Pandora's Box, page 34
Money, it turns out, is a double-edged sword. Run wild, among other things, it drives up costs. Look at the impact of Apple TV+’s deep pockets on the economy of streaming. HBO’s Big Little Lies was supposed to be a one-off, and therefore it signed Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman for a single season only, paying each somewhere in the neighborhood of $250,000 and $350,000 per episode. When HBO tried to sign them up for a second season, the notoriously tight-fisted cabler discovered that Apple TV+ was reportedly paying Witherspoon and Aniston between $1.25 and $2 million per episode for its flagship Morning Show, plus producing fees. Witherspoon used this to jack up her price for Season 2 of Big Little Lies to about $1 million per episode. Needless to say, her co-star Kidman expected the same, with the rest of the cast most likely getting substantial salary bumps as well.
As Bloys says, “It is true that, not just Apple, but Netflix, Amazon, and the rest are paying higher salaries. That’s not just actors’ salaries, that’s across the board. The cost of doing business has gone up.”5 Speaking of the impact of the so-called Apple Effect on the second season of Big Little Lies, HBO’s VP of drama Francesca Orsi said, a bit less tactfully, “We’ve been . . . raped.”6 Hastings reflected, “Some day The Crown”—the first season of which cost a hefty $13 million an episode—“will look like a bargain.”7 One 2019 headline read, “Disney and Apple Are Pushing Us into the Era of the $25 Million TV Episode.”8 Says David Nevins, “We’re paying too much for the return on investment and what the market can sustain.”9
Not only doesn’t money necessarily guarantee quality, it can even compromise it. Says Landgraf, “You don’t make art just by throwing money at it. Will we cross from a golden age to a gilded age? I think there’s a very big danger that’s already happened, and if it hasn’t happened, it will soon.”10
Meanwhile, whether we have or we haven’t, the cash-poor (relatively speaking) streamers can’t keep up. For them, the star system presents an almost insurmountable obstacle. On the one hand, they need stars; on the other, they can’t afford them.
One way those streamers appear to be fighting salary inflation is by paradoxically packing their shows with talent. Norma Desmond famously said in Sunset Boulevard, “I am big . . . It’s the movies that got small.” But that was then and this is now, when it’s the other way around: Actors have gotten small and the movies have gotten big, too big. Spider-Man: No Way Home used three A-list stars (Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, and Tobey Maguire) to play one character—Spidey—plus Benedict Cumberbatch, Jon Favreau, Jamie Foxx, and Zendaya. Both Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck play Batman in Warner’s The Flash. That seems like an indie production compared to No Time to Die, which boasts eight big names. Every time we wake up we see a familiar face—Daniel Craig, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw, Rami Malik, Jeffrey Wright, Rory Kinnear, Christoph Waltz, and Ana de Armas.
Stuffing them with stars like piñatas makes the shows more appealing, but it also undermines the power of individual actors to claim credit, and therefore demand a salary bump on the next one. It’s also an admission that traditional stardom may be fading. Succession didn’t seem to suffer unduly from the untimely death of Logan Roy, even though Brian Cox is the best thing about it. The gifted ensemble managed to carry his water.
Of course, actors and “matinee idols” are two different species, but Tom Cruise, talent-challenged though he may be, could indeed be the last “movie star.” He’s entering his sixties, and one survey determined that most of the stars that draw audiences to theaters are seniors—Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, etc., averaging 57.5 years old. Few youngsters and women, no Zendayas, no Zoe Saldanas make the list.11
The growing importance of IP and branding have also taken their toll. Audiences want to see Captain America, not Chris Evans, who is more or less indistinguishable from the other three Chrises—Pine, Pratt, and Hemsworth—especially when they’re hooded. The fact that nine different actors, including Adam West, have played Batman doesn’t seem to have made a dent in the franchise. (Maybe these superheroes should throw in their lot with the anti-masking crowd.) And finally, the phenomenally successful animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse do away with actors entirely.
