Netflix took risks on films from distinguished auteurs, like Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, a science fantasy about ecoterrorists trying to rescue an enormous bioengineered pig, and Alice Rohrwacher’s portrait of an ingenuous sharecropper in the Italian countryside, Happy as Lazzaro. And it acquired ambitious documentaries, like 13th, Ava DuVernay’s history of the American prison–industrial complex, and Icarus, Bryan Fogel’s film about a Russian sports scientist who helped his athletes avoid doping regulations for years. (The latter delivered Netflix its first Academy Award for a feature-length film.)
But its commitment to good filmmaking was short-lived. As with its DVD-rental business and its pivot into streaming, Netflix’s concern was scale, rather than the cinema it was scaling. Movies, as the founder had told Louie, were merely a means to an end: acquiring subscribers who paid for access to Netflix’s entire library of content every month.
The range of indie films on Netflix didn’t resemble the ’90s boom and its cultivation of new auteurs. As the years went on, the streamer picked up lifeless vehicles for A-list talent like The Polka King, a comedy starring Jack Black as Jan Lewan, the real-life Polish immigrant and polka band leader who launched a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme; preposterous directorial feature-length debuts like Brie Larson’s Unicorn Store, a fantasy-comedy starring Larson as a failing artist who learns that unicorns are real and that Samuel L. Jackson wants to sell her one; and found-object curios not worth remembering, like the 2016 biopic Barry, starring Anya Taylor-Joy as Barack Obama’s white college girlfriend.
Film studios have always released duds: movies that fail to gain traction and are shuttled to the studios’ archives, where they disappear into obscurity. Until recently, for most studios, a forgotten film was a sign of failure. But Netflix, uniquely, seemed to relish making its films vanish as soon as they were released, dumping them onto its platform and doing as little as possible to distinguish one from the next. “Your film ends up as a thumbnail, and culturally it doesn’t make a splash. It’s not the same,” one producer with movies on Netflix told me. “Unless you’re Scorsese or something, the streamers don’t craft custom bespoke marketing campaigns for these films.”