Comment by phartenfeller
6 hours ago
I don't like this. Netflix rarely creates excellent content; instead, it frequently produces mediocre or worse content. Will the same happen for Warner? Are cinemas now second behind streaming?
Edit: I agree Netflix has good Originals. But most are from the early days when they favored quality over quantity. It is sad to see that they reversed that. They have much funding power and should give it to great art that really sticks, has ambitions and something to tell, and values my time instead of mediocrity.
Cinema is indeed second behind streaming. The theatrical window is now so short (~40) days that audiences are happy to wait for the increased benefits and reduced cost of watching at home.
This was inevitable. Technology was bound to catch up. Hollywood actually panicked in the 1960s. But those screens were tiny. Nobody wants to see the Godfather on a cheap 1974 Panasonic.
But TV today is at least 55 inch and in crisp 4k resolution. A modern TV is good enough for most content.
It is not Netflix that killed the movieplex. They were just the first to utilise the new tools. The movie theater became the steam locomotive.
55” TV’s have been out for decades they really aren’t a replacement especially when put in a normal living space.
The issue IMO is so few movies are worth any extra effort to see. Steam a new marvel movie and you can pause half way through when you’re a little bored and do something else.
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I remember being amazed when the Michael Keaton’s Batman movie was released on VHS in the same year as the theatrical release. I had never seen a movie come out for home use that fast.
Disagree, I'd gladly go and watch movies in a cinema, the experience cannot be replicated at home, at least not unless you're very rich.. a 55" tv and a soundbar just doesn't do it.
For me, the price is killing it (80% of the reason) and bad movies (20%)... two tickets, drinks, popcorn/nachos/candy/something, and we're in the 50eur+ range. Then add the messy audiences, ads, trailer#1, more ads, trailer #2, another ad for some reason, and it's been 20 mintues of technially all ads for something that i paid money for. Then the movie is a total disappoint. I'm not into superheroes nor into pedro pascal, so most of the movies are out before i even buy the ticket and the rest are somehow... just 'bad'. Watching a bad movie at home is ok... you fall asleep, press stop, it doesn't matter... whatching a bad movie at an artsy film festival is also ok.. it was low budget, the ticket was 4 euros, no popcorn, had beer before you enter, so you can fall asleep in the cinema and hope not to snore. But 50 euros and all the ads for a bad movie is just too much.
It's the sound that's missing from a home viewing setup
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I was flabbergasted to find that there are 100" TVs available for sub-$1500. Only a few years ago, they were five figures, minimum. Combined with a decent audio set-up, you really can have 90% of the theater experience at home.
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Other issues also took their toll on movie theaters:
--Ticket prices of $20 or more per person.
--Jaw-dropping prices on snacks and drinks.
--People talking and using phones during the movie.
--30 minutes of ads before the movie. Not coming attractions but straight-up commercials when you've already paid $20 to be there.
--The general slop quality of most movies being made if you're not a comic book or video game fan (and frankly even if you are).
The above bullshit was enough that I stopped going to movie theaters more than about once per year. And then COVID happened.
Begone, bot
Movie theaters can compete by installing LED screens. My company has a movie screen sized LED screen and it looks so much better than modern digital projectors.
Good. Movie theaters have been anti-consumer for decades. Time for them to reap what they sowed.
It’s only older contracts and studio holdovers that are preventing simultaneous release (which has already been done at times).
I believe the Academy Awards and a few other things too also influence this. The rules to be eligible still very much favor legacy studios IIRC. But, with this that may change? Hard to say. I know that quite a few Netflix movies have had theatrical runs at random mom and pop theaters in Cali so they could meet eligibility requirements for the various awards.
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Now I'm envisioning WB movie pass combined with streaming subscriptions. The business models can get quite funky in this paradigm.
I would disagree. I think what you see is the popular, but less well done material. Dept Q was an original 8-10 episode detective drama that was highly thought of. It received no press but it likely showed up on your carousel. Netflix knows eventually you will find it but not sure they can bring you everything.
