Netflix started creating original content with the series “House of Cards” in 2013. Since then, it has steadily increased its output of Netflix Originals. Now, they perpetuate throughout the service — and with seemingly new releases every week, there is always some Netflix Original going viral on Twitter.
The huge number of shows and movies that Netflix produces provides film and television creators with great opportunities to make content and to reach a wider audience. Netflix has become the platform of choice for directors whose films are not considered mainstream or are deemed not profitable enough for wide release in movie theaters.
Even legendary American director Martin Scorsese will be releasing his next film on Netflix. It is commendable that in this way, Netflix has enabled filmmakers to reach an even larger audience and to create films that may otherwise not get made.
At the same time, though, the service seems to have forgotten that quality comes before quantity, and the mass production of so many Netflix originals means that there is a lot of garbage being produced.
The lack of quality in Netflix Original films can be largely attributed to the service’s obsession with producing content geared for social media. Their most recent hit, “Bird Box,” that, despite the buzz, only has a 62 percent on the movie rating site Rotten Tomatoes, prompted memes that flooded everyone’s Twitter feed.
That is, until their newly released show “You” became the next most popular thing, and said memes were replaced by posts with the hashtag #YouOnNetflix. Creating films with the sole purpose of getting a hashtag trending for about, at most, a week, defeats the idea of cinema as an art form and instead makes it a money-making scheme.
Of course, cinema has always been about making money to some extent, but it’s concerning for the future of cinema when your entire platform is designed around such an idea.
Netflix’s obsession with viewership numbers and their strange refusal to release official numbers — sticking instead to memeified tweets about how many people watched what that can in no way be verified — also proves this money is their sole goal. With a new Netflix original seemingly popping up every other week, the service ensures that its consumers quickly move onto the next new thing.
Netflix’s business model ensures that consumers will never run out of content, but it also means that the content that is being consumed is not as high quality — many users don’t even bother to watch Netflix originals.
Part of Netflix’s business model is built around the idea of binge-watching. It can lead individuals to watch several, or even dozens, of episodes within a day or two. Since Netflix original TV series release all their episodes at once, users forego the weeklong wait between episodes on cable TV.
Once a viewer is sucked into the show, they are more likely to finish it as quickly as possible. This concept further drives Netflix’s immense output of new original series, because viewers are now watching shows that took months to make in the span of a weekend. Netflix can’t possibly leave its users with nothing to watch, and so this mass production of content continues.
Instead of mass producing content that is only average at best with the sole intent of making it the most-tweeted-about topic on the internet, Netflix could be bringing a more selective, high quality and worthwhile selection of cinema to so many people.
The service plays a crucial role in the world of modern cinema simply because it is accessible to such a massive audience, and its subscribers undoubtedly have more diverse tastes than those at Netflix assume. Therefore, the service should start to stream more classic and foreign films, particularly those from the 20th century.
In comparison to other streaming services, Netflix has far fewer classic films — fewer than 200 of the films they offer were made before 1990. Entire decades of cinema history are being lost in streaming sites, and as the leading streaming service, Netflix could easily incorporate classic films into their offerings and attract an entirely new audience to their platform.
If Netflix wants to become the true leader of movie streaming and modern cinema — which it certainly has taken steps toward by producing films and shows with diverse casts and production teams — then it should also make an effort to preserve the history of cinema.
This means offering a wider selection of films that include films from the earliest eras of filmmaking from all continents. With the streaming service Filmstruck, the former leader in classic and foreign cinema, shutting down just last November, Netflix has a huge opportunity to pick up where they left off.
There will doubtless be some that will argue this isn’t the type of media that fits the Netflix brand, and maybe on some level, they’re right. But I also know that there is a whole community of film lovers who would be thrilled to see these types of movies on the platform, and I am certain there are Netflix users who are just searching for something more worthwhile to watch.
