Netflix spent over $135B on film, TV over last decade | Hacker News Reader

Netflix spent over $135B on film, TV over last decade

reuters.com

17 pointsandsoitis20 comments

Is that all?

Netflix generated $39 billion in revenue in 2024 - I would not doubt that on all the internal productions the accounts are renting the studio lot / cameras / crew / marketing / renting the netflix jet etc at premium rates from the parent company.

the mind boggles what those numbers could actually build (as in actual physical construction) and yet here we are with so much „entertainment“ options we can‘t decide what to watch.

They've solved that problem by baking a surveillance infrastructure into the system. The personalized home screen (boosted by a crippled browse interface) decides what they want you to watch.

I struggle to remember hardly anything memorable from Netflix, especially their movies, despite that amount of investment.

K-Pop Demon Hunters, what else? The rest is mostly if not all slop. Even looking now at their top 10 most popular movies we have a generic Rock movie in second place

not 100% sure if theirs...

the tomorrow war marvels the punisher witcher

Stranger Things, and back in the day Orange Is The New Black and House Of Cards were the reasons to have Netflix. (I also thought Glow was really excellent, but that's me. I know some people had a real attachment to Sense 8, but that one wasn't for me.)

I haven't been a Netflix subscriber for years now though, not since they diluted Netflix Original to mean anything they currently had an exclusive distribution license to in your country. (Occupied / Okkupert was great, at least in the season, but Netflix had nothing to do with making it.)

EDIT: Oh, and the Daredevil series was excellent, but I think of that as Marvel rather than Netflix.

Their TV shows are definitely better than the movies by far but even then I can’t think of one that I watched that didn’t decline in quality as time went on. Even the last season of Stranger Things was pretty poor

I feel like that's a pretty common complaint for quite a lot of TV series rather than anything specific to Netflix.

narcos

Money Heist and Squid Game were big globally. Beef and The Queen's Gambit won a ton of awards.

You can't argue with their awards record in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accolades_received_by_...

Remember that unlike HBO, Netflix has to produce both types of content: prestige TV and filler. They position themselves as the alternative to all TV.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

I think the trick is getting up from the all-you-can-eat buffet at the right time.

BoJack Horseman is maybe my favorite show of all time. But that did start in 2014 and seems like a relic of an older Netflix that would commit to something for 6 seasons.

Netflix makes what people actually watch (remember they have the EXACT numbers) not what the critics like.

When folks come home from a hard day of work they don't want HBO.

> When folks come home from a hard day of work they don't want HBO.

that's hilarious, since today, as many other days, i am literally looking forward to watching HBO when i get home from work

Fun fact: entertainment production and show business are so expensive that most things that are made are actually made for people who watch those things.

This holds true for Netflix but it also holds true for HBO.

What is mind numbing is the bit about Netflix making exactly what people want to watch. It doesn't work that way. Netflix orders content from a supply chain. Netflix can feed in the info to the supply chain on what the numbers say, but not much else.

People also liked Arcane.

> I struggle to remember hardly anything memorable from Netflix, especially their movies

For me there have been a few movies, off the top of my head:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold_the_Dark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irishman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraction_(2020_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Thinking_of_Ending_Things

In addition the first seasons of The Witcher and Altered Carbon, and the show Dark.

I canceled my subscription around 2020 though, got so fed up by the UX, so haven't watched much since.

While not "fully" Netflix original (having been picked up by Netflix from Fox I think after season 2 or 3), Lucifer was a great series and without Netflix we would have never gotten an ending for it. They did right by that show in my book and it saddens me that since those days, the quality and care put into what they produce just fell off a cliff. It's honestly gross how much money was wasted on all this new junk designed to be algorithmically enticing so much so that even after you watch it and tell yourself it was garbage, you still find yourself going back and hoping this time will be different.

Entertainment media used to at the very least masquerade as Art. Unfortunately it seems the desire for money eventually ruins all good things.

Some of their cancelled adaptations were impressively faithful.

I really enjoy The Diplomat, which is also widely praised for the acting and writing. Aside that there are a number of great cooking and foodie shows on Netflix.

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