We had a bunch of people who worked on the recommendation system at netflix at the stat seminar. Their whole movie catalogue after hashing comfortably fits into a dataframe in R on your laptop. Even the audience-like matrix is not very big. They simply don’t have that much permanent content due to licensing issues. Parks & Rec for example is like one of their top 10 most streamed content - today - even though that thing aired like a decade ago! on top of which, its going to move to Peacock next quarter! So not only are they lagging in content contemporariness, they are losing what little they have because the networks who make the content are pulling the plug.
An unrelated problem with movie recs is that the kind of movies & tv episodes being made today have homogenized because of international distribution issues & things like metoo. Your villains can’t be clearcut russians & chinese anymore, we sell to those countries. So it has to be some amorphous bad person with ambiguous intentions, which doesn’t work so well for james bond type stuff. Many of the older shows I love, I watch them on youtube & the comments there are mostly along the lines of “this would never ever get made in 2019. this is so bigoted. this is so mean spirited. this is openly sexist racist” etc etc. These are shows from 70s-80s, so its not like we had some genetic mutation and became a different species. We are still the same people, but those kinds of movies & shows aren’t happening anymore.