How Netflix plans to win the streaming war
As the fight for your hard-earned cash heats up in the battle of the streaming giants, two of Netflix’s most senior content bosses share their secrets for staying on top.
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The entertainment world is in the throes of an escalating streaming war, a fight for your eyes and permission to reach into your wallet.
It’s a battle that will almost surely have corporate casualties as the big guns crush the bit players, but there is one clear winner in this epic fight: You.
With Disney+, AppleTV+, HBO Max and others joining Netflix and Amazon Prime Video in this space, viewers are spoiled for choice and benefiting from the tens of billions of dollars these services have spent, and are planning to splash, on new content. Never before has there been such variety in programming. Without that often creative roadblock known as the advertiser, more diverse and edgy stories are being told than ever before. The biggest problem for audiences is choosing where to start.
Apple is said to be dropping a cool $US300 million for two seasons of Morning Wars with Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell, while Disney+ has everyone talking about its the Star Wars live-action series The Mandalorian.
Netflix has spent big on The Witcher, starring Superman Henry Cavill as Geralt of Rivia. There is a heap of buzz around this fantasy based on the books by Andrzej Sapkowski. Reviews are embargoed until later this month, but Insider has watched the first episode and is confident it will be a hit with fans of the genre. This also seems to be the consensus of television reviewers in the US who have watched and shared their early thoughts.
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The streaming giant is also bringing back the laugh-out-loud coming-of-age comedy Sex Education for a second season and audiences are currently binging the third season of the hugely expensive royal drama The Crown.
With more than 150 million subscribers across 190-plus countries, Netlfix has been the undisputed streaming leader for years.
For many, the emergence of such formidable competition would have alarm bells ringing from the mail room to the executive suites, but Netflix is confident it has positioned itself well to prosper.
Two of the Los Gatos, California-based company’s most senior content executives — original films chief Scott Stuber and Channing Dungey, the former ABC Entertainment boss who now heads up original series — tell Insider these new shows form part of their strategy to stay on top and while also revealing how they continue to snare the biggest names in Hollywood.
Stuber, who worked at Universal for 20 years before being poached by Netflix in 2017 to build its film studio from scratch, says securing the right talent behind the camera and allowing them to create passion projects in turn allows them to
attract the best actors to bring those stories to life.
“We got out and tried to find the best people — people like Fernando Meirelles (The Two Popes), Martin Scorsese (This Irishman), Dee Rees (Mudbound), Ava DuVernay (When They See Us), Spike Lee (See You Yesterday) and Alfonso Cuaron (Roma) — and say ‘let’s make that movie that you deeply believe in’,” he says. “Within that there’s usually great writing and great writing is what actors want to do, they want to take great writing and bring that character to life.”
The Two Popes, a drama inspired by the historic resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and the election of Pope Francis , is a good example, Stuber says. With a screenplay by three-time Oscar nominee Anthony McCarten and City Of God’s Meirelles tapped to direct, it was far easier to sign screen legends Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce to the drama which screens in selected cinemas from Thursday before dropping on Netflix on December 20. And with Martin Scorsese at the helm of mob marathon The Irishman, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and Anna Paquin all came on board.
“We’ve just been really aggressive about working with the best writers and the best filmmakers and then inevitably the best actors want to be directed and guided by those craftsmen,” he says.
When the Wall Street Journal recently shadowed Stuber for a day, it was evident just how well this strategy has worked in bringing A-listers into the Netflix fold. In the course of the day, the film chief was chatting with Sandra Bullock on Facetime before heading out for a coffee with Jennifer Garner, both talking about upcoming projects.
With a massive audience outside of the US, creating content that has a more global feel to it is also important for Netflix in retaining audiences.
Messiah, a thriller coming soon to the service about a man who gains an international following after a series of ‘miracles’ and acts of public disruption, and a dogged CIA agent’s investigation of him, steers away from the US-centred shows that dominate the genre.
“In the case of Messiah it was impactful to the story that we depict the world’s reactions and not just those in America,” Dungey says.
Dungey, who made history when she became the first black head of a major network — and made headlines when she yanked Roseanne after its star tweeted racist comments — says focusing on diversity is another way Netflix hopes to stand out in the crowd.
“What I’m looking forward to doing is making more content that shows diversity in a way that is not just about colourblind casting,” she says, while stressing it can’t just be a token nod.
“I would like to be telling a story about a person that is meaningful about their background, whether it is their race, their religion or their sexuality, (and) is in part of the story without being the whole story,” she says. She points to Ally Wong and Randall Park’s rom-com Always Be My Maybe as an example of how to do that right.
“The fact that their family heritage is a certain way, the kinds of food that they like to eat (is important), but it’s not a story about the Asian experience,” she says. “It’s about two people meeting in the fully three dimensional version of their lives.”
