The Netflix Dilemma: Can Dan Lin Make Higher-Quality Movies While Spending Less Money?

The long-telegraphed changes over at Netflix’s film division seem to have finally taken hold, at least behind the scenes. The New York Times recently ran a piece about the arrival of Netflix’s new film chief Dan Lin, without quite underlining the contradictory nature of his supposed mandate. Somehow Lin’s mission is supposedly to raise the quality (rather than the quantity) of Netflix original movies, while also nickel-and-diming any big-name filmmakers who they’ve supported in the past, to prevent the company from spending too much money on accidentally making something that will wind up in the Criterion Collection.

OK, it’s not quite that directly hostile. The real idea is that Netflix movies will no longer involve as much profligate spending on streaming mockbusters that do their middling best to imitate the general feel of a theatrical release, like Red Notice or The Gray Man. The piece also mentions that Lin wants the company to be more active in development, rather than financing directors’ dream projects.

This does explain the shocking quality gap between the top 10% or so of Netflix’s originals – a list that would include The Irishman, Roma, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Marriage Story, Hold the Dark, Da 5 Bloods, The Killer, and The Power of the Dog, among others – and the service’s seeming inability to consistently produce a competent romantic comedy or action picture to fill out its lineup with crowd-pleasers. Movies from Martin Scorsese, Alfonso Cuarón, or Spike Lee don’t necessarily require a lot of executive development. They may, in fact, flourish without it, given their level of experience as artists. (Maybe you can quarrel on the grounds of self-indulgence, but I’d say that the tough, disciplined, darkly funny filmmaking in The Irishman speaks for itself.) Whereas Your Place or Mine, You People, or even the about-to-conclude Rebel Moon duology probably could have benefited from other voices in the development process.

In other words, the company probably wants more movies like Glass Onion, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel that wasn’t a bank-breaking megaproduction (though the company paid a lot for the rights and budgets for two Knives Out sequel), got terrific reviews, and was accessible/anticipated enough by mainstream audiences that it sold a bunch of tickets in a limited theatrical run that preceded its Netflix debut.

At the same time: Can those types of movies really be made without promising a bunch of cash upfront to talented filmmakers? They can be with other studios, because payments to directors and stars can be partially deferred based on anticipated box office, and because that talent can be promised a splashy theatrical berth that will earn then more money and attention. Despite the success of Glass Onion, and the fact that Netflix’s most popular movies at any given time tend to include at least some former theatrical releases licensed from other studios, Netflix still has no interest in the theatrical market. Getting rid of those pesky prestige pictures, with their directors who often ask for some kind of theatrical release as Netflix clearly hems and haws over the bare minimum they can offer, could help consolidate that anti-theatrical strategy further.

If that strategy still sounds difficult to pin down, it’s because the studio’s attempt to move toward some imagined middle comes with so many asterisks, moreso than simply imitating network programming of the past on the TV side. The company wants movies that are good, without giving auteurs carte blanche. They want movies that clearly signal theater-level quality without actually releasing those movies into theaters. And they want to do all of that on a sensible budget, but without paying stars or filmmakers upfront to mitigate the lost revenue from profit participation and/or royalties. The Times piece mentions that Lin has his eye on a “wider spectrum of films,” but how wide a spectrum can those qualifications accommodate? Granted, there probably are a few crowdpleasing mid-to-low-budget Netflix-only movies by journeyman filmmakers. The space survival thriller Oxygen is one. Maybe Set It Off is another, although that feels like a low bar compared to genuinely classic romantic comedies. Here and there, you get a nice genre-based surprise, rather than the feast of great filmmakers versus the famine of hollow imitations. But it’s not as easy as it sounds; the company’s frequent splats and shrugs feel more excusable alongside the three or four great movies they’ve been making every year – courtesy of the filmmakers they’re now letting go elsewhere. For an executive, there’s probably not much difference between paying through the nose to get Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot, and Ryan Reynolds enough in salaries to make up for their lack of back-end deals and spending a bunch of money on Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and a ton of visual effects for period settings and digital de-aging on The Irishman. For a discerning viewer, though, there’s a major difference, a distinction the company threatens to lose track of entirely.

Strangely, a big-name filmmaker the company appears to be sticking with (at least for now) is Noah Baumbach, who – unlike Scorsese or Cuaron, among others – has never really made a big commercial hit (and made his most expensive picture ever, White Noise, for Netflix). Maybe it has to do with his relationship with Adam Sandler, who will co-star in his next film. Sandler is an unexpected success story in terms of quality. He was lured to the streamer after grosses on his theatrical comedies starting ticking downward, and though his first few projects for Netflix were about as bad as anyone could have expected, he’s since made some of his best Happy Madison comedies in years.

Maybe that’s a miniature version of what Netflix is after: A lineup of movies about as good as your typical summer-movie roster from the big studios in, say, 2002. To be fair, that’s something plenty of film fans are pining for from the bigger studios: a realization that staking so much on a handful of big all-audience tentpoles diminishes broad interest in moviegoing, especially in the frequent cases where event films aren’t as exciting as studios hope. (In other words, making a good movie may be hard, but the circumstances of Glass Onion seem a lot easier to replicate than those of Avengers: Endgame.) Maybe a new Netflix strategy will result in the return of various mid-to-low-budget subgenres that bigger studios have mostly abandoned. Not just romantic comedies but legal thrillers! And mysteries! Near-future sci-fi! Dramas aimed at adults!

Then again, it’s not that at-home audiences are in desperate, inherent need of any of those things. Netflix’s Top 10 chart show time and again how many people will discover or rediscover some random movie from 2009 because it happens to have an appealing premise and a recognizable star, and any number of classic rom-coms, thrillers, mysteries, and so on, are available across various streaming platforms. The trick is to keep people in the habit of going to Netflix – rather than the service’s mortal enemy, movie theaters that exist outside of your home. Maybe they can development-exec their way into making mainstream genre movies regularly. But at some point – especially if they curtail their investment in auteur dream projects – Netflix may be performing the entertainment equivalent of telling customers that if they need a fresh breath of air, they ought to consider taking a ride in an Uber.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.