IP, superheroes, spectacle, money—they all degrade acting as a skill. We don’t have actors anymore, we have empty supersuits. Many of the most popular shows, like Tell Me Lies, or the Avatars, have done fine without stars. The plight of human stars is such that several shows have been built around consumer brands like Tetris, BlackBerry, or Nike in AIR, where Matt Damon is barely recognizable in a fat suit. The best way to become a star these days is to get involved in a scandal picked up on social media, like Olivia Wilde in Don’t Worry Darling or Ezra Miller in The Flash.
Then there’s content. Over- or underspending on content fosters consolidation, uniformity, and, worse, allergy to risk, both narrative and aesthetic. With innovation the casualty of caution, many shows even build risk aversion into their narratives. The vast majority of Marvel’s superheroes, for example, never die, that is, die for good, unless an actor wants out or the franchise itself is dying. Superheroes are valuable IPs, and with multiverses galore, if they die in one, they just pop up in another. They can’t go to the store to buy a quart of milk without ending up in another universe. Marvel’s so-called Phases 4, 5, and 6 are even known as the Multiverse Saga, which will extend through 2026, when presumably it exhausts the universe of universes.
The Avatars are multiverses under another name. Stephen Lang was too good in Avatar to leave for dead, so he’s revived in The Way of Water as his avatar, that is, his personality in a Navi body. The apotheosis of this trend is the 2022 series Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And, as Rolling Stone puts it, risk avoidance is another version of comfort viewing: “Multiple worlds are . . . a comforting thought as ours goes to hell.”12
George R. R. Martin well understood that opening the door to other universes slams it on ours, whether we like it or not. The absence of the realism that grounds fantasy in the best of these shows erodes the emotional bond between viewers and characters because we know that whatever jeopardy the latter may face is phony. This suggests that these series don’t so much resemble novels, the template that defined much of the early Peak TV era, and that carries with it a certain gravitas with its commitment to behavioral authenticity in which actions have consequences—that they don’t have in fairy tales, the difference, as we have seen, between House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power that reeks of Hans Christian Andersen.
Back in the day, the difference between the disrupters and the disrupted—HBO and Netflix, say, versus the staid old studios and networks—was dramatic. We recall that when HBO was breaking with the sponsor-driven model, it shunned anyone and everyone who was redolent with the stink of network. Bridget Potter, remember, was reluctant to hire Tom Fontana to write and run Oz because he had written for St. Elsewhere, and Amazon’s Roy Price refused to hire network executives who were synonymous with down-the-middle shows. Never mind that Potter herself came from ABC, and David Chase had a network résumé as long as his arm, because if a cabler or a streamer wanted personnel with experience, there was little choice but to recruit from the despised networks or even the studios.
As companies consolidate and scale up, they are virtually forced to become cozier with their corporate cousins, because they need executives with the kind of experience and contacts that outsiders like Fuchs and Bewkes, Hastings and Sarandos, didn’t have. At first, the cable companies hired renegades like Nevins, Reilly, and Greenblatt, who were impatient with the network and studio values and wanted to emulate HBO. But as the competition became more intense, and the cost of acquiring more subscribers increased, that too changed. First cablers and then streamers began hiring executives from networks and studios not despite but because they brought those values with them.
As we have seen, when Amazon was looking to replace Price as head of Amazon Prime Video, it turned to the networks, seizing on former NBC Entertainment head Jennifer Salke. Salke in turn hired the former chairman of Sony Pictures Television, Mike Hopkins, to supervise Amazon’s video entertainment division and promoted Julie Rapaport, a survivor of the Weinstein Company, to co-head of movies. Rapaport was put in charge of a new division devoted to what Salke described euphemistically as “more widely engaging stories that audiences will connect with.”13
Forced to compete with a Big Tech rival for which money was no object, Hastings and Sarandos seemed to feel that they had no choice but to re-create Netflix as a studio. According to New York magazine, “The official word from Netflix insiders is that Sarandos . . . simply decided he wanted the company’s TV operations to mirror the structure of its film business.”14
Hastings has tried to explain away his new romance with the studios and networks by saying that Netflix has a lot to learn from Hollywood, singling out the studios’ skill in exploiting franchises like Star Wars. But franchises like Star Wars, as Disney+ has skill-lessly shown, are often graveyards for creativity, and mastering the machinery necessary to manufacture them is the last thing Netflix needs to learn from Hollywood.
