As Netflix’s newly appointed film division chief, Dan Lin will certainly have his work cut out for him once the streamer’s current head of film Scott Stuber steps down at the end of this month. Among other things, the tepid response from critics to the streamer’s newest films like Damsel and Spaceman continues to suggest that a change in strategy is warranted. Likewise, Netflix was almost completely shut out of this year’s Oscars ceremony, winning just a single award.
Notwithstanding the negative reviews from critics, meanwhile, it could be argued that Millie Bobby Brown’s Damsel is the streamer’s only original movie that matters right now. As of this writing, Damsel is the only Netflix original film on Netflix’s daily list of the Top 10 movies in the US. The movie, in which Brown plays a young woman who has to save herself from the clutches of a dragon, also seems to be proving at least somewhat of a success with viewers rather than critics.
Despite its middling 57% Rotten Tomatoes critics score, based on 89 reviews at last count, the movie has a much better audience score of 72% on the review aggregation site (based on more than 1,000 ratings from viewers).
The problem with movies is that they offer a much more compressed window for storytelling compared to a Netflix TV show — we’re talking about two hours or so for a movie, compared to generally eight hours for a TV series, with eight hour-long episodes tending to be the Netflix standard these days. Also, the scale is lost since you’re watching a Netflix movie on your TV screen, smartphone, or tablet, compared to gawking at the production on a giant cinema screen.
Making the situation even more complicated is that movies require a bigger investment and longer time commitment compared to the more rapid cadence of TV production. Will the new film chief shake up Netflix’s efforts here? That remains to be seen, but Lin (who produced the Lego movies as well as the new live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender) would probably do well to reconsider how many movies Netflix makes a year, which movies Netflix is making, and who they’re for.
Netflix has typically flooded the zone, releasing at least double the number of original movies each year that a traditional studio does. You’d think that the law of averages would result in a higher hit rate, but the fact of the matter is that so many feature films we continue to get from the streamer are along the lines of Damsel — big, splashy star vehicles that end up being overly divisive between critics and viewers. It’s time for a change, especially considering that the importance of movies to Netflix is reflected right there in the second syllable of the company’s name.