A few years ago, Netflix was my main source of content. Also, the most reliable and the highest quality. Most of the time it was the only subscription service that offered great options with a quick review of their catalogue. Or in any case, whose collection of series and movie premieres was attractive for the mere fact of being original. Especially in summer. During the hottest days it was the fast track to hang out. It was entertainment, too, at a reasonable price. Now, my summer dream of Netflix has been shattered.
Before the great war of online subscription services, Netflix was an undisputed giant. And it was because it offered the ideal conditions for the platform to become something more than a classified content service. Those were the years when House of Cards dazzled by its elaborate and elegant plot, as well as first-rate performances. Or in which stories like The Orange is the new black They managed to surprise by their originality and maturity. It was the time of sense8, an experiment by the Wachowski sisters that demonstrated the scope of streaming platforms. Without rules or limitations, the creators of The Matrix they imagined an alternate universe as powerful as it is unforgettable.
Also Netflix was the first service to change television content consumption habits when that seemed unthinkable. The novelty of having access to the complete seasons in a single day dazzled. At the same time, it transformed the way subscribers understood the experience of enjoying a program. Yet the term “marathon” was not used to define a habit that is now part of popular culture. But deciding how, when, and in what ways to explore our favorite stories weighed heavily on Netflix loyalty. While the big cable companies were struggling to create productions capable of capturing the public for weeks and months, the platform took the risk of creating a unique event. And he was successful in doing so. So much so that my summers were assured.
When stranger things, Netflix’s most successful content and its most emblematic series, came to the platform with more than just a novelty. It was the possibility of enjoying productions of the highest bill, quality and production for a more than reasonable price. A large-scale television screen that encompassed the entire world and was also nourished by the experience as a whole. With overwhelming success, Netflix became more than just an option. It became a form of large-scale production consumption, a production company in its own right, and in the end, a notable muscle in a new form of entertainment.
A long and bumpy road to success? from netflix
At the beginning of 2015, Netflix reinvented itself. And she began to walk the path of original productions. At first, it was a trial and error journey. On September 3 of that year, the first original platform film production was released. Beast of no Nation surprised by his sensitivity and elaborate argument. It was the first self-financed by the service and also the one that adhered to high caliber cinematographic quality criteria.
Before, the series House of Cards, had demonstrated the sustainability of a completely different business system than the Hollywood one. Netflix, which did not depend on box office, distribution or marketing, could afford to focus their budgets purely on production. And indeed, the ability to accommodate projects rejected by studios and production companies allowed the service to quickly move in a new direction. Five years after Fukunaga’s film, the Netflix catalog was already more than just a curiosity. In reality, it was a combination of the consideration of the work without immediate profitable cost pressures. The door is also open for various creations with a marked authorial and stylistic tone.
In 2017, Netflix decided to take its boldest step to date and introduce ok by Bong Joon-ho, at the Cannes festival that year. The film surprised, captivated and caused a complicated stir in the traditional event, which ended with a change of constitutive rules. The novelty of a film that had only been broadcast in its online version irritated and challenged the festival. The fact that Netflix was a subscription platform worried and showed that something was happening in the North American system of studies. For Netflix, it was the attempt to understand the journey of its way of making cinema through new places.
In the same year, it premiered icarus. It was an essential dialogue with independent cinema that dazzled audiences and overcame Netflix as an entertainment platform alone. mudbound it encompassed more intimate and much more emotionally powerful terrain. Finally, The Meyerowitz Storiesalso from 2017, showed that there was the possibility of creating auteur cinema with the Netflix seal.
In 2018, private lifea made it clear that the cinematographic language sponsored by Netflix sought the possibility of innovation. across the wind by Orson Welles was recovered by a group of filmmakers and turned into a curious visual experiment. There was even room for auteur rarities in the purest style of independent cinema. shirkersSandi Tan’s stolen film, debuted as an exploration of cinematic art at its purest.
Netflix gave Alfonso Cuarón the opportunity to create a black and white epic that worried other studios. In 2018, Rome became an awards season surprise. With the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and three Oscars from the Hollywood Academy, the film became a milestone. But also in demonstrating Netflix’s ability to be the ideal production company for filmmakers in search of creative freedom and a hefty budget. One year later, the Irish by Martin Scorsese proved that Netflix had no qualms about multi-million dollar budgets. As long as, the immediate repercussion was recognition and expeditious publicity.
For the following years, the formula was maintained. story of a marriage amazed and became the favorite on the way to the Oscar. After, I’m thinking of quitting Y the power of the dog they showed the possibility of an adult and auteur cinema. Despite its errors in approach and form, Netflix insisted on being a meeting place with cinema. A production company without limits and house of films that, otherwise, could never have been filmed.
But then Netflix was faced with the unthinkable. A total war between platforms that forced you to make immediate decisions. And often wrong, to beat the rest of the subscription platforms.
The inevitable decline of a brand and the end of summer marathons
With the arrival of the pandemic, Netflix enjoyed the most immediate rebound of its service in years. With much of the world’s population confined to the home, streaming has taken the place of cinema in several different ways. Not only in experience, but also in preference. But while Netflix became the natural choice, the rest of the subscription services launched an offensive that dazzled the option-hungry market. And that pushed Netflix to questionable decisions to maintain its seat of honor.
HBO Max became the showcase for productions destined for the cinema, a novelty that dazzled the public in quarantine. Secondly, Disney + showed off its most famous brands at an affordable price. Netflix was robbed of its captive market. Also the exclusivity of your options. In a symbolic twist, the platform lost what was its flagship series for years. friends, converted into a mass consumption product, abandoned the Netflix catalog and began to be part of its rival, HBO Max. A bell that made it clear that the license war — who could transmit what — was more complicated than might be supposed.
The worldwide proliferation of subscription services blew up Netflix’s business system. So much so that his first reaction at the beginning of 2021 was to start fill your catalog with all kinds of mediocre productions. From low-quality movies, local productions with questionable plots, to failed experiments. During the first months of the toughest year of the pandemic, Netflix redoubled its catalog offer. But the increased number of programs available did not sustain the quality. Series without great importance, original productions with great Hollywood faces and mediocre scripts. Bit by bit, Netflix faced something unthinkable five years ago: having to win the business it had helped create.
In 2022, Netflix is going through the biggest of its crises. The year began with an appreciable loss of subscribers. Also with massive layoffs, department closures and series cancellations. For now, the platform seems to be aware of its lackluster content and seems to be making progress in going back to its roots. But while that happens, something is inevitable. The Netflix catalog has become a soporific combination of very low quality productions which disappoints by its lack of imagination and solidity.
Can we subscribers expect something different in the future? At least for now, the platform seems more interested in dealing with its financial problems than the quality of its content. So it is likely that for a few years, the platform will be just the place that accumulates second-rate productions in good quantity. A faint shadow of the robust productions of yesteryear.