2022 hasn’t exactly been a great year for Netflix. The streaming giant is still gigantic but no longer as giant as it once was. After losing roughly 2 million subscribers in Q1, it lost another million or so last quarter. And there’s a massive reorientation of content production in-house, downsizing their output and shutting down certain creative divisions altogether.
READ MORE: Netflix To Shift Gears For Its Future Releases, With “Bigger, Fewer, Better” Films
But don’t confuse downsizing for downfall: Netflix is still a massive force to be reckoned with in the streaming industry. They’re still worth $200 billion-plus as a company, retain 220 million-plus subscribers, and move the needle more than any other streamer creatively. It’s just that Netflix is no longer the upstart company that made a huge splash, changed the industry forever, and has a dominant, ever-growing revenue stream. Instead, they’re now a slow-growth company, not the new kid on the block. As a result, their considerations should shift to their legacy and what content is worth producing instead of simply greenlighting every script that comes their way.
So, this year may be a reality check for Netflix, but it will not stop them from being the marquee streamer everyone wants to work with. And they have plenty of exciting stuff on the way this year and beyond, including an as-yet-announced series with Spike Jonze. Puck’s Matthew Belloni dropped that little nugget in his recent wrap-up of Netflix’s current state of affairs, citing that Jonze is “quietly working on a lavish series at Netflix that hasn’t been announced yet, but which has a writers room and a broad, expensive canvas.” Belloni provided no details about Jonze’s show, but given that it’s the director’s first fiction work since 2013’s “Her,” there’s enough cause for excitement.
If anything, this news should make people realize that while the Netflix model is changing, it will also not change that much. “Shows like that aren’t ending,” Belloni continued, “Netflix just needs to increase its hit ratio with them.” And Netflix has some definite, no-doubt hits coming down the pipeline this year. Andrew Dominik‘s “Blonde” will very likely clean up at the Venice Film Festival next month. And if it doesn’t, then Alejandro Iñárritu‘s “Bardo (or False Chronicle Of A Handful Of Truths” will.
Also, don’t forget Rian Johnson‘s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” the first film in Johnson’s mega-deal with the streamer, Noah Baumbach‘s “White Noise” adaptation with Greta Gerwig, and Nicolas Winding Refn‘s crime series “Copenhagen Cowboy.” These are only some of the big names that Netflix works with, and that list of names will only get bigger down the line.
In other words, Netflix isn’t doing quite as well as it used to, but it’s still doing just fine. And that’s not going to change any time soon, even as their content model changes over the next couple of years. They provide creative freedom no other studio really can for filmmakers, and while Netflix may need to make more hits in the future to continue their current revenue stream, no other company has the ability to do so quite like they have right now. Lost subscribers or not, Netflix still is the king, they just need to amend their script a little bit.
