Netflix is here to save Hollywood
Empire contributor Alex Godfrey on why the future is bright for the streaming service
IT SEEMED LIKE dark times for Bright. The Will Smith action fantasy, granted a reported $90 million budget by Netflix, was sent straight to the slaughter ahead of its release with aggressively negative reviews (27 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes). The director, David Ayer, was the main target, but Netflix, inseparable from the story, was a bullseye too.
Save your ammunition. Ayer says he went with Netflix because it offered the most money and granted him creative control (Warner Bros. and MGM were part of a bidding war, according to Deadline). If he’d gone with a traditional studio, Bright may have been very different. Netflix is a whipping boy for those who despair that cinema visits are making way for outsized home entertainment. But filmmakers love Netflix. “They trust the filmmaker,” Ayer told me on set of Bright, not long after Suicide Squad, which he described as “a rough experience”. With Netflix, he was clear: “There are no studio games.”
The company have funded Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, out next year, with a budget somewhere between $100 million and $150 million, according to Deadline. It wasn’t financeable “in the traditional way”, said Robert De Niro. According to a report in Indiewire, studios found the film too risky to shower with cash. Simply, it’s unlikely we’d be getting The Irishman as intended, with De Niro, Pacino, Pesci and a whole lot of expensive digital de-ageing, were it not for Netflix.
It is complicated. An 11th-hour upset recently hit Alex Garland — his Ex Machina follow-up Annihilation will now go straight to Netflix in most countries, including the UK, just weeks after its US theatrical release. A financier decreed the film “too intellectual” for general audiences, according to a Hollywood Reporter story. Now this sucks for Garland. “We made the film for cinema,” he told Collider. However, he also said that with Netflix, “you don’t have that strange opening weekend thing” — the horror of dismal openings meaning films prematurely disappear from cinemas.
This is what happened to Dredd, which Garland wrote and produced. He had two sequels in mind, but the film made $35 million, against a $50 million budget, according to Box Office Mojo. The trilogy was toast. Imagine a parallel universe, where Dredd had been made for Netflix and was instantly devoured by millions. Bright 2 was greenlit within days of Bright’s release — and, remember, Dredd was actually critically acclaimed.
It would be an awful shame if The Irishman isn’t granted a theatrical release too. But it’s no longer all about those auditoria. We’re not living in a 1970s dreamland where blockbusters are brainier and studios gladly take risks. In this ever-precarious climate, Netflix is a white knight. As with Scorsese and The Irishman, last year Bong Joon-ho was left alone to make the wonderful Okja as odd and as dark as he liked for Netflix — lest we forget, his thrilling Snowpiercer never made it to UK screens at all.
For me, the industry’s obsession with opening weekends has ruined cinema. Times have changed, and thank heavens, frankly, for Netflix, who are supporting filmmakers, not interfering and, most importantly, coughing up the cash.
BRIGHT IS ON NETFLIX NOW