Netflix’s Peter Rice Risk: Studio Insider, But Streaming Outsider

“We’re not trying to predict the future, we’re trying to invent it.”

That was Reed Hastings in 2016 about the company that would upend Hollywood’s business model — rejecting its conventions, from pilot seasons and programming schedules to a level of production volume that left legacy players shaking.

A decade later, Netflix has entrusted its entertainment future to Peter Rice, a consummate studio insider who spent three decades inside Rupert Murdoch’s Fox before taking over Disney’s television business when the studio traded hands.

The big question on Rice’s first week on the job: Has the ultimate Hollywood disruptor just hired the ultimate Hollywood establishment player? And will that work?

Ask two of Rice’s former colleagues, and you’ll get wildly different answers.

“I don’t think there’s anyone they could have hired better than Peter for that job,” says one former Fox executive. “His creative chops are extreme — they’re really good, as much in TV as it is in film.”

Another former Fox colleague calls Rice’s appointment “one of the most idiotic appointments I have ever seen in Hollywood.”

Mouths are still agape at the unceremonious ouster of chief content officer Bela Bajaria. (And then again today at the exit of film chief Dan Lin.) The industry was already grappling with what’s next for the world’s largest streaming service — the onetime tail of the industry that now wags the market’s dog — which has handed its sprawling global content operation to a respected tastemaker with deep talent relationships. But, according to some who know him, with surprisingly little experience with the forces now reshaping television — data, algorithms, global audiences and YouTube.

The well-respected British film and TV executive, who turns 60 tomorrow, is described by colleagues and rivals as thoughtful, polished and talent-friendly.

But today’s stakes couldn’t be higher. Netflix’s share of U.S. TV viewing has slipped to 7.8 percent compared with YouTube’s 14.2 percent, according to Nielsen, some of its biggest series have stumbled in their sophomore seasons, and the company is reeling from last week’s 1,000 layoffs, the largest cut in its history. Tomorrow’s earnings call is no doubt a referendum on the streamer, whose stock is being punished by Wall Street. The streamer is beginning to look, at least to analysts, less like a high-flying tech company and more like a mature entertainment business. And now it has a legacy Hollywood executive running its content.

Rice himself knows something about upheaval. He was fired from Disney in 2022 by then-CEO Bob Chapek. Since then, he produced filmmaker-driven projects, including Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, which grossed just $10 million worldwide, and Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, which earned a more respectable $151 million. He also produced Chris Rock’s Misty Green through a deal with A24. The projects may have burnished his creative bona fides, but hardly constitute a track record of the kind of mass-audience hits Netflix prefers (think Hot Frosty, Lindsay Lohan holiday fare, or the widely panned but much-watched Animals from Ben Affleck).

Today, Lesley Goldberg, Like & Subscribe’s Natalie Jarvey and I talked to nine of Rice’s former colleagues and rivals about his strengths — and blind spots. What they told us raises a provocative question: Has Netflix just made the smartest hire in Hollywood, or an uncharacteristic miscalculation?

Read on for what the group of nine had to say…