There is nothing original in Dept Q. It's British adaptation of Danish book and TV show.
Fair. Everything is an adaption of some IP somewhere. I think the most interesting job now is cranking out self published books hoping to get adapted, but not well known to US audiences and was highly rated by critics was my point
That is true*, but the Netflix series is exceptionally well done. Much better than the average Netflix show.
* More precisely it's Scottish/American
I think such is the reality of serving a large customer base on something subjective like movies and TV. Most people would find most content not that appealing, and a small subset they like. The problem is everyone's small subject are different.
It's like having a restaurant that serves 300 million people. You can try to offer every type of food there is, but most people may not like most of them. Which is fine, as long as you have something they like.
They're starting to up their quality. Frankenstein and Death by Lightning were two standout successes recently.
That said, I'm more uncomfortable with the continued consolidation of media ownership and more outsize influence of FAANG tech over media.
> Frankenstein and Death by Lightning were two standout successes recently.
IMHO Frankenstein" was pretty terrible. The makeup was awful, the effects were cheap, the monster... wasn't a monster! The entire premise depends on him being a monster, not some sort of misunderstood, sympathetic EMO.
> The entire premise depends on him being a monster, not some sort of misunderstood, sympathetic EMO.
This is a misconception on a similar level to thinking the monster's name is Frankenstein: "As depicted by Shelley, the creature is a sensitive, emotional person whose only aim is to share his life with another sentient being like himself."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein%27s_monster#Perso...
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The creature was always supposed to be a mix of sympathetic and monstrous. He becomes a monster by turning himself implacably toward revenge, but we can sympathize with him for what sets him on that path. The entire premise rests more on Victor being a monster. I thought the movie handled both of those fairly well. There's really no living director who gets the Gothic sensibility quite as well as del Toro.
Personally, I didn't like it that much. Super long, droll, the casting was misstepped, and they changed the ending.
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> The entire premise depends on him being a monster
Have you read the book? She emphasises how pretty all the body parts that Victor picked were.
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> The entire premise depends on him being a monster, not some sort of misunderstood, sympathetic EMO.
Uh, the "monster" is definitely the most sympathetic character in the original novel.
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I was surprised at how many shots that I thought were terrible CGI were in fact practical effects.
It's about all the other projects that would have had great quality but did not secure funding because Netflix prefers to fund mass-produced mediocrity. In Germany we have a saying "Even a blind hen sometimes finds a grain of corn".
> It's about all the other projects that would have had great quality but did not secure funding because Netflix prefers to fund mass-produced mediocrity. In Germany we have a saying "Even a blind hen sometimes finds a grain of corn".
Did you see the show Dark?
U.S. version: "Even a blind squirrel (or pig) finds an acorn every now and then."
Netflix has always had one or three stand-out projects over a year, but is that what we want from studios? It is like the tech model: 1 big success for 10+ duds (the VC show) or another superhero installment (the Google/Meta cash cow movie).
You're describing TV and movies since forever.
Ever year there are a few good shows and movies and a lot of mid-to-bad shows and movies.
This is not a Netflix thing, nor is it new.
By the definition of "stand out" you can't have very many right?
If all of them "stand out" then none of them do.
If WB was any good, would they have been snatched up by Netflix?
All these studios fought the good fight against big tech over many years but the writing was on the wall.
Hopefully a future Progressive presidency reviews all these mergers and breaks up big tech big time.
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In parallel, they're also starting to downgrade their quality. In the latest season of Stranger Things there's a wild amount of in-scene exposition, where the characters explain what's happening while it's happening. I did some digging and learned that they may be dumbing down their shows because they know users typically look at their phones while watching Netflix and users are more likely to drop off of a show if they don't know what's going on.
See here: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/17/not-sec...
Edit: I did really enjoy Frankenstein.
Frankenstein looks oddly cheap and fake with really bad lighting in many scenes. You can tell they used the volume virtual production to shoot scenes and it doesn't look great.