For Netflix, becoming a studio to make studio movies meant purging itself of veterans of its disruptive era, while recruiting old-school studio warhorses, often doubling their studio salaries. In September 2020, Sarandos fired Cindy Holland, by that time an eighteen-year company veteran and his first hire when he moved to LA in 2002. Sundry Netflix insiders regarded her exit as an inflection point, when the company downgraded quality. From House of Cards to The Queen’s Gambit, “That service was built on the back of Cindy Holland’s taste,” says one. “Ted is . . . not a picker.” Another source referred to Holland’s exit as “the beginning of the Walmart-ization” of Netflix.15 Holland was one more example of a Netflix pioneer who became a victim of the “culture of candor,” says still another insider: “She would call Ted out on his shit,” and urged her team to speak up if they disagreed with his programming decisions. But, said another source, the reality is, “No one really likes that.”16 One employee says the culture of candor “works well peer to peer,” but compares Netflix to Orwell’s Animal Farm, “where all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”17
The Animal Farm analogy fit more snugly when Hastings promoted Sarandos to co-CEO in 2020 and the latter reportedly became less interested in candor. A veteran Netflixer says, “It’s not easy for Ted to admit if he’s wrong, to hear other points of view, if he feels strongly about something.”18
Sarandos added Scott Stuber, vice chairman of Universal Pictures, where he produced franchises like the fabulously successful Jason Bourne series, as Netflix’s head of global film. Netflix wanted Stuber to focus on big, nine-figure action films, which he did, supervising the liftoff of the blockbuster era at Netflix, paying unconscionable amounts of money for bankable stars and hot directors. He set his goal at sixty movies a year, way more than any studio.
As summed up by The New York Times, Netflix “is aiming straight for what the old-line studios do best: the PG-13, all-audience films that traditionally pack movie theaters, create a cultural moment and often transform into lucrative franchises.”19
In 2021, former Netflix enemy Steven Spielberg’s Amblin signed a multiyear deal to make films for Netflix. Netflix also signed onto the fourth installment of Eddie Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop franchise, Axel Foley. Then there was 6 Underground, a $150 million “Bayhem” express from schlockmeister Michael Bay that aired in 2019, starring Ryan Reynolds, who reportedly received, yes, $30 million for his efforts. The movie impressed no more than 36 percent of its reviewers, according to Rotten Tomatoes.
At the same time, several Netflix warhorses are either over, like Ozark, or are nearing their eternal resting places, like The Crown and Stranger Things. Netflix is leaning on a sequel to its biggest moneymaker, Squid Game, that its creator isn’t sure he wants to make.
One producer who had several shows at Netflix experienced pure chaos. When Emily in Paris was successful, they said, “Can you make it more like Emily in Paris?” Then another show got hot, and they wanted it to be more like that one. Despite lavish spending on some projects, on others there was constant pressure to lower the budget: cut, cut, cut. Says Stuber, “We were a business that was, for a long time, a volume business. And now we’re being very specific about targeting.”20
One blight that has proved true for studios and streamers alike is that, as many have noted, the middle has dropped out. Everything is either niche or blockbuster. Is it Tár or Avatar? Both or neither? As Soderbergh puts it, “We have the gigantic movies on the one hand, and you have A24 on the other, and there’s nothing in between. The starting number for a wide release movie in prints and ads is $30 million. I mean, you just can’t get out of bed for less than that. The idea of Erin Brockovich making a hundred million dollars today, theatrically, is impossible.”21 When Chris Nee left Disney for Netflix, she said that she’d be happy there “until I’m not,” and “not” turned out to be at the end of 2022 when her deal ran out. Nee supervised a slate of three shows, and the last, Dino Daycare, said to be from an LGBTQ creator, was killed altogether.
