Netflix has a mixed track record, to say the least, when it comes to original movies. It’s poured serious money into chasing a Best Picture Oscar statue for years — releasing awards bait like Mank, Blonde, and The Power of the Dog — while at the same time shoving one dumb Kevin Hart movie after another at viewers, as well as embarrassingly bad crap like that porn-y 365 Days franchise and newer titles like Tyler Perry’s Mea Culpa.
Netflix has a new film boss with a mandate to right-size the ship, as it were. It’s believed that he’ll focus on Netflix making fewer movies overall, but also fewer outright bad ones. Meanwhile, one way you can get a sense of just how thing the streamer’s film output is by consulting the weekly global Top 10 movies chart that Netflix releases, which this week lists just four Netflix original movies among the biggest in the world on the platform. And two of those four come from the same controversial director (Zack Snyder).
You’d expect to see more of that, especially considering Netflix’s vast reach today. “Almost 270M households across 190+ countries now subscribe to Netflix,” the company says in its latest quarterly shareholder letter. “With more than two people per household on average, we have an audience of over half a billion people. No entertainment company has ever programmed at this scale and with this ambition before.”
Nevertheless, of the 10 most-watched Netflix movies on the latest chart )which covers the seven-day period that ended on April 21) just four are Netflix original films. They include:
Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver (#1 in the world this week)
What Jennifer Did (#3)
Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire (#5)
Damsel (#9)
Per The New York Times, the mandate of Netflix’s new film chief, Dan Lin, is to both improve the quality of its original movies as well as produce a “wider spectrum” of them across different budget levels. There will be no more gargantuan upfront deals, essentially trying to buy eyeballs with the inclusion of this or that talent. “In other words,” the paper concludes, “Netflix’s age of austerity is well underway” — at least when it comes to original movies.
The biggest movie on Netflix in the US at the moment is Sydney Sweeney’s rom-com Anyone But You, which practically minted money at the box office and is now available to stream. Enjoy your brief run while it lasts, Snyder; Hollywood’s current bombshell is coming to dethrone Rebel Moon with the release of next week’s Netflix Top 10 chart.