They have a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.” Sure it has a lot of crap but they also have major hits like Squid Games, Stranger Things, (both became cultural phenomena) and Daredevil.
Warner makes a lot of crap too. They both make what sells.
This was clear many years ago when I opened up the HBO app and saw the full screen background ad for Fboy Island.
i dont think this should matter, plenty of conglomerates have brands across quality levels.
think old navy, gap, banana republic.
the quality difference is important for the conglomerate same with netflix vs hbo, the corporate benefit is being able to save on costs around like amortizing the corporate side of things (accounting, marketing, real estate, research ect)
> Are cinemas now second behind streaming?
It feels like a race to the bottom. Movie and TV content quality has taken a nose dive in the past decade.
Yes, there are exceptions, but it’s hard to find these days.
Maybe it’s because producing movies/TV is so much easier and cheaper that there is now so much low quality noise, that it makes finding the high quality signal so difficult.
But it seems like you used to be able to go to the theater and you’d have to decide between several great options.
Now, I almost never care to go because it’s only about 2-3 times a year that anything comes out worth seeing.
> it’s only about 2-3 times a year that anything comes out worth seeing.
This was probably always true, with some randomly amazing years every now and again, like 1972 (The Godfather, Cabaret, Deliverance, What's Up Doc?,...).
IMDB listing shows 470 films released US in 1972. Google says there are ~3,900 IMDB entries for 1972 (why the 4X discrepancy?). The hit ratio was veeeery small even in killer years.
the kind of person who watches a LOT of television and movies likes slop, it's not complicated.
still different than media people PAY for. for example substack sells empty opinions that agree with you. it is totally wrong to say that slop sells. it is merely the highest engagement for an audience that DOESN'T pay.
you could say, "engagement is the wrong metric," but if that were really true, tech jobs would contract like 50%. the alternative becomes, "would you like fries with that?"
The cinemas not already dead are dying.
Cinemas were a way to share the cost of technology to show high quality movies among hundreds of people.
Most people now has that tech at home, so there is no need for cinemas anymore.
I went to my local cinema a few times before it closed last year. There were never more than 3 spectators.
They're fourth now. Video games are first, then books, streaming, then cinema, and music after that. If I'm not mistaken.
> Netflix rarely creates excellent content; instead, it frequently produces mediocre or worse content.
I'm really concerned about them ruining the Magic Mike franchise.
Lots of good lesser-known stuff on Netflix if you wade through the crap:
* The Devil's Plan
* Alice in Borderlands
* Extraordinary Attorney Woo
* Brassic
* Back to Life
* Intelligence
* Black Doves
* Top Boy
* Mo
* The Breakthrough
* Borgen
* Love Death & Robots
* Scavenger's Reign
As well as well-known stuff like Stranger Things and Squid Game as a sibling comment mentioned.
[Edit: replies point out some of these are bought rather than produced but I think it still counts for overall quality]
> Scavenger's Reign
Oddly enough, this was originally an HBO Max production.
IMO their only truly noteworthy production is BoJack Horseman.
Long Story Short was pretty good and less stressful than Bojack.
Some foreign series gems also like The Asset, Mercy for None.
And some newer ones, American Primeval and the Beast in Me.
They licensed Brassic, it was filmed for Sky One, not Netflix.
Same with Extraordinary Attorney Woo and a lot of "originals" on netflix. They'll just buy the rights to air something and then slap their name on it like they made it. That said, I actually appreciate them looking for good media produced overseas and buying up the rights to those shows to bring them to the US. It's a good thing (although it'd be nice if put some effort in making sure there are always quality subs) but it can cause some people to think netflix is producing more good shows than they actually are.
I just checked and I've rated 1,788 movies and 326 TV series so 2,114 titles total on IMDB.
I agree with this take. Netflix has some good originals, but it's not in the same category as HBO/WB. Most (not all) of their series feel cheap, shallow, unoriginal. The quality and hit rate just aren't the same.
Netflix also created "Netflix lightning" where there are zero shadows to make lighting scenes faster but is really ugly.
