“Netflix” was always a misnomer. In a well-known Silicon Valley tradition, co-founder Reed Hastings once said, “There’s a reason we didn’t call the company DVD-by-Mail.com,” noting that the service was always intended to evolve into a streaming platform. streaming. . By choosing that moniker (rather than, say, Netshowz), the company positioned itself as a movie venue. Movies, however, have never been his forte.
It’s not to say that Netflix doesn’t have good movies (every year they release at least one or two Oscar candidates), but its series will always be what keeps its more than 260 million subscribers coming back. Even when their shows are canceled after two seasons. His first great successes were house of cards and Orange is the new blackand if there’s anything about the service that’s making waves right now, it’s Patricia Highsmith’s adaptation. Ripley (as in the Talented Mr.) or something controversially) baby reindeer. This week, when WIRED began compiling our list of movies to watch on the service, the options were slim.
It’s not just Netflix. Right now, the best things to watch on almost any streaming service are the shows. Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max, despite being the reincarnation of something that was once called Home Box Office and having a back catalog full of Warner Bros. films, has people frothing for its upcoming seasons of Dragon House and The last of us. Of course, it has the Dune movies, but people may still come back for its Bene Gesserit spin-off series, Dune: Prophecy.
Disney+ also has the entire Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars back catalogue, but it made a claim when it launched by offering original series like Andor and Loki. This week, Disney CEO Bob Iger acknowledged that the company “I tried to tell too many stories.“at first, but that doesn’t mean X-Men ’97 It’s not one of the most talked about things on the platform right now. Or consider this: Disney+’s most-watched movie in 2023 was moanawith almost 12 billion minutes watched, According to Nielsen. bluish more than triple that total with 44 billion minutes watched. Yeah, bluish is the number one show that parents love to play on loop, but The Mandalorian also won moana per minutes watched.
Netflix, like Amazon, started from a different place than Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney, because it did not and does not have a vault of decades-old content. But if the last few years have shown anything, it’s that streaming services want to replace television networks (or become them) and that means shows. If anything, streamers’ reimagined made-for-TV movies are a special treat, not the main course. Two-hour Prime Video feature road house okay, but the eight episode show Fall keeps the transmitter in the conversation at this time.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in this week’s trailers. An annual bonanza during which television networks convince advertisers that their air time is the best air time (if you think it’s painful to watch Ryan Reynolds try to tell a Deadpool joke in a room full of suits, it es), the whole dog and pony show. It has gone through a couple of changes in recent years. Last year, when HBO Max was morphing into Max, the events were picketed by striking members of the Writers Guild of America. Netflix canceled its in-person event and went virtual. This year Netflix, Amazon and even YouTube appeared. His arrival was so feared/praised that The Hollywood Reporter published one piece about how “an asteroid is about to hit us.”
