Ankler Preview: Netflix's Not So New Normal
Plus: Did Christopher Nolan Kill the Movies?
There are two pieces of received wisdom in Hollywood right now: Movies are dead and Netflix is officially the future.
Given the evidence of this very moment, it's hard to argue with either of those.
This stock analyst's advisory sums up the commanding position:
Pivotal Research boosted its price target on Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) to $650 from $600, noting that few competitors can keep up with streaming giant when it comes to spending on content.
Netflix is experiencing a "virtuous cycle" of subscribers paying for investment in content, which brings new subscribers, Pivotal analyst Jeffrey Wlodarczac says, according to Bloomberg.
Netflix should "remain as the dominant SVOD player for the foreseeable future", he adds.
For all the talk about Streaming War, Netflix's army remains standing alone on the battlefield, waiting for the other nations to show up and take them on.
But the evidence is also mounting that The Service is completing its transformation from rule-breaking disrupter to fairly normal corporate television producer. With the long-term implications such a transformation brings.
The upstart, big flashy moves that shook up the business in the first place have pretty much faded from The Service's playbook. It's been a long time since the last giant, twelve-figure producer mega-deal. Given the results thus far from their biggest get of all—the $300 million Ryan Murphy deal—it's going to be a long time until the indigestion from that leaves the system.
In the movie division, the Oscar hunt goes on, but apparently one all-in Irishman gambit was enough. The Service passed on the chance to pick up Scorsese’s next project, letting Apple take the bait on that one, and while the movie machine keep pumping, they seem to have lost their appetite for giant action projects that for some reason Paramount also lost interest in and the like.
When Netflix lifer Cindy Holland failed the Keeper Test, replaced by olde timey legacy network veteran Bela Bajaria, it felt like Netflix was ready to turn the page on its wild, reckless disruptor period (its Drunken Sailor Era, if you will), leaving behind those childish things so it could become something like a traditional television network. The reports are that these days, instead of handing out checks and deals like party favors, Netflix execs just take pitches and read scripts like a good, old-fashioned network.
When you look at the lineup of new shows, aside from the rare stunt, there are not too many things that wouldn't fit just fine in some or another network's roster at some point in the last 20 years. The irony is that when Netflix got into the production business, Ted Sarandos declared that their challenge was to "become HBO before HBO becomes us." Instead, they've become NBC circa 2003, or A&E. Take your pick.
There's still the trophy lust; on the awards trail, the Drunken Sailor Era may live on, but at this point, that seems more a personal obsession than a strategy.
So never has an entertainment company sat astride the industry in a more commanding position. And they are taking this moment to transform themselves into the companies they've vanquished. Don't we know where this story goes?
A few additional observations at this point in the road:
• Everyone who has ever gone into show business has looked at the historic ups and downs of the hit cycle and said, "But this time it's ME doing it!" The Netflix culture is certainly not immune to massive doses of self-love and belief in its own brilliance. The difference in its mind between how a traditional network did things and how they'll do things is . . . . It's them doing it! The company may be new and disruptive, but that is a particular story that's been told so many times in Hollywood history that we can all recite it by heart.
• Let’s put to bed the always crazy talk about the magic data driving smarter development decisions (as opposed to marketing decisions). Whatever the data tells them, it hasn't stopped them from making plenty of terrible choices; making them at a higher rate even than most "normal" networks.
• The basic tension for The Service is always going to be that they occupy this middle ground between being in the highly curated quality business (HBO, FX) and being a firehose of content (YouTube). If you're trying to become all of TV for everyone and vanquishing all competitors from the field, you're never going to have the time and space to pull off what the Quality networks do. Hence, the continuing shut out from the big Emmys prizes despite producing more than everyone else combined times a zillion.
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