For years, Netflix wanted Hollywood to believe it could be everything at once, even beyond just a tech platform and a global studio—as if that weren’t enough. Throughout the years, Netflix has tried on the costume of awards-season patron, a safe harbor for auteurs, a star-friendly home for mid-budget movies, occasionally, a benevolent savior for the kind of adult dramas the major studios no longer make. Under film chair Dan Lin, however, that fantasy is becoming less convincing, though maybe a little bit more honest.
In a new New York Times profile, Lin laid out a colder, more disciplined vision for Netflix’s film division. The new strategy under his aegis is fewer films, tighter budgets, clearer genre, and less of the lavish, blank-check energy that defined parts of the Scott Stuber era of the streamer. And if filmmakers still believe their movies need a meaningful theatrical life? Netflix is no longer pretending to be that home.
“There is a group of filmmakers who still want theatrical. Those are filmmakers that we’ve accepted we just won’t work with,” Lin said.
Well, at least the mask is off. Or maybe halfway off, because Netflix’s relationship with theatrical remains muddled in the most Netflix way possible.
Lin, who took over Netflix’s film division in 2024, was hired to change the streamer’s relationship with Hollywood talent. Stuber, a former Universal executive, spent years courting filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro, offering prestige projects major budgets, creative latitude, and, when possible, some theatrical exposure. Lin’s mandate is different. The streaming wars are over, Netflix won—well, essentially— and the company no longer seems especially interested in reassuring directors that it shares their attachment to cinemas.
Lin seems aware that his bluntness has become part of the story. “One mistake I made when I first joined the company,” Lin told the Times, “was that filmmakers always said to me, ‘Please tell me the truth.’ And when I told them the truth, they might not have wanted to hear it. So now I’m learning how to better read people. And if someone tells me they want to hear the truth, I tell it in a way that can be as productive as possible.”
That truth-teller pose makes Netflix’s theatrical exceptions even more awkward. Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” is expected to receive a full theatrical release in 2027, something Netflix has reportedly never given another film. David Fincher’s “The Adventures Of Cliff Booth,” starring Brad Pitt from a script by Quentin Tarantino, is also expected to get a special theatrical IMAX push. These could become the biggest theatrical releases Netflix has ever attempted, which muddies Lin’s message: Netflix will not work with filmmakers who want theatrical unless the filmmaker is powerful enough, the package is valuable enough, or the exception helps Netflix stay in the theatrical conversation.
Additionally, that posture becomes even harder to take at face value after Netflix’s failed pursuit of Warner Bros. Earlier this year, the company was willing to sell the value of Warner’s studio infrastructure, franchises, library, and theatrical pipeline as part of an $83 billion bid, with Ted Sarandos reassuring skeptics that the studio’s movies would retain a 45-day theatrical window under Netflix ownership. So the issue clearly is not theatrical itself. The issue is who controls it. Theaters are a headache when filmmakers want them, a strategic asset when Netflix can fold them into its own empire, and a prestige lever when the names are Greta Gerwig, David Fincher, Brad Pitt, or Quentin Tarantino.
As for Lin’s pull quote, every filmmaker in Hollywood is going to hear it loud and clear. Congrats on the honesty, maybe. Uh oh on the message.
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
