazy to bang my fists on the desk and shout, “Bring me more marketing!” that marketing spend at least signals the kind of faith Netflix has in its own decisions. Quality will ultimately win out, but Netflix has to know how much noise is coming at audiences right now. We’re being told to watch so many things, and rather than make a case for some of its originals, Netflix frequently chooses to be hands-off, happy to simply add a new movie or show to the platform with little else. All of the onus then falls on the viewer to spread the word, and look, I’m happy to tell people that Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl shorts are very good, but also, that is meaningless when we’re all telling each other what to watch all the time, with a glut of shows and movies constantly overwhelming us. I feel like every gathering I’ve been to for the past decade features a variation of the following conversation:

Friend: Have you seen [Show X on Streaming]? It’s great!

Me: That’s what I hear! It’s on my list. We’re currently watching [Show Y on Streaming].

Friend: Oh, I’ll have to put that on to my list.

[Repeat until the heat death of the universe]

Fewer Things to Watch, More Reasons for Why to Watch Them

My hope is that the new contracts for the WGA and (hopefully) SAG-AFTRA will cause the studios, in a cost-cutting measure, to generate fewer movies and TV shows. There was the hope that more movies and TV shows would create more diversity and minority voices, but that hasn’t been borne out as much as a bunch of imitations of popular things that already exist or game shows that ask “Is it cake?” So if we have to scale back, then this should be an opportunity for streamers like Netflix to make the case for their own work.

Before streaming, studios and networks were limited by time. There are only so many theater screens and timeslots. If you’re going to compete, you want to put your best stuff out there and then push your belief in it. If you don’t believe in it, you try to minimize the thud when it flops. Netflix’s “I love my children equally and therefore support none of them publicly” strategy will need to come to a close as they have fewer shows and movies to push. They will, like studios before them, need to construct individual marketing strategies based on what they’re promoting rather than hoping social media will carry the day. They’ll have to take the step of saying, “We made this, we believe in it, and you should watch it,” because firehosing the audience with a deluge of movies and shows is not worth whatever the price hike will be.