The advent of streaming has had a major impact on the way movies and television are brought to the consumer. It’s also had a significant impact on the economics of the entire entertainment industry. Netflix is the biggest entertainment company in the world and it has been producing an incredible volume of original content for the last few years. Not all of it has been received well by critics, but it turns out Netflix doesn’t care because people are watching anyway.
Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos recently spoke with the New York Times about how the company defines quality. While there's always something new upcoming on Netflix, the company has said it plans to pull back on the volume of original content it creates, to focus on quality over quantity. But it’s not defining quality from the perspective of strong reviews or winning awards, but simply based on viewership. Sarandos explained…
The thing that stuck with me most was our discussion about film, because in so many ways it captures everything we’re trying to do. Our discussion about Irish Wish is a great example of how hard it is, because we all have these great contradictions even inside of ourselves. I love The Crown, and I love Is It Cake? And I love them both equally, which doesn’t make any sense! When I think about that and think about, What are we trying to do? We’re trying to make movies that are great. We define quality from the perspective of the audience. So if the audience loves the movie, it’s great. That’s quality.
It’s certainly not uncommon for critics and audiences to have different opinions on film. It’s become fairly common for some box office blockbusters to be trashed by critics and for films critics love to struggle with audiences. You’ll often hear filmmakers say they “made a movie for the fans” when a film doesn’t get great reviews, and that seems to be what Ted Sarandos is saying here.
While there aren’t box office dollars at stake, Sarandos says that what defines “quality” is the audience. If they watch a movie, like the Lindsay Lohan rom-com Irish Wish, then that means it’s good. He continued…
Irish Wish maybe didn’t scratch the itch for you, but 65 million people watched that movie. It’s an enormous hit, and people love it. Critics and reviews — it’s a great thing. We want to please everybody. But sometimes the movies that we make are not made for critics. But for the audience that loves it, they love it.
Nobody is going to call Irish Wish one of the best movies on Netflix. It's at best an enjoyable waste of time, but if it's an enjoyable enough waste of time for enough people, that's a hit for Netflix. Netflix continues to change how it counts viewership numbers and often we don't even get them publicly, so it's largely impossible to know what people are watching, but they watched Irish Wish.
At the end of the day, Sarandos isn’t wrong. These companies that make movies are businesses, and the ultimate goal, whatever else may happen, is to make money. For Netflix that means making movies people like, which means they will keep paying the monthly subscription fee. If people like a movie and tell their friends, maybe they’ll sell new subscriptions and make more money.
Certainly, Netflix would love to win over both audiences and critics alike with everything they make, but if the company is going to choose, it’s going to choose the money.
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