Netflix Will Make Fewer Movies In the Future

The days of Netflix releasing 125 new titles in a single month — as they are doing this June, somehow — could soon come to an end. In the wake of Netflix’s disappointing subscriber numbers last quarter, and a subsequent dip in the company’s stock price, the streaming service reportedly has reassessed its production priorities,

According to a new piece in The Hollywood Reporter, Netflix executives in charge of film production are now given a new directive in their priorities: To make “bigger, better, fewer” movies. In other words, you may start to see fewer films coming from Netflix, particularly in the lower-budget range. Here was an example cited in the piece:

Expect to a see a more subtle change — instead of making two movies for $10 million, as an example, the company will make one for $20 million. “The goal will be to make the best version of something instead of cheapening out for the sake of quantity,” says one insider.

The piece ends claiming Netflix is entering a new era marked by “discipline,” and also cited one anonymous source who claimed the “tendency to do anything to attract talent and giving them carte blanche is going away,” The example given of such a past tendency was Martin Scorsese’s massive mob movie The Irishman, which cost a reported $175 million.

But The Irishman was a huge hit on Netflix; it remains among the seventh most-watched film in the service’s entire history according to their own publicly-released data. And if the studio is going to continue to make bigger movies — and maybe concentrate even more on big movies — it’s not entirely clear how that equates to more discipline. That feels like a contradiction. “We’re going to be disciplined in how he make obscenely expensive movies!”?

The reality is Netflix makes so many movies right now — upwards of a dozen every single month of the year — that even if they throttled back a little bit, I doubt most subscribers would even notice. And if your paying customers wouldn’t notice if you spent less money on the product you offer them, isn’t that something you should probably do?