The Guide #266: The knives are out at Netflix – maybe now it will make something worth watching
The Guardian ·
In this week’s newsletter: Stalling subscriber numbers have led to a corporate bloodbath, but the streaming giant has an inherent quality problem that will be a lot harder to fix In all the fevered hype around a certain three-hour, form-breaking documentary portrait of a disgraced tech CEO , another big Hollywood story this week has been relatively sidelined: the drama at Netflix, where sluggish subscriber numbers and a general lack of Wall Street enthusiasm has led to a remarkable spree of sackings. A thousand employees, or 6% of its entire workforce, have been laid off – including some very big names. Among a clutch of other execs, chief content officer Bela Bajaria – the figure most synonymous with Netflix’s tone and ethos over the past decade – has been fired. The company’s head of film, Dan Lin, has gone too. That shade of red on the streamer’s logo has never looked more bloody. You Can See Everything getting very messy indeed. We’ve been here before, of course. Netflix – giant, controversial, inescapable – is the sort of company people love to make grand speculations about. Pencils were sharpened in 2022 when Netflix lost subscribers for the first time and saw its share price plummet as a result, before the company enjoyed a notable resurgence. Just as the obituaries written for the streamer were premature then, writing it off now would be foolish too. Continue reading...