COLUMN: When Netflix Pits Audiences Against Auteurs, Everybody Loses | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

This week, it was announced that Netflix had pulled the plug on Kathryn Bigelow’s Aurora.

This is just the most recent news to come out of the streaming service, signaling a significant shift in how it is approaching film production. Late last year, the company shut down the Robert Pattinson serial killer movie Average Height, Average Build when director Adam McKay departed the project. Earlier that year, Netflix shut down Nancy Meyers’ Paris Paramount, reportedly over concerns about the $130m budget. Reports suggest that Netflix is entering an “age of austerity.”

To be fair, this is part of a larger trend at the streaming service. Earlier this year, the company’s film chief Scott Stuber departed after seven years of service, with reports suggesting that he “balked over” proposed budget cuts. The arrival of his replacement, Dan Lin, coincided with lay-offs within the streaming giant’s film division. The golden age of streaming is over. The streaming wars are lost. Netflix won, but it appears to be making its own strategic withdrawal from the arena.

This has been a long time coming. Bigelow’s Aurora was commissioned in March 2022, in what might as well have been a different world. Just a month later, the market was hit by “the Netflix Correction.” Ironically, Netflix weathered this market readjustment better than many of its rivals, but there was a sense that the good times were over. A lot of the publicity and messaging from the company signaled that there would be changes to how the company operated.

In its early years, Netflix courted respectable names and diverse perspectives. The studio invested significantly in the kinds of movies that major studios could no longer justify funding, in part because of the threat posed by Netflix. The streaming service bankrolled movies like Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Dee Rees’ Mudbound, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, and many more. They even restored Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind.

To be clear, Netflix was not doing this for the love of the artform. As critic James Poniewozik warned viewers in March 2019, “Netflix is not your friend.” These were all calculated decisions. The studio lured in auteurs in order to build its credibility within the Hollywood establishment and among hardcore cinephiles. The studio’s hunger for an Oscar was legendary, leading to lavish overspending and making it darkly hilarious when Apple became the first streamer to win Best Picture.

Even Netflix’s embrace of diverse storytelling was rooted in a desire to cultivate particular “taste clusters”, luring in audiences that had felt underrepresented and under-appreciated by more mainstream studio output. For a while, powered by borrowing at low interest rates, Netflix was willing to spend absurd amounts of money trying to bring these groups on board, investing heavily in a diverse portfolio of films and television shows.

Of course, one can be clear-eyed about Netflix’s motivations for investing in these projects while also acknowledging the appeal of the end result. Netflix produced a lot of bland and forgettable nonsense over the years, but it occasionally churned out some real gems that could never have survived the conventional studio system. It’s a net benefit to the world that films like The Irishman and Roma exist, even if the model that produced them was never going to stick around longer than necessary.

In recent years, responding to these sharp market corrections, Netflix signaled an intention to pivot away from these sorts of projects. In June 2022, two months after the company’s stock tumble, The Hollywood Reporter suggested that this was the end of “the era of expensive vanity projects at Netflix.” This is also the messaging around the recent wave of cancellations, with producers and agents opining that Netflix is “no longer a top choice when trying to find a distributor for their films.”

There is a sense in which this is self-defeating. If money is the issue, the obvious solution is to put some of these movies in theatres. It’s a no-brainer. After all, Glass Onion demonstrated that audiences will turn out enthusiastically for a streaming movie they want to see. More than that, movies released in theatres tend to do better on streaming. However, Netflix seems unlikely to make that concession. As Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria stated, “It’s just not our business.”

However, the classic framing of this argument is that Netflix favors audiences rather than auteurs, and is appealing to a wide base of subscribers rather than narrowcasting to smaller subsets. This has a ring of crass populism to it, evoking the specter of “the lowest common denominator.” After all, it’s worth taking a moment to consider Netflix’s attempts to create four-quadrant blockbusters: Bright, The Gray Man, Red Notice. It really doesn’t sound like Netflix thinks that much about its audience.

More than that, this re-framing of the debate between artistic and commercial appeal misses the reality of the situation. It’s entirely possible for films to appeal to mass audiences while being well-made. Setting aside extreme cases like Duncan Jones’ Mute or even more niche examples like Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl adaptations, it’s not as if any of the projects that Netflix has recently cancelled were especially niche.

Nancy Meyers is not some marginal artist whose work is only appreciated in the deepest and darkest halls of film academia. She has directed six films that have cumulatively grossed over $1.35bn at the global box office. She is one of the queens of the romantic comedy, one of the most accessible and broad genres in contemporary Hollywood. Netflix might hesitate to pay $130m for a Nancy Meyers movie, but that’s what happens when the business model doesn’t allow for profit participation.

Meyers would seem to have been quite a coup for Netflix. Over the past couple of years, the service has made a big deal of how it resurrected the romantic comedy after the genre floundered at the box office. Some of Netflix’s most enjoyable (and popular) originals have been romantic comedies. The company even branded 2018 as “the Summer of Love” due to a spate of breakout hits: Set It Up, Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, The Kissing Booth, Like Father, and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.

Similarly, it’s not as if Robert Pattinson is an unknown actor. He is one of the most recognizable stars on the planet and is currently between Batman sequels. It’s understandable that McKay’s departure might have caused some concern at Netflix. However, given that McKay’s previous collaboration with the streamer, Don’t Look Up, reportedly smashed viewing records for the service, it’s wild that Netflix didn’t want to press ahead with a film that at least originated with the director.

As with Paris Paramount, Average Height, Average Build feels like a project that fits comfortably at Netflix. The streaming service has a wealth of breakout serial-killer-adjacent media, even beyond the true crime documentaries. In 2019, Netflix bet big on Ted Bundy, releasing the Zac Efron vehicle Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Vile and Evil alongside the documentary Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer was a smash hit for the service.

Then there’s Kathryn Bigelow. Bigelow is a legend. She is a director who exists in two separate spaces. She directed Point Break, one of the great action movies of the early 1990s, a movie so beloved that it essentially provides the emotional spine of Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz. She was also the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Direction, for her work on The Hurt Locker. Bigelow isn’t some unknown or unproven talent.

More than that, Aurora seemed like it was comfortably within the streaming service’s sweet spot. Netflix announced the project with the headline, “What if Kathryn Bigelow directed the apocalypse?” This captures the sense in which the end of the world has been a successful and proven subgenre for the studio. Susanne Bier’s Bird Box, starring Sandra Bullock, was reportedly the service’s most successful release to that point.

These aren’t obscure or niche projects from unproven arthouse darlings. These are all accessible high concepts being overseen by filmmakers with solid track records. Of course, there is an element of risk involved in all of these movies, particularly given how difficult it can be to even quantify the idea of success within the Netflix model, but that is true of any film in any context. These are the kinds of movies that audiences used to watch in cinemas, before the streaming and superhero booms.

This is the uncomfortable subtext of Netflix’s retrenchment. As Netflix argues that it is prioritizing audiences ahead of auteurs, its definition of auteur is so broad and its estimation of the audience so low that this feels like a race to the bottom. These are the kinds of projects that work at Netflix, and these are the kinds of artists who excel at making these projects. There is no reason to think that these projects couldn’t be both successful for the streaming service and good for the audience.

When Netflix argues that it’s artists against audiences, everybody loses.