If you believe reports and speculation that is consistently floating around social media and general film discourse, you may believe that Netflix is the biggest enemy of the theatrical experience and the streaming platform is hellbent on destroying the big screen and forcing us all to watch films on our smartphones. Well, in a new interview with THR, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings takes issue with that presumption and actually explains what Netflix truly aims to do—present options.
“We don’t want anyone to abandon the theaters, we just want consumers to have choice,” the CEO explained. “Think about cooking. You can cook a great chicken at home or you can go to a restaurant and have chicken. The restaurants don’t say, well, we need to have an exclusive on chicken. Instead, they just say, we do a better job. It is great to go to a restaurant, and it’s great to go to a movie theater.”
If Netflix doesn’t want to destroy theaters and make Christopher Nolan cry, then would the company be interested in purchasing its own cinemas to showcase the rising number of prestige films the company releases on an annual basis? We saw recently that the laws have changed, allowing film studios to purchase their own theaters if they so choose (something that hasn’t been an option for decades now).
“I can’t see us doing a chain or expanding in theatrical,” Hastings admitted. “We want to really focus on internet entertainment and trying to just continue to improve our series, our films to make them the best in the world.”
Okay, so Netflix doesn’t want to destroy theaters and doesn’t want to buy any theater chains. So, what does the streaming company want to do? What goes does the largest online movie platform have for the future? Well, in no uncertain terms, Hastings is targeting Disney’s bread and butter—animation.
“We want to beat Disney in family animation,” he said. “That’s going to take a while. I mean, they are really good at it. We’re both very focused on building out our animation group and, you know, it’s a friendly competition. We both want to do incredible stories for consumers and we want to be able to raise the bar in that area. We know that they will be a challenger and a competitor for the next 50 years.”
Those are some lofty ambitions, huh? Then again, who would have thought Netflix would be a dominant force in Hollywood a decade ago, when the company was just operating in the DVD subscription realm?