Honestly speaking Netflix has good catalog, much more comparable to Hollywood. Take the latest Frankenstein for example.
Don't look at only series. They also have recipes repurposed. But they acquire good titles and also produce some good ones.
I have 459 titles on my IMDB watchlist and a tiny percentage of it is available on Netflix (if at all), but this is anecdotal and might have to do something to where I live.
Netflix outside of the US is a very different experience.
In the US, it's mostly their own productions and older content they explicitly acquired, but elsewhere, especially in markets that don't have a local HBO or Disney streaming service, they have incredible backlogs.
I remember finding basically everything I could wish for on there when traveling in SE Asia almost a decade ago, compared to a still decent offering in Western Europe, and mostly cobwebs in the US.
459!? It must take a while to check your list…
Is it actually worse than the status quo though? I'm not so sure.
I hate this era of consolidation but Warner and HBO have already degraded, so this may be the least bad outcome here.
I don't want you to think I'm picking on you; but, I've been thinking about the MBA-bullshittism "consolidation" for a while. It's really a euphemism for "trust formation", right? It seems like we fought tooth-and-nail just 100 years ago to set up real antitrust laws, with real teeth... and now every industry is "consolidated". What's going on in health and seed and cars makes me seethe.
If you want some considered thoughts on consolidation and antitrust implications, Cory Doctorow's writings are interesting. Some relevant examples:
"Hate the player AND the game (10 Sep 2025)" https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-p...
"The one weird monopoly trick that gave us Walmart and Amazon and killed Main Street (14 Aug 2024)" https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enfo...
"End of the line for Reaganomics (13 Aug 2021)" https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down
"10 Oct 2022 Antitrust is – and always has been – about fairness" https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/10/play-fair/#bedoya
And his archives for more:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/monopoly/
https://pluralistic.net/tag/antitrust/
The laws only exist if people are willing to apply them.
Warner Bros has had their best summer in years (Sinners, Superman, etc). HBO still makes highly regarded prestige TV series (The Last Of Us, Task, etc). This is just false.
Yeah, HBO has moved decidedly down market.
Apple is at least trying to fill their old niche. It seems quite telling that the only company truing to do the whole “prestige TV” thing is a kind of side-project for a hardware company. At least nobody can buy them, though.
> Apple
do we really want big tech to also control our media?
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Seriously?
The Crown, Stranger Things, Unbelievable, Russian Doll (wow, just wow), Orange Is The New Black, Narcos, Narcos: Mexico, GLOW, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Ozark, Nobody Wants This, Altered Carbon, Dirk Gently, Mindhunters, The Queen's Gambit, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
And that's just what I can remember off the top of my head. And that's my taste, there's more not to my taste like Squid Game, Wednesday, Bridgerton, etc. And not including the films, documentaries, shorts, etc. they done like Love, Death and Robots.
The majority of that list is quite old. Have you seen what they're doing now? Not saying every single thing they make anymore is bad, but the average quality is far lower than it used to be.
If you listed the best movies or books or plays or albums or video games you could think of, they would tend to be older too. 99% of stuff is kinda crap, always.
Survivor bias is very misleading.
> The majority of that list is quite old. Have you seen what they're doing now?
Adolescence (which won big at the Emmy's this year), Stranger Things, The Beast in Me, Last Samurai Standing, A Man on the Inside, The Gentlemen, Absentia, Baby Reindeer, Ripley, Arcane, Squid Game, Dynamite Kiss, Delhi Crime, etc.
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Interesting that most of the shows you like are +- 10 years old. From the early Netflix days.
I suspect the same would be the case for HBO. Their back catalog is more impressive than their current output.
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a lot of these projects were cancelled though.
imo, that's the worst thing about Netflix. its not that they don't produce good series, its that when they do they have a high peobability of getting cancelled.
I feel like people who say this never watched a lot of TV before Netflix. Every popular show overstays its welcome and gets cancelled once people get bored. That's just how TV works. Netflix isn't even the worst offender.
