Netflix Lost Subscribers, But It Really Lost Something Larger — Call It Mythology (Column)
01.05.2022 - 02:29
/ variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticPretend it was one year ago, when the streaming revolution, stoked by the pandemic (when is a pandemic good for business? When your business depends on people staying home), was feeling the first flush of being the New Paradigm That Ate The World. And pretend, in that spring of 2021, that you’d been asked to imagine how a film industry headline from the future might read.
You would probably have predicted something like this: “For the First Time, Every Oscar Nominee Comes From a Streaming Service.” Or maybe this: “Movie Theaters: Still Here But No Longer Driving the Action.”You probably would not have come up with something like this: “Netflix Buys Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s ‘Bardo,’ Plans Global Theatrical Release.” But that’s the headline that ran on April 27 in Variety.
Netflix has bestowed token theatrical runs before — to “The Irishman,” “Roma” and “The Power of the Dog.” But not with a six-month-before-the-fact headline trumpeting a global theatrical release. Sorry, but that is not on-brand for Netflix.That particular headline was not about the shocking attrition of Netflix’s subscriber base — the fact that the company lost 200,000 subscribers in Q1, and expects to lose another 2 million in Q2.
Yet those stats, reported the week before, were, in effect, the deep background for the news about Netflix’s commitment to giving “Bardo” a full-scale theatrical release. Both headlines were broadcasting different aspects of the same thing: that there are now powerful countervailing forces to the streaming revolution.Why did the loss of Netflix subscribers happen? A perfect storm of reasons, led by the war in Ukraine (Netflix cut services in Russia), but also driven by the fundamental fact that
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