In January 2023, Nee was looking for a new job. Says one Netflix source, “Nobody at Netflix is saying any more, ‘Don’t worry about making a big audience hit,’” which is what she was told when she first arrived. “In fact,” the source continues, “what they’re saying is quite the opposite.” The watchword now is “creative excellence,” “excellence” being a euphemism for reaching as big an audience as cheaply as possible rather than just a niche audience.22
As if trying to find the sweet spot between blockbusters and niche series, which is hard enough, Netflix also says it needs “better” shows. Despite dominating Nielsen’s 2022 Top Ten list, quality-wise, as reflected by the combined reviewer and audience ratings as measured by Rotten Tomatoes that same year, Netflix scored worst among the streamers. Me Time with Kevin Hart and Mark Wahlberg scored a critics’ rating of 6 (six!).
As Soderbergh points out, however, quantity doesn’t translate into quality: “You can make thirty movies, and five of them are going to be really good,” he says, continuing, “and you can make seventy movies, and only about five of them are going to be good. There’s just no algorithm that guarantees, ‘Oh, if you have this much great art and you make ten times as much, you’ll have ten times as much great art.’”23 More can be more, but so can less.
The most revealing indicator of Netflix’s new turn in an old direction is that in the past, Sarandos was in the habit of traveling north to the Netflix mothership in Los Gatos two days a week. Now Hastings goes down to Hollywood for two days a week. At least he did. In January 2023, he stepped back, ceding the co-CEO slot to Greg Peters, formerly Netflix’s COO.
Netflix mapped several escape routes from its looming death spiral, including fewer originals, while achieving surprising success by reviving obscure items from its vast library, like Mel Gibson’s Dragged Across Concrete, which flopped in theaters in 2018. Meanwhile, its exhibition strategy is a mess, especially in view of the fact that exhibition began a modest bounce back over the 2022–2023 holiday season with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Avatar: The Way of Water, and later The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
Whereas Sarandos could easily have opened his expensive features or launched new franchises in theaters before moving them to Netflix, he continued to fight exhibition, ignoring Bloys, who said, “It’s much better for us that movies have been launched theatrically and then come to HBO.”24
Struggling to open new product post-pandemic, three theater chains granted Netflix a six-day theatrical window for Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the first of two sequels to Knives Out, the rights for which Netflix bought for an astounding $450 million, give or take a few zeroes. Sources say that they were given the impression that this was a test to see whether exhibitors and Netflix could cooperate in the future. The former, however, were furious when Sarandos, on the red carpet of the 2022 Venice Film Festival, announced, “Streaming first.”25
An angry theater executive groused, Netflix “couldn’t care less about exhibition.”26 Instead of the two thousand screens exhibitors anticipated, it played in 638. Given that it grossed $15 million in just one week, and could have made an estimated $50 million in wide release, “This is probably one of the biggest gaffes in modern film release history in terms of bungling what could have been made at the box office with Glass Onion,” said Jeff Bock, a senior media analyst at Exhibitor Relations. “In my mind, they left hundreds of millions of dollars at the table.”27
Netflix is also experimenting with live programming and cracking down on password sharing, despite its 2017 slogan, “Love is sharing a password.” And then there is bingeing, perhaps its signature innovation, but now a luxury it may no longer be able to afford. Whereas HBO, say, can ride shows like House of the Dragon and The Last of Us for weeks and weeks, Netflix has to come up with fresh shows week by week. As Bloys puts it, “Releasing a new season of a new show instead of a new episode every week—that’s expensive.”28 It’s like stuffing a bag of rocks with millions of dollars and dropping it into the ocean. Worse, when subscribers have finished, they look for another multi-million-dollar series, and if Netflix doesn’t have one ready for them, they may just click their remotes to take them elsewhere, which is called “churn”—a word that elicits dread and loathing from streaming executives.