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Far more shows go on too long than get cancelled too early.
Of course Jessica Jones is on Disney+ now. I think most of those others are still on Netflix, but it is a bit of a problem for them - when they don't own the content they eventually lose the ability to stream it, especially as the content owners have entered the streaming space too.
The first season of Altered Carbon was great. It's a shame that they never made a second season. ;-)
Man a second season would be so great. They could even recast the main character, given their personality lives in a brain disk. But I'd rather they didn't.
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I watched half of those and I haven't had Netflix in 5 years. it's not worth it anymore.
Pretty subject to personal taste. Half of that list is garbage IMHO
I got netflix a looooong time ago when they still had good movies on there and weren't cycling. It kept getting worse and worse. Then I got rid of it a few years back.
Nearly everything on there sucks now. It's all campy politically-undertoned garbage and not anything I would consider fun to watch or a great way to waste my time. The first squid games was neat. A novel concept and interesting. Then Netflix did what they do best and netflix-ify it into a political message rather than a horror film. The latest Ed Gein show had the potential to be amazing but ended up falling into the same campy, political, director had too much creative liberty trash.
They are a tired company that has strayed from their roots. The Warner Bros acquisition makes complete sense because the entire media entertainment apparatus is capable of only producing:
1. Remakes of movies that are themselves remakes
2. An hour and a half movie where they try to inject The Message into as many frames as possible
3. A campy nearly serious movie that needs stupid jokes injected for the squirrel-brained morons that pay for it.
The entertainment industry is in a financial nosedive because no one wants this garbage anymore.
>it frequently produces mediocre or worse content. Will the same happen for Warner?
HBO hasn't produced good content in years at this point. Since before the last season or two of Game of Thrones, I should think. The other brands in Warner didn't even really have that much prestige.
Succession, Hacks, The Last of Us, White Lotus and Euphoria have all been recent buzzy TV hits for HBO post Game of Thrones
I don't like they buried their own show, Westworld, to fuck the actors on residuals
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It is probably not just a Netflix issue. But it is also quite a philosophical question as to who is to blame. The consumers who watch and pay, or the ones who fund the mediocrity.
It is definitely sad to see Netflix turn from their early phase, where they valued quality over quantity, and since have reversed that.
I just want to see more great art that really sticks, has ambitions and something to tell, and values my time.
>I just want to see more great art that really sticks, has ambitions and something to tell, and values my time.
Its out there, there just isn't great curation and in a world of ever increasing content more people just dont ever find it and accept whatever mediocrity they find.
This is Succession erasure.
I'd have to be younger, 3 notches to the left of Lenin, and in a perpetual billionaires-are-evil rage mode to find it compelling. Got through most of the first season, which is a rare point to quit a show... we either quit after the first episode, or make it all the way to the end. Painfully bad, and not half as much as the stupid Sex and the City way either.
> I don’t like this
please stop them.
Netflix is `while profitable(): make_sequel()` which _always_ ends with shitty content and incomplete stories.
How are Netflix created contents profitable? I guess Netflix pays shows based on user time spent, and a Netflix show is profitable if users spend time on it, and not on other shows?
All TV series on Netflix end in S01. Even if they don't, it's a new show with same characters but lousy writing. Looking at
* The CIA laywer who doesn't know about green passport
* FUBAR
* The Diplomat
Mostly agree but their original k-dramas for the US market are pretty good.
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What you're describing is more of an American television problem.
The Simpsons, The Office, Game of Thrones, etc. all managed to go on too long without the help of Netflix.
I actually think that’s the opposite of Netflix. TV shows rarely make it past a second season, as soon as there’s even a mild drop in viewing figures they drop a property like a hot potato.
Note the OP's algo was *while* profitable. You're focused on shows that never make it. I think this is true of the cash cows, while dogs are historically (with only one or two channels so limited broadcast bandwidth) networks could be far more brutal while Netflix needs a much bigger catalog.
You're describing the entertainment business.
They are agile